Loose Leaf Notes

I’m standing on a patch of spring grass in the park with the sun on my back, pushing my 10 month old grandson Bryce in a swing. Little children are running around. Bryce giggles and kicks. Swinging high, he makes a funny face, has to catch his breath in the wind.
I’m swinging my grandson in the park. I say it out loud, waking myself to an alignment where my future is revealed as the present and I’m calling back to the past.
I’m swinging my grandson in the park. I don’t know how it happened, a beach town girl from Massachusetts, living in the country in Virginia, swinging her first grandchild in a park.
“Look. I’m swinging my grandson in the park,” I say and everyone listens; the tiny girl who missed her daddy when he was stationed in the Quadraline Islands in 1952; the four year old girl in the wool snowsuit whose baby carriage was left empty when she lost her favorite doll; the girl in the pink flip flops eating cotton candy at Paragon Park (We spent all our money and had to walk the 5 miles home and my flip flop kept coming apart.); the girl in the plaid clam diggers posing with her big family at a cook-out down on the Cape; the young woman who danced every weekend at The Surf Ballroom, liked boys, and went to four proms; the South Shore day care teacher who pushed little four year olds in swings, read them stories, and made play-dough pies; the woman who bore her own two precious boys and loved every moment of raising them; the jewelry maker who bought her own home with money earned vending Grateful Dead concerts; the one who married the love of her life on the Blue Ridge Parkway in 1997; the writer who writes her life down.
So this is it. Here I am now. I’m swinging my grandson in the park.
Post note: I think the squeaky swing hypnotized me for this time trip. Video clip “The Next Best Thing to Flying” of Bryce’s reactions to swinging is HERE.