This morning was a different story. This morning I awoke to sun streaming through my windows, bouncing off the hall mirror and into my bedroom where I couldn’t even enjoy the last two presses of the snooze button. “Daytime is here!” the morning shouted at me. Wakeupwakeupwakeup!
An hour and a half into the workday, I took advantage of my morning break and headed up Edmonds’ Main Street to fetch coffee for the crew. I had to first run back inside for my sunglasses. Yesssss. This was going to be an awesome walk. There weren’t any clouds back then. (Already I mourn for the morning.) The sky was obscenely blue, the sun violently bright. For fifteen minutes there was nowhere to hide from my memories…
I remember working the opening shift at the garden center after high school. First duty of the day was always to water. Waterwaterwater. I can still hear the squeak of the valve, the hiss of the water as it rushed forward, can feel the way the hose writhed as it woke. I can hear the crunch of the gravel under my work boots as I dragged the hose down to the far end of the aisle, pausing every other table to undo a kink.
I remember the way the light would hit the spray of water, how it would sparkle and obscure everything else. How the marigold heads would bob and nod to thank me and kiss the droplets off their neighbors. I remember the soft, fragrant air filled with petunias and heliotrope- how wonderfully the scent of their petals mixed with the earthy smell of their leaves and soil. I remember the humid warmth radiating from the sunflowers as they guzzled their morning drink. How warm and damp and beautiful the whole world was within those few acres. The rest of the workers would filter in slowly, and I’d grin because I was luckier than them to have been given this task.
Drifting back into Edmonds, I crossed a narrow side street. Birds nesting in a crack in the stucco above cried out for their breakfast. I was back in Boston in springtime, on any number of days, a strikingly familiar bright morning with just a slight chill still in the air. Somewhere in the region of Back Bay and Symphony and the Fens, wandering among Northeastern University dorms and apartments filled with musicians. And the sun beat mercilessly down on the brick, but not a single one minded except the ones that still huddled in dark shadows beside front steps or behind garbage cans, envious of their friends who were already twice-baked in the sun. And just beyond whatever street I was on, I could feel the rest of the city breathing, rising and falling and rising and falling and waking. The birds flew overhead and never once dreamed that there was a place three thousand miles away that was also home to birds just like them.
