‘Tis the season for sunburns and skinned knees. For crickets harmonizing in the dark and ceiling fans that keep warm air circulating. It’s time for ice cubes crackling in tea and grills that sizzle with the searing of meats. Bring on pasta salad, watermelons shaped like baskets, and volleyball nets in backyards.
My eyes are tired. I am tired. The night settles into a quiet rest, every last scary thought cast into oblivion with my mother’s caress across their forehead. A breeze hits me through blinds that bang easy on the sill. I let down because all three of them are finally down, and I escape from lengthy lists of what I will need to attend or pack on these last few days of school. I forget about the laundry backed into a corner of my bedroom, ignore the toothpaste splattered mirrors, and let the cool wash over my skin the way water showers my Impatiens.
But somewhere in the midst of all this easing there is aching. A nephew who will have a funeral. A marriage withered and dry, cracked on the edges with pain that doesn’t give. A parent with a diagnosis that guts a family. The quiet eases nothing. The emptiness, a beating of the soul. A summer’s breeze, razorblades, because it feels that nothing is as it should be and everything has changed.
“What if we have it all wrong? This question recently came from a friend. “What if danger, heart-wrenching circumstances, sorrow is our means to life?”
When the morning is already hot on my arms, I pinch buds of Petunias, wrangle them loose from their stem so that many more will come. When snow has stopped its angry tantrum and frigid temperatures dissipate, chive sprouts return greener and fuller. Only when a tree’s lowest branches are sawed free can the rest of it reach high.
Come through the screen, night air. Remind us that winter doesn’t last and hope comes after death.
Whispers of a Scattered Mind 