I am in my yard weeding.
The recent rains have softened the dark rich soil, and the weeds pull easily from the ground. A small section alongside the house has been overrun with some sort of red-rooted clover-like plant, and I sweep my fingers low and beneath to gather them up.
They release their grasp on the world as if this has all been a misunderstanding.
“Oh, are these not our seats? So sorry. We’ll just be moving along, then.”
A small pile of these interlopers accumulates beside me.
No hard feelings.
The weather is perfect.
73 degrees and humid.
There is the scent of moss and electricity in the air.
The scent of possible futures.
The scent of inevitable endings.
The scent of time’s passage.
If I had known that the air in Oregon would smell like this, I would have been here sooner.
I breathe deeply and pull the weeds, sweeping my fingers carelessly below them.
Grasping and pulling, each time coming away with a messy bouquet of green leaves and rooted red.
And then there is a dance . . . a swaying urgent dark wiggle of a dance.
A tiny nervous garter snake, pinched at his middle within the weed bouquet. I somehow caught him perfectly as I swept the plants from their weak damp purchase. He wiggles erect and tall within the wilting bouquet, like a magic trick . . . up into the air.
For a moment, I am transfixed, as though this magic might be mine.
I open my hand and lower my hand and shut my eyes.
I do not want to watch him leave.
I watch instead, against the theater of my eyelids, an image of a woman crouched in the muddy earth of her chosen destination. Separating out what should and shouldn’t be here. Looking for magic.
Hoping some of it is hers.
Laughing to herself at the memory of a long-ago newspaper article . . . a music review of some award show . . . The Grammys? Maybe. The reviewer wrote of a performer who had failed to make eye contact with the audience, who had failed to connect. She remembers the reviewer said that the performer sang “to the backs of his eyelids,” and that someone needed to take him aside and explain about charisma.
She remembers reading that article and laughing great gasps of incredulous glee.
Laughter that startled the child within her belly.
She spoke to her belly, her only conversational companion, “Maybe, Maj? Maybe this writer is unaware that there is magic on the backs of that singer’s eyelids.”
She giggled, “Or maybe, Maj? Maybe this writer is unaware that Andrea Bocelli is blind.”
My eyes still closed, I watch the woman laugh as she crouches in the mud. As she holds her palms out to feel the mist of the warm light rain that has begun to fall. As she turns unseeing face to the sky to welcome the moisture on her skin.
As she stands.
Arms stretched high to greet the rain.
Breathing in the scent of her chosen destination.
The scent of possible futures.
The scent of inevitable endings.
The scent of time’s passage.
She sways and dances in her mind.
A silent song in her imagination.
Magic against the backs of her eyelids.
This is hers.
This magic.
She does not want to watch it disappear.
Her eyes closed.
She is blind.
