Rain on Sunday

It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted with pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Crows are stealing cherries from our tree. I "heyed" at them, and they flew off, each with a yellow-pink Queen Anne poised in its beak. I only hope the worm they will undoubtedly find in each one, they will consider a blessing.

My brother and I once went to a park which was heavily populated by squirrels, chipmunks, ducks, geese and the like, but we forgot to bring bread. All we had were green grapes. So we threw some grapes to a squirrel. It squirrelled up, sniffed at a grape, picked it up, peeled it, as if opening a nut, then ate it. Later, a greedy duck tried to eat two at once, one on top of the other in its beak, but they both shot out, like tiny green cannonballs, upon its biting down.

A squirrel and some unseen bird (though not a jay) are quarrelling in the cherry tree. The cat arches her back in the grass. The peas need watering, as does everything else.
   I see an actually ripe cherry, but don't want to fight with the actually huge robin who seems also to be eyeing it. I look up again, and both bird and cherry have moved on. Once more, I have missed an opportunity.

But the pennies, of which I find sometimes several a day, sometimes none at all. Heads is luck, tails is money. Lucky pennies are kept in the left shoe for the remainder of the day, then either put away, given away, or spent.
   I found a penny for T. the day before he left on his trip. I found it in the road, which was fitting. He worries about his car breaking down in Nebraska. With my slight understanding, I tell him to go through Kansas instead. That Kansas is perhaps not situated properly in regards to Nebraska to warrant going through at all is no reason for my failed-freshman-geography-by-arrogant-omniscient-boycott mind not to think to say it. Meanwhile, I dream about babies.

The dream is this: Suddenly, I am encumbered with a boy. The environs are my paternal grandmother's dream-house (meaning my near-constant dream version of her house, as opposed to the Barbie dream-house which she ignorantly-or-with-malicious-intent sent me one Christmas, into which I immediately moved my Fisher Price family, after beheading the Barbies which would now be worth a small bundle, as it was much ritzier than their former abode what with the elevator and all. But I digress.); the supporting cast consisted solely of male friends.
   T. shows up, briefly, and hyperventilatedly terrified, asks if it were his, to which I say, "Of course not; it's S's," that last bit of which, of course, I left out upon recounting to the waking cast.
   Sentient from the get-go.
   All boy; peed a lot.
  A better looking baby than even I'd been; blond hair and striking, flashing blue eyes. Maybe spoke, but if he did, I can't remember what he said. Had no name, thank God.

So what do I make of this visitation? Just the other day (we have had a very wet and prolonged spring this year. The sun finally came out two days ago, but they're expecting rain on Sunday), on the bus downtown I thought, "This will be the last summer in ten that one could be big-as-a-house and not wish speedily for death. Once again, it seems, I missed my chance. And yet, in another part of the dream I was running barefoot across boards entwined with vines suffused with wasps. And did not get stung.

Three o'clock. The sunlight is diffuse. The leggy nasturtium too long in the shade turns lazily westward. K., one of my various roommates, is upstairs asleep. M. is at work at the nursery: my peas and flowers kindergarten projects compared to his roses-from-seed. J. at work in the lab, devotedly feeding the rats she or someone else will later saw open the heads of, to see which side of the brain really does what. Poke them in the right place and they'll run widdershins until almost dead from exhaustion. Frightful thing, science.

Geraniums, lobelia, and roses: only the wild or trailing ones doing well this year. The rains giving everything prehistoric proportions. The desire to jump from a wooded riverbank not afraid of eels or falling. My skinned knees and bug bites extending well into my twenties. Scars are how the body remembers things it's done. And phantom babies. And crying when someone touches you just right, but not later remembering why. It's best that they ignore it, and not take it too personally. It's best that you don't, and do.