The patio is
timeless. In the afternoon it is languorous with humidity. At night the
constellations cast by nearby condos look into its wide view. Oma has
kept it nearly immaculate, although she would never admit it – a
war with this climate is never won. Across the yard the bushes
sprawl along the fence, drooping color from their flowers. Between us
the birds flit, cardinals and starlings and mockingbirds, and two
doves building a nest in the eaves. Yesterday afternoon a warbler
flashed his bright yellow tummy at me from the neighbor's yard.
Today, thorough tropical rains have left the edges of the patio
sprinkled. In a breeze the young oak shakes its throughfall to the
grass. Through it all the patio is unperturbed, the russet tile and
wicker chair embrace, a quiet stage for morning coffee.
The patio window
looks into the kitchen. For the amount of life which has worn its way
through that room, Oma has once again kept it strikingly preserved.
Her battle is lost on the chair backs, however, pale with the prints
of determined palms. Other subtle remnants linger, of laughter and
conversations gone by, if only in the fullness of the air, of arms
draped and eyebrows emphatic. In one such recent conversation, Oma
puttered around the table recalling Opa's latest exploits.
"Drinking a
beer with a straw! Can you believe it?" She often strikes me as
the curious, determined child I think she was. An earnest giggle is
all it takes to see it. Playfulness aside, she still has a strong
sense of propriety.
"I had to
explain to him that people don't usually drink beer with a straw."
As if the fact that it was not done meant it should not be. Mom and I
smile at her as she stands, arms spread. Opa, it was reported,
elected to keep the straw.
Last night, on that
round kitchen table, we spread a museum. A museum of our own history.
As darkness pooled outside, we looked at envelopes stamped 1907 and
1941, at the penmanship of a brave age now returned to the
earth, at sepia copies of large families with bright smiles and
strong hands. Looking at the faces of family I will never meet,
holding their names on my tongue and passing their pride under my
fingertips, I felt the energy of a wave before it breaks. The purity,
the potential, rolling constantly under each ocean swell as
it turns from the gritty dark below to the frothing air above. The skim of a pelican's wingtip, the clear water at the edge of a
curl, like the lip of a glass cup, before it shatters down in spray and fans across the sand.
In the photographs
I see a new era ahead of them that is behind me.
I see the vitality of an unpolished country. Their world was more
dangerous than mine, their ambitions had faces they too did not know.
In their smiles I see the courage with which they wrote the rules. In
my Oma's voice I hear a woman who lived by those rules. In my mother
and I, we are the wave that is breaking, the shattered rules, the
periwinkles streaming through the sand.
This
morning, I am on the patio, listening to the birds, and the memories
of ancestors with farm houses and fields behind them, with generous
moustaches or dresses with sailor collars, hair in a bun hands on
hips. The rain has paused for now, and is a weight in the breath
instead. Sunlight sinks through the clouds. I am thinking of my Opa
sipping his drink with a straw, and Oma conflicted between joy and
embarrassment. I guess it is in all of us, to do what we're not
supposed to. To fiddle with the rules passed down to us. To feel that
we live on the edge of a dream that is collapsing, and a new one that
is coming to be.
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