This gift will last forever, This gift will never let you down…
–-Glen Hansard
Last night, at bedtime, I could feel the pull of the night air. I stepped out onto the porch and looked out across the sky. Pale blue with hints of pink, and thin gentle clouds that rose into small, fairy-tale mountains as I turned to the north. A breeze on the warm side of cool brushed past the leaves as Hallie followed me out. “Wow,” she said, looking up at the sky, her hair dancing across her face.
Crawling out of the water that morning, rivulets coursing down my body, I rolled onto the catch basin, too tired to lift myself completely out of the pool. Slowly standing, breathing hard as drops of water hit the cement, I slowly made my way across the pavement and up the stairs to my t-shirt and towel, every movement intensely felt in my tired muscles, happy now only to walk, after swimming so far. Is this, perhaps, why we left the oceans behind us? The sheer pleasure of moving in a different way?
The summer’s been lean. After a couple years of abundant money and too little time, I’ve had to learn again how to live with the opposite. And for the first time in ages I feel as if I’m having a summer. My life is made of wind and water, heat and rain. The sun rises and sets before my eyes, and as the days grow shorter, I am happy to sit on the porch with my little girl and say wow to the sky.
Swimming, biking, and eating ice cream; childhood pleasures that have always cheered me. But this summer I long to add another.
I want to play in the rain.
I want to dance in puddles with my daughter, chase kayaking leaves with my son, and laugh with my wife as we both get soaked to the skin. It’s been a while, and I’m sure I’ll look crazy. But that’s okay. Embarrassment holds little sway in my life these days, it’s just another enemy of joy. And joy is what I’m after. It is, of course, all around me: in the motion of my body and in the air that I breathe, in the clouds in the sky and the laugh of a friend, in the attention of my son, the touch of my wife, and always, always, always in the eyes of my daughter, where the world never fails to inspire, befriend and renew; and where love abides for all she beholds.
Playing in the City with Trains 
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