This is my life. Right now.
This ferry ride. This eight o'clock solstice sun on the evening before dad's surgery to have a catheter placed for kidney dialysis. The light pours through my dirty jeep window and I hear massive engines and smell diesel and sea. I wonder if the sun is too intense for my skin and whether the man I might love will still find me sexy when the wrinkles come. Because they are coming. Everything is coming.
Life unfolds in hours and minutes and sunsets as we make revolutions around the brightest star in our sky. The beauty is not in an Instagram post or a pixel-dense capture of the longest day of the year. It is here. In the beeping cars and the low bass growl of the ferry and the gasoline and the waterfowl perched on the pylons watching the show.
The ferrymen work to load us on and off. For tonight, I am coming home. Tomorrow I do not know. This is my life. Right now.
In the morning, he is ready. He smiles and holds up the red splotch that resembles a dog, the one his two-year-old granddaughter painted for him last weekend as she exclaimed, "Faye painted da dog!" I take a picture of him to text to all of my siblings and say, "Ready pre-op!"
Mom is driving now. My sister, Summer, texts us a photo of herself waving and she writes, "Love you Dad!" and my other sister texts to tell us all that Faye just saw the photo and said, "Auntie Summy at work. Make da honey. Auntie Summy come play da Faye, RIGHT NOW!"
Faye knows that bees work to make the honey. So she has put the logic together herself. When her Dada and Auntie Summy and Zsi Zsi go to "work" they obviously make the honey, too.
RIGHT NOW is a new phrase she has learned, and she applies it well.
We all laugh. Truth is funny.
My brother, Stuart, is an emergency room doctor in Nashville. He texts us all a photo of his hand holding a nearly empty honey jar, "I'm running low, better get back to work."
This is life. Right now. We are making da honey.
xo
laura