Just in Case
All I really want is for my Mom to come and pull me out of the water.[1]
Her skin speckled and smelling of coconut cream. Her arms
like the Jaws of Life, the girth of the old sycamore under which I am now treading
water.
I am 21, no longer 6 or 7 or so, splashing about in our
backyard pool.
If I want to get out of the water, I have to pull myself
out. If I am tired or cold or hungry or weary or weak or thirsty, it’s on me.
There are no clean-laundry-smelling beach towels open wide
to pat you down dry and roll you into a Mama-love-taco. She does not place your
strawberry face on her chest. You are not rocked back and forth under the old
oak in the late afternoon quiet.
Let me make myself clear. It’s not that she no longer wants
to. She would, if she could. She would, if she knew.
She would even drive to the nearest CVS to find the exact
coconut lotion, and rummage in the linens closet upon her return to find the
exact checkered towel – the bright, colored one you loved so much, the favorite
you fought your twin sister for every summer pool party and beach day,
unrelenting, the one you’d scramble to find and hoard on weekend mornings in
anticipation of the possibility of its usage, before putting on your tankini
while everyone else put on theirs and lathered up.
For one, you cannot call her now because you are in a nature
preserve for endangered species in the Hill Country. There is no cell
reception.
You know she would want to if she could, if she knew, and
that is why even if you could call her, you don’t.
What would you tell her?
For starters, that you have discovered something
small-beautiful-big from a new friend.
It is this, that you cannot hear yourself think if and when
you wear a wide, straw-brimmed hat under a waterfall in drought season. Enough
water to pound out the constant stream of consciousness, but not too much to
tip over the hat that creates the echoing boom orchestra with its
water-catching rim, the only sound you have ever known more powerful than that
of your thoughts playing tag and running away from each other and colliding.
It is bliss, and you’ve called other things that before. You
would never have needed all that talking and medicine if you could just stand under
a perfectly diminished waterfall in Texas Hill Country in drought season.
After that, you would probably mention the highway of light
and dust particles erect in a column between the leaf cover of the Sycamore and
the water where you float below.
This would lead you to mention last night’s fireworks, and
does she remember that your favorite ones have always been those she once described
as champagne bubbles, the simple golden floating kind, like phoenix ash and
ember? Does she know you remember, and does she?
What a silly question.
Of course she does, even if it is no longer a conscious
knowing, but the deep bedrock kind the grass forgets in its greenness.
Eleven-year old girls do not easily forget when their Mother
paints their loves in the language of champagne, a feat almost more spectacular
than the fireworks themselves.
If there was still time, you’d mention how odd it is that no
one ever talks about the after-show of the after-works, the smoke tendrils like
poky dahlias dried white in the flash of a drought, cosmic spider webs, the
plumes of dirty street doves, the tumbleweeds of our sky.
Unplanned and unassuming, this show even more miraculous
than the first.
Same goes for the rainbow metallic spectacle of the
fireworks’ reflection in the city’s skyline towers, color rolling up and down like
the belly of a magical snake called from its sleep to dance.
Even though you cannot call her now, and you wouldn’t if you
could, because you chose to come here, as you must, and stay, as you must, and
want to, as you should, you know she knows somewhere that you are trying to
feel the beauty of the dripping water in this prehistoric oyster bed and all
its green trees, on the inside,
trying to suck it in through your belly poking out of the water as you float.
Just in case, you write it down to find out later for sure.
When the moment has passed. Just in case.
ps- Was it the
mother swallows overhead, ducking in and out, coming and going, again and
again, to feed their babies, as I swam and floated for no one but me?
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