It's been a long day, the timing of things is wrong, clicking when I'm snapping, moving when I'm daydreaming, forcing when I am gliding. I smooth my hand against the hot metal of the side car door on the way home from work, the roar of cars to left and right, my hair is long and wavy and moving in ribbons behind me. The children are spread around town, doing things without me, without their father. They are older than they used to be. I slide off my sandal and push my foot hard on the gas pedal, feel the warm rubber. The sun is moving downward. A truckload of men in their 20's pulls up and the brown face, wide laugh of a man turns to me and he cups his hands around his mouth. I cannot hear what he tells me. I just know he has told me something. He turns back to his friends and their truck is going 60 and I am going 45. I am 34 years old, and they are brown skinned young men in their 20's. The sky is clean like blue bone. The trees are many and soft California green. The tree heads bump against the sky. Sunlight moves over my arms and my face and my hand is burnt against the car door metal. I feel the blonde down on my skin pulse with joy. I am going home to my husband and there is his face and his hands and his eyes and our history and our future. There is a center to the madness. There is this heat and this sunlight and the young men and their wide brown smiles and there is my husband to give it to. Today at work I was pushing children in the large stroller. I was by myself as you are when you are with very small children. I was looking at little I and his fat curvy arm sticking out the side, small fist curled into a caterpillar. Just hanging there. And suddenly I saw the ultrasound of my and Mr. Curry's baby, our unnamed but very real baby, and his little fists, all curled up under his chin. And I was out in the open, and the sun was soft, and the wind, and there was no traffic, and it was like a great breath was being held so sweetly by the world, waiting for me to understand. ' Your baby actually existed. He was here. He was alive. He was a real human being created with the man you love. ' And there was this new level of understanding what I had lost. I drove with one hand in the sun and burnt against the car door. I drove and thought of my children in their 3 different places with their 3 different beautiful bodies, moving and groaning and laughing and complaining and living. I pulled the car to home and pulled my body as closely as possible to Mr. Curry's. And there was this new level of understanding what I have.
