spring

Some Everydays

Wadi’ah sat under the table, tying and untying her father’s shoelaces. He was speaking English, a language she knew the contours of and could recognize, but didn’t understand. She knew that he was talking to a sahafi from a radio program from America. He told her that talking to the sahafi might help, that he would tell the people in America that they needed help, to please help everyone who was struggling. He had made Wadi’ah promise to be quiet during the interview, and she’d promised.

And now she was under the table. Wadi’ah hadn’t expected was for the sahafi to be a woman, in jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt and short, graying, uncovered hair. The woman’s shoes were similar to Wadi’ah’s father’s. They were tennis shoes, grey with a blue stripe. One of the laces was untied.

Wadi’ah slid, as quietly as she could, across the dusty floor. Her mother wasn’t around to clean anymore. Her father said she wasn’t coming back anymore. He’d cried, and she’d cried too, but she still was certain, somehow, that he was wrong.

She lifted the woman’s white laces up off the floor. The woman’s leg was very, very still, and she said something in English that made Wadi’ah’s father laugh. Wadi’ah loved her father’s laugh because it was very loud, like a donkey braying. It made her nervous for a second now, though, because she thought that maybe he would look under the table and see that she was holding the woman’s laces, but he didn’t, so she tried to tie the woman’s shoelaces tightly but without the woman feeling it. When she finally managed the last bit of the knot without the whole thing falling apart, the woman’s leg twitched, and Wadi’ah scuttled back towards her father’s feet.

There was a bang. The door of the house had slammed open. It was Farouk. He was yelling, shouting, like he had so many times before. Wadi’ah lifted her arms up, almost on autopilot, and sure enough, her father swept her up from under the table, at once.

The shelling began in the street as he ran downstairs to the tiny cellar they had built under their house when all this began. Farouk pushed the sahafi woman in front of him and heaved the cellar door shut behind him. The woman whispered something and Farouk hissed, angry. Wadi’ah’s father slapped his wrist in the dark. Then he spoke in Wadi’ah’s ear, so softly that only she could hear it.

“You saved her life, you know. If you hadn’t tied her shoelace, she’d have fallen and never gotten in here. You’re a good girl, my Wadi’ah, you’re a good girl.”

“Will Ama come back to us now I’m good?” Wadi’ah asked.

Farouk hissed at them to be quiet again, and the sound of shelling and the stomps of soldiers grew closer. Wadi’ah knew she couldn’t ask any more questions now, so she hushed. She’d have plenty of time to ask about her mother again later.

 

Springtime Reactions

When spring came, the trees unfroze from their long slumber, the animals uncurled in their dens, and the flowers bloomed in their neat rows. The sun shone and warmed peoples’ skin and the wind blew and chilled them when they stood in the shade. The world took its course, as it does every year.
But inside Gray Gardens, the old fashioned townhouse that Laura and Bill occupied, things were changing in an entirely new way and everyone was out of sorts.
“Bill! Bill, where are you?” Laura pounded down the stairs, yelling at the top of her voice and making the chandelier rattle.
“I’m up here!”
Laura stopped, turned, sighed, and climbed right back up the wide staircase. She tracked Bill’s voice to the second upstairs bathroom, where he had taken to shaving in the mornings after Laura had complained that she was sick of finding his tiny face-hairs stuck to the main bathroom’s sink. As she pounded on the door, he nicked himself and swore loudly.
“Can’t you knock like a human being?” he said. “Geez, it’s like having an untrained chimpanzee for a wife sometimes,” he added under his breath, rolling his eyes at himself in the mirror.
“The catering company called and they’re saying that the sushi is non-kosher. Your father is going to murder me. Literally.”
“No, he’s not. He might flay you but he won’t kill you.”
“Well, I won’t look very attractive without my skin on, will I? You need to call them and tell them that we’re not going to pay for it if it’s not kosher.”
“Why can’t you do it? I thought you were taking care of the caterers.”
“I tried, didn’t I? Their secretary got very snippy with me. It was as if she forgot that I was the one paying her.”
“You’re not. The catering company is paying her.”
“Whatever. Will you call them?”
“Fine, fine, I will.”
Bill and Laura’s daughter was getting married and the wedding was that evening, in Gray Garden’s spacious backyard. Nothing was going right, and it wasn’t even nine in the morning yet. Bill had already gotten an angry email from the band they’d hired, telling him that they couldn’t possibly arrive two hours earlier than planned, because they were on tour and that their management was already pissed off that they’d agreed to a private engagement like this one. Laura had wept twice that morning – once on the phone with her daughter, who was sobbing about how scared she was and a second time because her beautifully manicured nail had broken inside her expensive hairdo. Bill had been on the verge of tears himself when he’d found out that there was mold growing out of the corner of the bathroom wall again – he’d thought they’d gotten that taken care of last year.
Spring calmly hovered in the air outside, but inside it seemed to be only eliciting allergic reactions.

Forgetting Spring

Imagine a great, big tree. Grand and majestic, an old soul, it carries thousands of small leaves, leaves that fall each winter to the ground and scatter in the wind. Each fall, as the leaves begin to change colors and one by one fall from the branches, the tree begins to feel lonely. It knows that soon it will be bereft of all its cover and will be alone. So every fall, the tree grows sadder and sadder until, as the first frost kisses the branches, the tree feels dead and alone.

The months of winter whip the tree into a fierce skeleton of its former glory. All leaves gone, the tree is left without support, without cover, without anything to shelter if from the winds and snows and the rains and the frosts. If the tree could have a voice it would be howling with pain as the wind beats through it, screaming as the cold drops of rain hit its branches or moaning softly as the snow buries it under a cold blanket of wet white flakes.

The tree never remembers during the winter what it feels like to wake up in spring. But nevertheless, every year, there comes a morning when the tree feels the warm glint of the sunlight on its branches. It drinks up the water from the wet ground through its roots and seems to stretch out as the warmth thaws it. Soon enough, the new leaves start budding, one by one, and the tree would be smiling if it could, greeting every new bud with a drop of water to sustain and nourish it.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that spring will come, but come it will, whether we know it or not.