Heavy handed.

The lead, dragging, a too soft, rounded tip moving across the scrap, white—covered in kids drawings or erased attempts, ideas once on their way to the real world, now captured in tiny eraser bits brushed to the floor, then stuck to the bottom of my nikes and currently residing 1.5 miles away from my place somewhere along a jogging path that is still as peaceful today as it was before the virus-caused new social order which has changed a great many other things but not those trees lining the river that runs alongside the path, still bowing down to check their reflections in the water—printer paper. 

My not so young, not so pudgy anymore either fingers turning white at the joints but bright pink where they meet to guide my thoughts into form as they cover an abstract drawing which is really just another way to say that one of my kids scribbled on a bunch of paper in our box of paper. I’m pressing hard, trying to contain what is melting out of me, it’s heavy, slow—what I imagine the physical state of lava to be just as it settles into the enormous channels dug in the wake of its molten flow or even just in its run off for miles, what it was right before my kids and I camped on it last year, where Otto and I sat out there in the dark while the girls slept in the tent. 

His curiosity is always disguised in simple terms with equally simple requests waiting under them. Will you play basketball with me? Want to ride bikes? Can I take my shoes off at the symphony if my feet get hot? Mommy, will you sit outside with me? When I oblige these simple requests I see it, his curious nature, alive, well, collecting data. It was quiet out there and beautiful. Time was still with its eyes wide open, same as ours. 

My thoughts now, almost at a grinding halt but still making their way out as the lead rolls along the printer paper, are more like that lava must have been right before we played in the caves that morning and stood at the edges of small canyons that I hoped they thought were deep and giant and would think back on someday. Maybe, one day, as they are driving down the road, they'll remember how I let them drive my car on the back road that afternoon, straight down the road, each one after the other, excitement with a pinch of terror reaching record levels. Maybe then their thoughts will drift back to that morning playing in the fields of dry grass, laced with deep cuts of rough, dark, dumb, old rocks as they smile and wonder what their mom saw in all of it and why she was so insistent that they see it too. Maybe not. 

In time’s eye, right before is just a blink. This and this and this too are probably all wrapped up together in one stealthy blink along with the last three weeks. Right now, an eraser bit is on a jogging path, covered in a late spring snowstorm, only to be picked up by me with one, perfect, dumbest of luck, dumb luckiest step and brought back to the same damn house and into the kitchen next to the room with the table it fell from yesterday, just right over there. Can you imagine such a thing? I don’t think time does but in my minds eye, the details are all there, filed as neatly as a detail hoarder can manage—a sky high stack of scrap, white, printer paper is probably a safe description, so we’re clear. An old wooden painters ladder I found in the eves of the garage of the house where I lived before moving here, that I insisted on bringing with me, is standing by, waiting for me to climb it, to add something new to the stack. Something that time won't just blink about and move on from. Something that gives my kids a glimpse of what I see in all of it or at least something worthy of time standing still with its eyes wide open, hopefully until they water or maybe for a second.