It doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere this summer, because we have half a clue and see the rest of the country getting sick by traveling and acting like we’re not in the middle of a pandemic. I’ve lost count of all the events and trips and shows we’ve missed out on, so I understand what it’s like to want to get back out there, to hope and try to find some sense of normalness in all this madness. Yet I’m not stupid enough to risk things by going to a big gathering at a beach or something. Oh, and our pool is still not open, so it’s not like we have a paradise in the backyard just yet. Again, I’m just not dumb enough to take any risks.
And so we travel in music and books and beauty, touring the gardens and remembering various related events that come with the blooming of each flower. Daisies bring back times with Suzie and JoAnn, and a simple summer day riding my back down Romeyn Avenue and coming upon a patch of these in full bloom. I stopped and stared at them, studying their happy faces turned upward at the midday sun. I couldn’t have been more than eleven years old, but I still remember that moment. Daisies do that.
Music can do that too. This is a new song for me, and it’s an instant summer mood. Tinged with melancholy, and shot through with rays of sunlight, it’s like a summer morning when you’re packing the car for a road trip, and there’s hope and trepidation and excitement, all rolled together in the best kind of butterflies the stomach can flutter.
TIME HAS COME TO GO
PACK YOUR BAGS, HIT THE OPEN ROAD
OUR HEARTS JUST WON’T DIE
IT’S THE TRIP KEEPS US ALIVE
Daisies and vacations and summer days… what happiness these words conjure. What glorious connotations attached to each, with threads of silk and wonder leading to other memories. Amassing such threads has been a habit of mine. Maybe one day I’ll craft a cocoon in the hopes of some miraculous metamorphosis. Maybe a butterfly will result. And maybe the butterfly is already here, in the fluttering movement of the mind, piling into the car and hitting the road in giddy anticipation of another adventure to come.
THEY’RE FOLLOWING SOME DANCE OF LIGHT
TEARING INTO THE NIGHT
WATCHING YOU FALL ASLEEP
THE SWEETEST DOVE IN THE DREAM
We travel through the day, we travel through the night. Somewhere along the way, a storm comes and wets the world. Morning arrives, the petals of flowers still holding on to the kisses of rain. Water from the sky drips into the land, taken in by the plants, released again as oxygen, then back into the air, traveling in a cloud, moving over the land, toward the seas and the oceans, then trickling back down into more water, rejoining itself and lapping upon the shore, knocking on the sand, rising in the mist, carried and spun back into the air, funneled into a storm, tumbled through the atmosphere, falling through the night sky, and nestling onto the radial whorl of a daisy.
