38.

Intersections in Time and Space

I was feeling down today, just heavy and tired like I wasn’t entirely in my body. The days are getting hotter and hotter, which carries its own kind of weight—the knowledge of impending and inescapable heat that will lean into this city for the next five months. After a lot of slow movement around the house, I went outside to chase Milo and Barley around the yard, only to find that as the sun was setting a breeze had kicked things up into something like running weather. I hopped into my sporty orange shorts, grabbed my shoes, stuck my ipod in my bra, and ran out the door. As I was running down Olsen, weaving through one of the spots where the sidewalk disappears, a yellow swallow tail butterfly flew directly in front of me and there was this flash of a moment where I could see the pattern of its wing perfectly, right in front of my face. I swear I could feel the force of it, something projecting sideways into my body as we passed. We were one split second from collision, another split second from missing each other completely. And for a full moment all I could see was the pattern of the wing.

A couple of blocks later, I was running down Third Street and Shelley was running up. Another perfect intersection—a couple of moments of hesitation and one of us would have turned and we would have continued to run, tracing each other’s footprints unknowingly. Shelley always renews me. We ran much faster than I would have on my own, and maybe even faster than I knew I could. We went to her new house to water the huge tree that is producing pine cones in a desperate thirst. Neither of us had ever heard of pine cones as an act of desperation. Pine cones have been hiking treasures and bird feeders; they have been placed on mantles like trophies or decoratively in baskets, but they have never been a sign of dangerous thirst. And if I hadn’t been heading downhill at just that moment when she was heading up, I would have missed knowing that.