We ate tomatoes out of the garden and snaked our hands through the brambles to pick dark, heavy blackberries, fat and shining in the sun, and then we went to the river and sloshed across the shallows to the island and set up our tent in the hot sand and took all our clothes off and ate peaches naked, and then swam in the cold sparkly water all day.
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The house is empty, and the silence presses down, loud in my ears. It feels alive. My heart is full of feelings, all the feelings, rising up in waves and running back down to the ocean, which is sweet and deep and endless, and it is alive too. And also, I know I can open the back door and the sound of rain and a gust of cool air will rush into me; I know that I am home, home, home.
We sat around the table and ate homemade bread, still warm, and the leftover soup from Shabbat, and passed the baby around and then some of us went home and the rest of us curled up around each other on the couch and told stories about our past selves, and tomorrow they'll go and I'll stay and it will be too long and too short and so many things will happen, and then we'll all be home again.
The kiddo was almost asleep, in the dark room, long past bedtime, wiggling around and snuggling and babbling half-words and stroking my face, and then she touched my hair and said, it's so SOFT, it's so SMOOTH, thank you for twisting it up every day, I've never even TOUCHED it before!, and then she rolled over, and then I reached up and touched it too.
The house feels heavy and my throat is ominously scratchy and probably I should just go to bed, but instead I open the back door, and the cool air flows through me like water and the sound of rain rushes in. I realize how hot it is inside, and I sit on the cool stone steps and feel the heat radiating from my thigh muscles and look up at the oak and listen to the rain-sound of the wind rushing through it and think about how magical it is to hear that sound whenever I open my back door.
I'm sick and everything hurts, and I went out on the back porch and the sweet alive smell of outside hit me, I had almost forgotten about outside, and I sat on the concrete steps, under the splintery roof, and watched the grapevine cascading over the fence, its broad leaves waving gently in the breeze. I heard a tiny soft noise that sounded like rain tapping against the leaves, but there was no rain, and I watched and watched and wondered if it was the grape leaves tapping against each other, or sparrows hopping around in the tangle of lemon balm and iris at the base of the grapes, or a sprinkler in the neighbors' yard. Or if I was imagining it, but I knew I wasn't. I watched a puff of dandelion float by and thought about bees, and a crow with half a bagel clutched in its beak suddenly appeared on top of the fence and I laughed, and the cat and I meowed at each other until my sneezes scared her away, and then I looked at the air and realized it really was raining, the tiniest little streaks of water, not enough to wet the ground, but enough to tap against the grape leaves, at the very edge of my hearing.
I am tired and scared, but mostly tired, and I'm not sure what to do about most of it, and also, I prayed outside tonight, under the glowing, deep blue summer ten o'clock sky blazing with stars and my bare feet on the damp grass and soft earth and the cool wind rushing past me, fluttering my robe, which I made with my own hands, and into the oak tree, and it sounded like water, and it was better than I imagined it would be when I hoped for it, in my quiet room alone in the old house, where I was also tired and scared tbh.
"while you’re inside the hard parts, it doesn’t feel like wisdom." Adrienne Maree Brown. 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.
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.
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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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