My Heart...Now Grown

Watching from a second floor window as you walk to the school bus, I am ashamed at my impatience with you. If you were not so easily distracted you would not have noticed the bluebirds flying in the trees between the houses, whose yards you shortcut through. I pray that Mrs. Kennedy is still sleeping on this Tuesday after a holiday weekend. Hope that she won't notice you again walking on her finely manicured lawn. Especially now, since you have slowed down to watch the Bluebirds dance in her Bradford Pear tree. The dew clings to the grass beneath your feet and I am sure your ankles must be wet and I consider how uncomfortable I'd feel walking in damp shoes all day. I remind myself that none of this, Mrs. Kennedy, wet shoes or imminent bus, weigh even slightly upon your head. The way the sun is coming up behind the houses makes you look almost golden. Your red baseball cap climbing the hill now as you turn to watch the birds fly into the woods behind our house. Big, yellow school bus appears as you reach the top. Like you knew all along that there was plenty of time for watching bluebirds.

Later that same morning when Aunt Dee Dee calls and we run a two hour long conversation on life, death and the dubious significance of it all, I try to explain why it isn't the sad and horrible things that depress me. How sometimes, it is the simplest, most beautiful things that make me sad. She tells me how our mother, the new one we have now since Dementia abducted our original Mom, how she tried to pay our Dad when he hollered at her for using too many hearing aide batteries. How she unfolded, in her bony, translucent hands, several twenty dollar bills from her wallet. Danielle tells me how she remembers those same hands stroking my black, curly hair on the day she brought me home from the hospital. How she reached out to show me off to my siblings who were already half grown.

I tell her about the baseball cap in the sun.