I come home from work. Is anybody home?
I hear noise from the back, so I go to the far end of the house. I see my lovely wife and Owen through the windows. She points to me and asks him who is home. He sees me and smiles. He is wearing his red spring jacket and his bright red plastic Cars sunglasses, fine blonde hair short and spiky and soft, like Calvin from the comics come to life.
I collect my fleece and slip-ons and go out onto the deck in the back yard. My lovely wife has been blowing bubbles for him. He points at them and asks for more. "Bubbles!" There aren't going to be any more, not today, and he's disappointed, but it's hard to worry about that for long when it's a clear spring day and you're out on the deck and you can do anything.
My lovely wife tells me about their day as she unbundles the patio furniture. It's nothing special, our patio furniture, but it's good enough. It'll do for now. I follow Owen around as he walks around the deck, peering at the wood boards that compose it, inspecting the pool, pausing to step carefully onto the rope that had bound tarps around the furniture. I touch the cover on the pool and he does the same with his tiny hand, measured, careful.
He sees a leaf stuck between the floorboards and is worried. He was frightened by a tangle of sticks that all moved together like a tangle of sticks do when he tried to push through them. It seems that leafs are in the same distrusted category. He'll grow out of it.
I sit down on the steps leading to the pool, still wrapped up from winter.
Owen walks over to the steps, carefully turns, and sets his bum down beside me. He doesn't look at me, playing it cool, watching the wind in the trees, but after a moment he shifts himself over a little closer. Sitting with daddy.
This moment is never going to come again. He's going as fast as he can, figuring out the world, turning into whoever he's going to be. Summer is going to come, and his second birthday, and then other seasons, other years. He's going to have his own life and his own worries and I'm going to lose him.
But right now, in this moment, we sit together on the step in the cool spring breeze.
I hear noise from the back, so I go to the far end of the house. I see my lovely wife and Owen through the windows. She points to me and asks him who is home. He sees me and smiles. He is wearing his red spring jacket and his bright red plastic Cars sunglasses, fine blonde hair short and spiky and soft, like Calvin from the comics come to life.
I collect my fleece and slip-ons and go out onto the deck in the back yard. My lovely wife has been blowing bubbles for him. He points at them and asks for more. "Bubbles!" There aren't going to be any more, not today, and he's disappointed, but it's hard to worry about that for long when it's a clear spring day and you're out on the deck and you can do anything.
My lovely wife tells me about their day as she unbundles the patio furniture. It's nothing special, our patio furniture, but it's good enough. It'll do for now. I follow Owen around as he walks around the deck, peering at the wood boards that compose it, inspecting the pool, pausing to step carefully onto the rope that had bound tarps around the furniture. I touch the cover on the pool and he does the same with his tiny hand, measured, careful.
He sees a leaf stuck between the floorboards and is worried. He was frightened by a tangle of sticks that all moved together like a tangle of sticks do when he tried to push through them. It seems that leafs are in the same distrusted category. He'll grow out of it.
I sit down on the steps leading to the pool, still wrapped up from winter.
Owen walks over to the steps, carefully turns, and sets his bum down beside me. He doesn't look at me, playing it cool, watching the wind in the trees, but after a moment he shifts himself over a little closer. Sitting with daddy.
This moment is never going to come again. He's going as fast as he can, figuring out the world, turning into whoever he's going to be. Summer is going to come, and his second birthday, and then other seasons, other years. He's going to have his own life and his own worries and I'm going to lose him.
But right now, in this moment, we sit together on the step in the cool spring breeze.
No comments:
Post a Comment