March 2008

Duck walking weather

We went for a walk in the rain, just the two of us, dressed in plastic slickers and boots. There was no thunder, just the steady downpour of warm droplets all around and a sky that was flat and gray like the skin of an elephant’s underbelly over our heads. Good duck-walking weather.

Passing through the park, we found large puddles in the mulch which were too perfect. We jumped across, we jumped around, we jumped in… competing to see who could make the biggest splashes.

The fields and playground were empty except for our voices. Someone’s abandoned soccer goals held the end of the fields. There was gelatinous mud, and we found big sticks and tried to gross each other out with mud globs, hurling the goo from the tips of our sticks through the air across the grass and down to the goalie’s box. “GOALLL….” we cried again and again, our sides aching with laughter, “GOALLLL….”

Then we noticed the worms crossing the sidewalks. They were like religious zealots on pilgrimage to see shrines that only they understood. Some had been flattened out by other pedestrians and would never see the holy land of grass on the other side of the sidewalk. Others, it seemed, were having their epiphanies right in front of us.

My daughter picked one of these worms up and studied it closely, cooing to it gently as if to comfort it in a time of great stress and strain. Her four-year-old mind ascertained a certain amount of worm distress, but could not acknowledge that she was causing the problem. I knew the truth, and watched the creature scrunch and struggle in her fingertips.

“We are not birds, Mr. Worm,” I said, trying to prompt my daughter to put the creature back on the ground. “We will not eat you.”

“We are PEEEEEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!” she yelled with glee, pausing to gently put the worm down before taking off in a sprint out of the park.

With the worms behind us, we walked the street where the big maples lined the sidewalks. They had no leaves, since it was early in spring, but their red flower buds and already opened and were now hanging soggy from the tips of each branch. In two or three weeks the leaves would begin to emerge and the shade would slowly return to this street.

A bird called from an upper branch insistently. She claimed it was a robin, although I guessed it was a cardinal. It’s a robin, she said again. She’s telling her friends that those worms are over there. They will go and have a feast. Yum tweet tweet yum, she said, pretending to be a bird.

The rain stopped for a few minutes, and we found that we were close to the magnolia tree on the corner, near the mail box. Boat race! Boat race! All boats to shore. Suddenly we were evaluating the fallen leathery green leaves all around for their buoyancy. This is my boat, she said. You can take this one, and she handed me a leaf with brown spots on the edges.

The gutter was running full and fast, like a river.

“Go!” I yelled and we threw our leaves down in to the rushing water. With an eye on the street for traffic we followed, running across the street and down and the hill, following until both leaves became shipwrecked under the tires of a large SUV.

The water went onward, though, and we decided to follow it, down the hill, across another street where the honeysuckle vines grow rampant, and over the curb, into a swale made of concrete.

“Where does the water go next?” she asked, craning her neck to see around the bend in the swale.

To Sligo Creek,” I answered pensively, “and then onto a big river called the Anacostia. Then the Chesapeake Bay. Then the ocean.”

“Why are there rainbows?” she asked.

I was having trouble keeping up with these sudden changes of subject.

“Light goes through the water,” I said, “and it turns into a kind of prism and gets separated and comes out the other side as different colors.” My head was tilted backward to watch the clouds, thinking she had seen something up in the sky that I had missed.

“What?” she said, puzzled. And then I realized she was watching the rainbows of oil and grease in the water at our feet. She had not changed subjects at all. It was only me that had gotten confused.

Rainbows… I did not answer right away, carried off in my own thoughts to the rainbows of my past. Some did happen in the sky overhead. Once I even saw one on St. Patrick’s day. I was a senior in college and I had been on a date. He was nice, but not the man for me. The rainbow had been a part of my realization that I needed to go and find the man I really loved, who lived in another part of town… the man I would eventually marry. Her father. I did not tell her this story, but remembering that St. Patrick’s day from long ago made me long to see a rainbow over our heads.

“Why are there rainbows?” she asked again, picking up a stick and making them swirl around and go polka-dotty.
The sky was clearing over our heads and the sun would soon going to be out, warm and wet for the rest of the afternoon.
“Those aren’t rainbows,” I said slowly. “It’s the dirt and oil from the street. Real rainbows are in the sky, over our heads. That’s just pollution that gets washed off the street when it rains and gathers on the top of the water.”

One day soon, I pray silently, let her see a real rainbow, overhead in the sky.

“Does it go to the creek, too?” she asked, still poking at the oil slicks.

“Yes,” I said.

We stare at the water for a while longer and I think of saying more, but stop just short of becoming one of those Wawa-wahah-wah voices from Charlie Brown. No preaching allowed! Today, I tell myself, we are just like ducks, because I know when the rain falls warm and sweet and spring is coming on, I want to be outside. And so does she. And some times that is enough.

She begins to sing and we see an amazing puddle at the next corner. Huge, shallow and clear.

“Jump!” she yells. And I do, and she does, too.

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