Two marshmallows are smiling at me from my tshirt, mirroring my own expression.
I am currently feeling happy and more than a bit sad. How novel – a girl who feels more than one emotion at a time.
On one hand, I am tickled to finally be confirmed in a suspicion that I have had for many months now that a girl I regularly see is actually a man in the process of becoming a woman. Since I first laid eyes on her/him…I’ve thought she was a man, though most people I’ve asked say I’m crazy, and she’s just big boned. Ooh…validation, how sweet you are. Informant, you know who you are. You have made my night.
These past few nights, I have swapped my elderly habits in favor of the nocturnal habits of someone my own age, and it’s weirding me out.
At 3:30 this morning, I found myself still firmly parked on my living room couch, enjoying the quiet solitude of a house long asleep.
That’s when I heard our furniture in the backyard being moved. I immediately froze and felt my heart speed up, as I stopped to listen. All I heard was silence. I turned my attention back to my computer, and the silence was broken by a second long and drawn out scrape of a heavy chair being pulled or banged across cement, and then a shuffle of movement just behind the glass door I was seated in front of. I didn’t know what to do. My dad had opted to spend the night in the great outdoors as part of a men’s retreat weekend at a lake across town, and my mother is still currently more than halfway across the country gallivanting with Elvis impersonators at her mother’s 50’th high school reunion in Oklahoma City. But the echo of my dad’s words were still bouncing off the sponge-like interior of my head – warning me of the rise in crime in our area in recent weeks as close as just a few blocks away. “Make sure the house is locked up before you go to bed”, he’d said. Just what every young girl wants to hear.
So of course, I was hearing something in my dark backyard playing at feng shui in the dead of night.
I shot to my feet and stumbled through the kitchen, down the dark hallway, and into my brother’s room, all the while stage whispering his name. When I was finally able to rouse him, I explained that there was something in the backyard, and that he should come help me do something about it. I realized I was clutching my cell phone the way I always do in tense situations when I’m out in public and nervous from walking alone – like a weapon that could save me with the punch of a few buttons. It didn’t matter that the battery was dead.
Within a few seconds, my brother was out of bed and on his feet with a live (sharpened) katana in his hands. We crept together into the silent kitchen, and he peeked through the blinds, ready for battle. I held my breath.
Two enormous raccoons were roaming my yard like they owned the place, one with his eerily humanish hand in the cat food dish. My poor cat (maybe a third the size of just one of them) was gallantly holding her territory with her tail puffed out, and a deep rumble in her tiny chest.
A few bangs on the glass door scared them away, but they clattered awkwardly through the recently arranged furniture – obviously not yet familiar with the new set up.
I roused my brother in the dead of night to fight some raccoons with a sword. And gamely, he was in. My brother rules.
This morning came too soon, and I spent some quality alone time with my cup of coffee.
After a lazy afternoon, we headed to the old town area to grab a pizza and make our way up to regional forest park behind my house. We hiked up near the goats and plopped ourselves on a park bench as we watched the day wind down. Children played in the meadow below us, trying to tag each other as they ran circles around the barn. A little girl was running down the hill, screaming delightedly at the wind whipping through her hair, until a boy caught her at the bottom. The goats behind us bleated in time with the adult laughter from below. And from somewhere, 50’s music was playing and echoing through the canyon-like area. We sat at the table as the sun fell behind the hill, and watched as the multitude of colors and hues faded to shades of deep blue and purple and the shapes became nothing more than a black silhouette against the fire shot sky. To me, there is nothing quite as breathtaking as the intricate beauty of nature, and my heart breathes a quiet thank you to God every time I see it like this, up close and personal. There is no room for belief that this magnitude of perfection could have merely fallen into being by random chance – the earth positively sings with delight at existing if you listen.
We sat at the bench and felt the conclusion of the last day of summer wash over us. Not officially, but for us it was. I could already smell the seasons changing as the clouds rolled in and the wind began to blow, and I was grateful for my red hooded sweatshirt sheathing my upper body, a bright splash of color in the gathering twilight. When the park was empty, we finally decided it was time to go, and reluctantly wove our way down the hillside and under the trees.
Carrying the remains of a greasy pizza in an even greasier box, we drove down the winding road and saw the city lights shining like thousands of interim suns down below us in the city. It seemed so far away from the untouchable place we were at in my little car, high above the sounds and sights of the city life. But what goes up must come down, and down we went.
Leave a Reply