On a Day Like This

On a day like this clouds gather together like long lost family, their voluptuous love for each filling their insides to overflowing, threatening to weep their joy in an afternoon rainstorm. You watch them meet, a kiss on the cheek as they embrace. If you could touch them, you would embrace them too. Instead you sit alone and wonder...

On a day like this the skies are a wash of blue straight from the artist's hand. The brush strokes long and even across the sky. The winds whisper, cotton wool conversations that float so far above your head. It is like the distant chatter of loved ones enjoying everything spring can squeeze into a day. How you long to join something, anything outside your glass window. Instead you tuck a newborn baby in close to you and whisper your own love stories...

On a day like this you gather your thoughts inside, perhaps sheltering them from the rain of your tears. You wait for the skies to open so you can cry together, but they won't. Not today. Not on a day like this.  Somewhere you imagine the world you use to occupy, still there, waiting, whispering for you in its sleep. Your husband, your toddler, all settling into the corners of life until you return...

On  a day like this you imagine you are her. The woman in the tall grasses. The woman whose hands stroke the wind as it chatters to the leaves and moves the green carpet on the earth's floor in waves. You imagine the freedom of being able to come and go, or simply stay, if you chose. You imagine a year from now when all this being enclosed and prodded and poked by medical staff is over. A week from now when you are home with those waiting people. A day from now when the doctors give you the all clear. A moment from now when your newborn finally sleeps beside you in the hospital bed and you can rest again, look outside the window and dream...

                                                                             On a day like this...

~

(For Andy, who I love and admire. 

You will be home soon. I can't imagine...)

~

WHAT ABOUT YOU? Are you looking out a glass window waiting for something? If you write, I know you are waiting. We writers are always waiting. But visiting with my sister-in-law today I thought about how, in many ways, we are all sitting behind a glass window looking out at something, waiting...