Ada in the Driveway

On certain days, the weight of all that remains unresolved attains a kind of critical gravity. My sense of where I stop & start undergoes a liquefaction & I find myself subject to the imagined velocities of all else at play in the world I inhabit. Where I am powerless, or feel powerless, I cast about me for what riffles the air or upsets the clouds, what permits the dizzying motion of my contingencies to dance along while I stew in stasis, waiting for or welcoming a nudge that would at the least feel like something definitive. I am too much in the habit, I suppose, of supervising the energies of others, of my kids. I blanket over their temporal demarcations, a backdrop, a control, a blank page all marked up & scribbled over by their will & whim. I forget myself in there, & forget how to assert my own longings & absences such that I might give them the credence they deserve. Parents forget to merit their own attention, so very often. & if they do manage a moment’s self-examination, as I try to do in these quick missives, their grammar is punctuated less by periods & commas & more by cries & shouts from other rooms, staccatos of needs & wants. 

In a particularly well-timed illustration of just precisely that, I now return to the page six days later, called out of writing that prior paragraph by Whitman awakening & pulled through the last week by the anticipation, explosion & aftermath of Ada’s fourth birthday. There you have it. 

When Ada was one, we would stand on the side of our sinuous driveway, between the blueberry bushes & the black spruce, & she would gingerly pick up stones, one at a time, & transfer them from the shoulder to the drive, over & over again. She is not a patient human, but was inexplicably capable of performing this particular exercise seemingly without cease. I recall standing next to her, growing exasperated, & coming slowly to terms with the fact that this was a sort of productivity, that Kristin & I being companions in this sort of activity was in fact generative & valuable & good. I was so thoroughly accustomed to building & working & mushing & moving that any task that did not immediately declare itself useful or functional raised a degree of suspicion that frankly threatened to undo me. My mind still raced around plans & measurements or charted training schedules for the dogs or tallied chores yet unfinished, while my body stood there, watching Ada move stones with great care & pleasure. 

The curious thing is that now, both kids tearing about in full gear, that old stillness seems so wildly out of character, but so utterly & obviously foundational. She took the time to encounter her world  in order to know the ground upon which she stood. If you have met Ada, you know that this seems almost a physical impossibility, but her will & her thirst to know the grain & grit of everything she sees required satisfaction before she could promptly turn into a hurricane again. However frustrating it was at the time for me to idle in place, I was humbled in the reminder to exact that demand of participation. To think geologically before spiriting off to follow a bird. To sink into the diaphanous community of life threading through everything we touch & see, sinew & vein of deep time, blush & spoil of season, dew drop of that morning, white-crowned sparrow on a branch above at that moment. We are brittle & brief in all of this. What a wise & necessary thing she did in those hours, humming an absent-minded song & turning a pebble in her small hand.