Branches This Way and Up
The day starts with close to two hours of my son saying “Mama” and “Dada” and “Uppa” Uppa” after my husband left me to delve into single parenthood for two weeks straight. The drop-off at daycare brings about crying so loud that an older brother to a girl in our class tells my son, “Don’t cry, school is fun!” Then me at work (the contract almost done), departing early to grab the boy to drop him at my girlfriend’s to be watched with her two boys by a shared caregiver, because I think the walk/bus/subway/streetcar rides that our caregiver offered to do with my son were just too much.
More tears, departure and a circling around like a vulture in the downtown core for parking to an event that I am ah, yeah, 1.5 hours late for. But I made it. I did. Darrell Keezer (4 kids) and Julie Cole (6 kids) are engaging and fun speakers and after mingling with some fellow entrepreneurs I bolt to, you know, pick up the kid and come home. I was hungry. I had been running to and fro all day it seemed, present but not, thinking about getting to the next thing, and the next. I call Fresh and order a Buddha bowl. A default choice, based on hunger and inability to think straight.
The sky is now at that magically state when daylight gives way to night and the clouds in the west are tinged with pink and yellow while the view to the east greys into blackness. We chat, Jackson and I, on our drive home as we do. He points out buses and streetcars and asks for firetrucks. He says “Dada” when we turn down our street and I point to the sky and say, “Not tonight baby, Papa took an airplane this morning, remember? He took an airplane bye-bye for a bit.”
“Dada?” he asks again.
“See the trees in Angela’s yard? The way the branches are going this way and up? If you look deep enough you can still see today, where the Lorax once stood just as long as it could..”
His expression is blank in the rear view mirror. He’s tired. Quieting down. He doesn’t yet understand naked crooked trees or winter bleakness or the rhythm of Dr. Seuss rhymes.
He’s wide awake when we get through the door, so I put him down and open my rice bowl to take a bite, but peanuts and peanut sauce is everywhere. So much of the day was spent with the care of my son in mind (driving cross-town to avoid a taxing transit situation with the caregiver, leaving work early, and then the event early to get him to bed at a not-too-late time) and yet, a potentially fatal allergen to him was the basis of my dinner. Dinner would have to wait.
More tears followed by long hugs and an edited version of our usual lengthy bedtime routine and he’s down. Asleep. And I can settle in to thinking about trees. About the Lorax forest and the lack of trees in the world I’m writing about in my latest book. The Arctic in TriPolar has no branches on trees going this way and up, but the water flows from glaciers there, this way and that, for as long as I’ve known until I started composing the story of Naqir in the land without forests, the reality in TriPolar that feels so near.
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