A Sunday Morning

It is a Sunday morning in the fall and I’m sitting in front of my house, I’m not in any pain and I can feel it. Instead, I feel the chill in the air especially on my hair which is still wet from a shower. I re-read two poems from a friend; I think those two poems are my favorite that I’ve read in many years. One is about how the pleasantries we exchange in forms of hospitality and care, simple acts of kindness are vague, reminiscence, like a distant cousin to the tribal bond, the fact that we need each other so deeply and the fact that now we barely if it all admit it. The distance in my mind grew as I pondered and was kindly interrupted by my neighbor walking their dog, they say good morning and I said good morning back (a small evidence of the bond), it made both of us feel better, although I’m sure we could not articulate the loss if it hadn’t had happened. The second poem was about the knowledge of dying, and considering what it would look like to show absolute gratitude to those humans we encountered as a way of living. And the embarrassment and fear of thinking that living such a way is foolish. The poet speaks of how in the face of death it is easy to just get skirted along like water and how we don’t slow down to consider which is more foolish? To be aware of death and addicted to gratitude or to be out of tune, and not saying a word? Meanwhile, two squirrels, no three dash as if for their lives depended on it and then can stop so suddenly and then off again. I want to know all that they survey in that moment and then they’re gone as fast as they can. What a wonder to do something as hard and fast as you can and then to stop and consider and then go again. Both of these poems and the ideas that they invoke make me tear up. I don’t know why, and as I do I’m struck by the fact that I definitely still believe in miracles and in my mind I drift to a weird, hypothetical scenario of a danger that could bring death and if it was closing like a door and my beloved kids were on the other side and how I would beg them to stay and yet how I’d be overcome when they came to be with me on the other side, and I feel silly and hopeful that I would hold them and squeeze their faces next to mine and I would cry out in gratitude for my tribe. I would thank God that they are so beautiful, beautifully and wonderfully made and I would ask that they could live forever, and I would be with them. All of this hope and all of this fragility in the air, with the chill on a Sunday morning.