It is fall. Dusk comes while we are eating dinner, the last shaft of the setting sun briefly picking out the newly yellow leaves at the tops of the poplars. It was hot this afternoon, but the warmth drains quickly from the evening air and we tuck a blanket around the kids in the double stroller before we head down the street. A flock of Vaux Swifts has made a chimney three blocks away its temporary home, a resting spot on the unimaginably long migration from Canada to South America, and the whole neighborhood turns out for the nightly show. The birds swoop and dart across the sky, catching a bedtime snack of insects before some unseen signal sends them spiraling in tighter and tighter loops, perfectly coordinated, until they reach the tipping point and begin to pour into the chimney.
Our lives are about to change in unimaginable and terrible ways, but right now there is this moment of perfection, of being together in the chilly air while a hundred birds become one unified swirl, a small tornado of dark wings against a pale evening sky.
November 2014
More than two years pass before I come back to finish this post. One month after I started it, Julia King, my god-daughter, happy mud-taster, fearless ladder climber, little sunshine girl, went into the hospital where she stayed until her death in January. Only one more month from the swifts to hear her little voice, so clear, point to the night sky "moon!" Only one more month to see her boogie her hips when she heard music, only a handful of days to watch her and Finn look through books together, eat bananas together, ride in the car together, just the two of them, big siblings away at kindergarten. One month of her smiles to see those big kids come out of the classroom at the end of the morning, one month to sing together at music class. One month for "You are my sunshine" to be only a song, before it becomes one of Julia's songs, sung at her hospital bed, at her memorial service, printed on the plaque on her bench at the park,
Two years before I can come back to this blog. Ten drafted posts, but none of them really my story to tell.
And now it is fall again. The swifts don't come to our street any longer. The house has been sold, the chimney fitted with a bird-defying cap. The boys remember the swifts, though. They remember Julia too, both through their own memories and through the stories we tell each other. I carry a new baby through the fall days, one who will never get to walk down the street hand in hand with Julia, who won't get to know her in this world, although I suspect they held hands in the spirit world that she is so freshly come from. She comes with us now to visit Julia's bench at Ragle Park, where the boys and Amanda draw pictures of hot air balloons, read books she loved, and climb trees just because that's what they do everywhere they go.
Julia will always be a presence in Tillie's life, even though they didn't overlap in chronology. Tillie was born into a family that was cracked open in ways both good in bad, Our love is a little fiercer, our hearts more tender. We try to follow Julia's example, to be brave and to love life even when it is hard and frightening. We try to care for each other every single day. We want her legacy to be one of joy and laughter. We want to sing "you are my sunshine" at the end of music class, even if it makes me cry and hide my face in Finn's hair. Remembering her is the sweetest pain, and she is everywhere, in every mundane and joyous detail of our full and blessed daily lives.
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