I order tomato seeds from Italy. I write a poem to my daughter’s friend. I meander through downtown gardens with my husband and youngest, popping in for a London Fog from a boutique hotel a few blocks away. While waiting for the barista, I people-watch, pretending I am just another tourist in a lobby full of strangers, deciding this old city would be one I’d visit again and again.
I spend 25 cents on a used paperback of The Doorbell Rang. I admire my daughter’s handmade phenology wheel. My family visits, and I reserve a table of 9 at the gastropub with the good pickles. I see cousins, aunts, uncles. We host the latter for white chicken chili while their hometown roads flood a few hours south. All month long, it rains and rains. We light a fire. I write the foreword for a dear friend’s upcoming book.
April brings another performance for the kids – Tom Sawyer. During an evening tech rehearsal, I watch a father accompany his daughter to her call time. They pause in front of the theater entrance. She offers him a half-hug and a smile, the common kind, that everyday, distracted goodbye our kids give us when they’re thinking of their lives inside those doors, friends waiting with Rubix cube tricks and cafeteria gossip.
She turns to leave and he stops her, motions that she has lipstick on her teeth. She moves her tongue around in earnest. It doesn’t come off. The father bends forward, peers again, rubs the lipstick off with the cuff of his hoodie, as if it’s a practiced motion, a mere part of his job, a shred of normalcy, as if he’s an old hat. The lipstick is off her teeth now, a streak of red on his fleece. She smiles, and it’s more than the common kind.
I have thought of this every day since.
On our coffee table:
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
A Trail Through Leaves, by Hannah Hinchman
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Freckles, by Gene Stratton-Porter
Umbrella, by Taro Yahima
A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley
Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman
—
The pear trees are in bloom, the grass an unfathomable shade of green. Bluebirds returning with the sun. My friends are pregnant. My church is renovating. Soon, we’ll move. All around, change. I feel it inside, bone-deep, this realization that transformation is inevitable. But I fight it anyway, hesitant of what’s around the bend. Aware that resisting change is futile, but unable to grasp for an alternative when the center tilts and I’m dizzied.
I need a handlebar, I explain to a friend. She suggests supplements, and I don’t have the heart to tell her that’s not what I mean.
Last week, we pile into airplane rows, some of us heading out west to work and others heading down south to play. I go south. The kids dive for pennies, chase seagulls, share frozen blueberries with a balcony view. One afternoon, I wave from the pier while the little ones accompany their grandmother on a dolphin tour. I walk the dog up and down the dock, and when the sun grows too hot, I tuck into an outdoor bistro with water bowls for the dog, fish and chips for me. I’d remembered my book, and this, I realize, was the luckiest hour I’ve known in many.
Later, the kids and I will fly home on a sunny day, sand in our backpacks. The 4-year-old bolts for the backyard, elephant scissors in hand, determined to cut a lawn that has grown wild in our absence. I watch her from the deck, darting between a hundred dandelions, snipping the heads of each, unshaken by the daunting task of taming what needs tamed. She needn’t rush, she knows. Eyes down. Weed by weed. One at a time.
And there it is: a handlebar, or something like it.
