I may say I don’t belong here, but I know I do…Nobody looks away when the sun goes down.
On Sunday, The Kid woke up complaining of a sore tummy. He dragged himself from the bed to the couch, where he promptly vomited. We spent the day at home accomodating his illness, and I stayed positive about it, thinking all this rest would do the family good, plus he’d probably be better by the next day, twenty-four-hour bugs and such.
On Monday, with grey shadows lining his eyes, he announced that he was still sick. We took Little Brother to school and came back home. I rolled his six-year-old ass out in the stroller so I could get some exercise and we passed a dead squirrel whose carcass was being picked at by a nasty bird (redundant. All birds are nasty).
This morning, TK and LB and I walked out the front door and came upon an entire gaggle of such nasty birds, picking through our trash and tossing it around our yard. “Why are they eating rubbish?” the boys asked, and I couldn’t even enjoy their proper Australian phrasing because I was yelling at the birds. “Get OUT OF HERE!” I screeched, as a mum from TK’s school who lives down the street walked by and grinned, waving, my life playing out like a horror movie before her eyes.
The mornings always come with full force, and I never feel ready for it.
The mornings are when TK and LB know how to push each other’s buttons, one sitting justcloseenough to the other on the couch to drive them both crazy, feet flailing and hands slapping, screams over the TV I shouldn’t be letting them watch while I show up for work as short-order cook, school-bag-packer, bed-maker, ass-wiper, referee.
The mornings are when the weight of the day sits square on my chest and I let it, seeing only the To-Dos. The mornings are when I feel only chains, and no freedom.
These late-autumn days are short, and the morning sun arrives late, and I want to stay in bed until after it’s high in the sky. Impossible, most of the time. But the evenings arrive early, and Sydney has planned ahead for that. In the Northern hemisphere, the arrival of short days and cold weather initiates my Pavlovian response: bring on Christmas. Here, that thought springs to mind then is quickly corrected: bring on the lights. Vivid Sydney stretches over a few weeks, over the bridge from autumn to winter, and in the cold we see not the twinkling lights of Yuletide but the illuminated colours of June, the art splashed across the Opera House and the twinkling of the ferries, the city and its bridge piercing the sky with pink, purple, green, blue and back again. It’s not Christmas, but it’s not nothing.
The other night The Husband and I took one of those ferries into the city. Along with everyone else on it, we looked through our phones and even our eyes at the festival of lights greeting our approach. The night before, we had gone to the zoo with friends and their kids, frogs and elephants and giraffes formed out of coloured bulbs. On this night, though, the kids stayed home with their sitter and we sat in a theatre, floored by music we only knew a few words to. The rest was new, but it resonated, lyrics as poetry as narrative. “This is Alabama,” he sang, the second time my home state has been featured on the Opera House stage for me to hear, sounds of a deeper home than state or country inching their way through my soul, stretching across hemispheres and oceans to right where I sit.
Evening is for date nights, for bedtime with the four of us splayed across two doubles that have been pushed together because the boys like being close and they like for us all to end the day in one spot. I keep thinking we should put a halt to this; it eats up too much time, right? But I see eight feet lined up and wonder if maybe this is how it should be.
The mornings are heavy. But they’re also when, lately, the boys in TK’s class have been playing Lava Monster, and he rushes me through the school gate so as not to miss it. He runs and jumps onto a bench alongside him and they shout his name with all the others, and LB’s if he’s there too, and TK looks around, grinning widely.
This morning I went back out and returned all the rubbish to its bins, then looked around for a more permanent solution. “How are you going to weigh it down?” TK asked me, itching to get to school already, and I spotted the rocks in our driveway. I grabbed two handfuls for the two bins and placed them in the centre of the lids, knowing that upon my return the stones would likely be scattered by our nasty feathered friends, and TK grasped my hand as we headed away.
I kissed his grinning face then walked back with a friend, turning onto our street and holding my breath, gearing up for my new job: trash collector. But as I approached, I saw that the birds had given up. The rocks remained, blocking their pecking beaks, blocking their destruction and decay.
Some mornings bring stones in place, mystery held inside that looks an awful lot like death and mourning. Then it turns out the stones were holding life, which also seems to come in the morning, chains broken and real light coming through.