Pillars of light danced from the early evening waters of the lagoon, a thousand glow sticks from a summer’s festival stood mid air. The moon would rise, and the lights would fade as the sky’s darkness would give in to what had been its destiny all along. If there had been magic, still it was there, but hidden away, beneath the angst, the long lists, the confrontations, and the harsh reality of the face of today.
“I said, ‘GET ME SOME MILK,’ you idiot.”
I know him, and I understand, though his delivery is harsh, that his immediate desires, perceived as urgent needs, override magic words and kindness.
We have come a long way, but I turn around and the baby, and now almost the little boy have gone. Sometimes, the look is far away. The eyes are glazed by words that cannot find form. When it all makes sense at last, will there still be time?
Maybe it’s good that I’m not a maple tree…a silver maple, or, especially, a sugar maple. I’ve heard the sap flows freely…
Before you know, maybe it’s simpler. Before your eyes have opened, your sleep was the peaceful comfort of a down blanket with the softest satin edge. A dollar for a dozen grocery store eggs, perhaps even eighty-eight cents during the Easter specials. Each precious egg, colors of green, blue, or brown, was laid by a hen with a story, a hen that spends her days roaming the farm property, trying to sneak food from the barn cats, peeking in visitors’ cars, and running to greet me as I come from the main house with a handful of millet. The eggs from our hens are part of nature’s rhythm, and we cannot put value on that.
A light so bold, fierce, amazing, and brave, once was and still is.
The sap from three trees drips into buckets at our farm. We gather it daily and have been boiling the contents once a week. Eleven gallons of sap, gathered and boiled, boiled for hours and hours on a Saturday, slowly evaporating and condensing into sweet syrup, just over one quart, which tempts us straight from the bottle. We wondered if it would turn out, for all the hours and guesswork, for all the hope.
Maybe it’s a little like parenting; we keep going, because it’s what we’re here to do, and even with experience as our guide, we falter. We falter, until one day all of our gallons of labor have boiled down to one quart, one childhood, to which we gave all we knew.
There had been so many horizons ahead, some which were yet unknown, when the turn in the path finally answered. What is before me is greater than what has been.
The sap drips at a good clip when the sun warms the day. I can’t keep the tears back when I am reminded of the steps not yet taken, the steps to places where people are just expected to go, the steps where I will no longer walk with my child on this earth.
The tears are for him, that the vague and diluted questions may find answers which satisfy for all the seasons of toil, when we did not understand where we were to go.
He asked for the maple syrup the night we had pancakes, and he did not call me an idiot this time. There was a lilt to his laughter, a new sound that rushed in to fill the air. There was a dance and a magic, as the light on the water, to remind me that he is here.