We stood on the bank of the creek as it rushed along, swollen and fast and brown with yesterday's torrential rains, among the ragged blackberry canes just starting to put out this year's first electric green leaves and the last of the dried cow parsnip flowers, spindly and crumbling. The last time we were there, the bushes were full of blackberries, fat and sweet and warm from the late summer sun, and the cow parsnips nodded in their starry galaxy shapes.
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We saw the first bee of spring! I saw a fat black wiggly butt sticking out of a salmonberry flower, shocking fuchsia against the thousand shades of brown and green and windy rain, and shouted, "Bee! Bee! It's the first bee!" We watched it go from flower to flower, and then decided that "Bee! Bee! It's the first bee!" (shouted while jumping up and down enthusiastically) is definitely the authentic and correct bracha for the first bee of spring.
We were standing at the edge of the harbor at twilight, cold, and feeling the Atlantic close by. The wind slammed into our backs and then swirled out across the water, pushing it into a million tiny waves. It gusted again and again, fanning the water into patterns that showed us the shape of the wind.
From my fourteenth floor perch, the city was all blocky shapes and sparkling lights and vaguely threatening floodlit scaffolding on top of skyscrapers, and then I saw the yellow moon, hanging fat and low in the misty night like a half-lidded cat eye. It seemed to be baleful just for me, and I told it a blessing. We were up in the sky together, above it all, and I felt powerful and grounded.
It was raining when I left the house, the air cool and soft, and full of the smell of flowers.
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AuthorBitter Water
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Archives
June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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