On a Fading Summer Afternoon
I am on the front porch my grandfather built, our home now, late afternoon of another fading summer. My wife took my eldest son to the doctor for some sort of poison rash, and I sit with my sleeping two-year-old daughter on the swing, the same one my grandmother used to rock me. I close my eyes and remember her laugh.
A storm has broken. Last night's weatherman promised continuous rain for two days, which of course would be Ohio's expected thing. In an instant, sunlight spills like grace onto white wicker furniture and my girl's alabaster skin. The light is soft and warm, sifted through a mist rising in the valley, up from the ground, over tufted heads of ripe com.
Annalyse wakes from her nap.
We are surrounded by pink and purple and greening plants: geraniums, begonia, double impatien, dusty millers, fuchsia. A breeze, which will later blow in the remainder of the storm now restless and recovering on a bright black horizon, dances on our skin with the weight of petals scattered by this morning's front.
She is no longer a baby--this our last child--but she still fits into the crook of my arm, yawning, her ratty Nanny bunny draped over her frail shoulder, falling to pieces. Limp in half-sleep and contentment, she has a mosquito bite on her right arm, a scraped left knee, and hair moppy with sweat. In the moment of unexpected light, I see love as breathtakingly fierce.
We are quiet. The porch swing creaks a steady rhythm, spinning a reverence as old as its rust. My daughter's eyes are soft and moist and distant, pink with sleep, still deep in the static that follows a baby's nap. We rest together.
Suddenly, a dog barks, the neighbor's caged pit terrier, a desperate but doomed chase of a feral cat crossing our front lawn. We both startle, father and daughter. The dog’s fading rage, chain raking against fence, is the sound a metal saw makes when pinched by wood. An echo of barking moves through our small village like waves from a stone tossed into a lake while towering thunderclouds rumble like a leathery old man with a bad case of gas.
My daughter's right hand is cradled loosely over mine, almost weightless. Her hand is puffy and white like it was bee stung, but with no pain. Below pale skin runs delicate blues and reds of veins and arteries, the gentle and tenacious streams of life. Underneath tiny fingernails (the pinky is impossibly small and precise) lies bright pink flesh the color of endless frilly dresses.
Her fingers sometimes cross and tangle without thought, and she has this habit of pulling her thumb under her fist like she was keeping a secret.
In all of this world, she is unique and precious and ours, gift beyond measure.
Her hand lies on mine, fingers in gentle frequent spasm; we breathe in damp sun-soaked air, the unexpected break of a late summer storm.