{Preview} Full

You were little.  My arms limitless.  I had hands that scooped like buckets and arms that could carry you across the sky. I could fit you any-which-way, for I was the soil from which you grew.  These were our ripest days.  We linked like an echo.  You beat loudly, a heart upon my hip.

But I knew growing-up would catch you. Turn you into a weed at my kitchen table.  Drinking light.  Craning your big-boy neck towards the sun.  Climbing, pushing, plowing off into the sunshine.  You tumbled into blur and it was my arms that helped you go. 

I’ve folded this bit of you, full, ripe, on the verge of everything, into a perfect square.  Tucked you neatly into the back drawer of my memory.  There I can pull you out when I need to feel your heaviness upon my skin.  Remember us molded by light and song.  Skin and sky.  And the feeling of my heart so full it spilt upon the floor.

{Preview} Elihu Island

I sensed they began tangled.  A jungle of bitty hands and feet, translucent, growing side by side in their early sea.  It was so easy to imagine as I watched them romp about in their twin-four-year-old-skin.  Curling around each other like I might twirl my own hair.  Effortlessly, quiet.  And their laughter - high, clear, white - drew lines across the sky.  It scattered birds and pushed through the rustling hay like water - spilling everywhere.  I watched them stop, then close their eyes to know just where the other was.  I could almost see the thin invisible line between them.  Gossamer, beating.  Connecting the blur of their bare feet.  And rustling hair.  Connecting their endless stream.  One of faint cotton over bones light as sparrow's made for flying.  They were a tangle of fingers I couldn't shake the sight of - fragile yet strong - skimming clover and moss and milkweed.  They were a winding trail of honeysuckle torn from the vine.

We walked the island for two hours, edge to edge of steel gray sea.  They never looked for us once.  They had each other, and the secure eye of their mom.  Always watching, but never too close.  She let them breathe.  And unfold.  I saw Sarah's heart bright and true in that last light, as she let them just be.  I felt her taking in their smallness.  Drinking in their girlhood.  Bottling the feeling of loving them just as they are.  In that very moment.  In that very spot, where she wed eight years ago.  On Elihu.