The raspberries are so ripe they disintegrate unless you pick them up very gently, one at a time, velvety against my fingers in the dark kitchen, and I remember the blackberries at the farm last summer, falling off the brambles into our hands and dripping sweetness into our mouths.
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Tonight I ate raspberries, and blueberries, and tomatoes and butter lettuce and thin-sliced pork in spicy drippings and moist, dense, rich challah still slightly warm, torn into chunks, flinging crumbs and sesame seeds across the wooden table, spread with thick soft butter and scattered with complicated, snowflaky salt, the kind that piles up in sparking white drifts in its bowl on the counter, like splinters of crushed ice, and I felt alive, I felt like my body was mine and I was mine and I could breathe like I haven't breathed in a while.
I walked home as the clouds gathered, past a deep green tree full of shiny, bright-red cherries, and the house was hot and damp, so I opened all the doors and the wind came in and scoured out all the corners and then the rain hit, all at once, slashing against the windows and flooding the gutters, and lightning flashed and thunder ripped slowly through the clouds, echoing and creaking and groaning, and we sat on the porch, all worn wood and cracked paint, old and solid and true, and drank cold beer out of the fridge, and talked about trees.
I was getting ready to do something hard and I was feeling strange and then my bat kol whispered in my ear: my body belongs to me.
We went to the carts for dinner and sat at a black wire table under an awning in a reclaimed parking lot and ate Thai food and the bartender turned on a bubble machine and the kiddo chased the bubbles between bites of potsticker and carrot and rice, lit up like the sun, grimy and joyful and perfect.
These are things I didn't write about, but they happened: the garden was full of lavender and the lavender was full of bees, I woke up from the anesthesia and my family came to pick me up and my partner held my arm and the kiddo held my hand, my family sent me lots of texts and cute pictures, my family comes over for Shabbat every week and sometimes it's thrilling and sometimes it's uncomfortable and it's always warm and home and sweet, the fence that faces the window over the kitchen sink is covered in honeysuckle and the smell is intoxicating and it is full of bees too, the kids make such a mess I mean they are Chaos in human form and I could not love them more, I'm scared to leave my job but I also know that I'm going to and what if?, I curled up in bed and everything was soft and warm and I remembered what it was like to be under a thick pile of blankets in the winter baking the cold out of my bones, sometimes we sit on the couch not paying attention to each other but really we are connected by a web of love and care and I just listen to them breathing and it feels like life, I used to think that there were four people in my core and that sounded very stable but yesterday I realized there are five because my core includes me and five is both trouble and magic and now it's seven because there are two new people and seven means luck and growing and chances, this morning it rained and the signs the kids are making for their booth are scattered all over the yard soaking wet, and they are going to sell anti-love, which makes you break up, and puppy love and a bunch of other different kinds of love that I forgot already, and the kids are all right and love is real and I think hope believe that we can all find a way out, that we can build a new world, that we can live.
It was after bedtime and after a very long day and after nine o'clock, but the air was full of pink light and the flowers were glowing in the garden and the moon was glowing in the sky, just past first quarter, and the breeze was as warm as water.
It's hot today, and humid, and we stood out in the yard before bedtime and looked up at the deep blue sky and the green fir trees against it and watched a tiny white airplane curve its way through the air, leaving a white wake like a boat in the sea.
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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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