A Patchwork Life

It’s the end of a long week at the end of a long year and your lungs are only now slowly filling up with air. It’s been raining for days. The kids are bickering, your spouse has that stir-crazy look in his eye, and suddenly the sun breaks free and the morning is ripe and golden.

So you go to the pool. You bare your winter flesh to the light in a motherly skirted suit and feel warm and delicious. Your husband stretches out in a puddle of sun like a contented cat and your children splash happily into the cerulean waters. You eat a plate of snack-bar french fries and let the kids swirl the ketchup around on the plate as long as they like, and promise that next time, they can have the girl-shaped popsicles with bubble-gum eyes. They find two friends and lay out in the sun on their towels and you see their teenage selves in the lines of their long brown legs. Later all four of you are in the water and he is catching them when they jump and swirling them around in the water afterward and their laughter floats like bubbles and you can’t stop smiling from behind your sunglasses. You think everyone around you must see how much you love them.

Then you all pile into the car, wet towels wrapped around you, the warmth of the sun still thrumming beneath your skin, the smell of chlorine strong and sharp around your heads. The family heads home for tuna melts and corn and applesauce, with cheesecake brownie cupcakes for dessert. The day fades into a soft summer night, and everyone is happy.

You think that you want to remember this day forever, capture somehow in your mind’s eye, trap it in a golden net, but you also know that even if you pin a butterfly down as carefully as you can, it will never be as lovely as it was, dancing in the summer sun.