Five-Minute Friday: Remember

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I walk to the park, a slow gait, hands cupped around my bowl of frozen yogurt on this chilly evening.  I'm in the mood to savor.  The beams of the fence leading into the park look whittled by beaver teeth and  I walk across wet bark between the fence posts, the door opened wide to this marshland mansion.  For the first time this day, quiet as I've been, my soul is hushed within me.  I'm not afraid of this silence; I lean into it.

I crouch low to admire the emerald sheen of a duck and the royal purple swath on the wings of another.  I see a cloud of crows above, off in the distance, a black banner waved across the sky.  I stop to stroke the end of a bare branch, its soft white tuft tucked into a cocoon, how its held here on this spindly wood and nurtured to bloom.  And the green caterpillar-esque blossoms shooting high from another set of barren trees.  These trees whose limbs bounce in the breeze and beneath the weight of robins' feet, their rusty orange chests puffed out, calling in lone song across the land.  

I enter a sanctuary of trees with bark peels curled across the ground, where birds traverse lightly through grasses, little hovercrafts in search of dinner.  I hear knocking on wood up high and strain my eyes until I focus in on a sleek black body with ruby red head, peck-peck-pecking away.  I lay my hand on a tree and gently trace the scars etched in its skin.  And I stand enchanted, filled with the sounds of whirls and trills and wooden clacking, of wind tickling grasses and squirrel claws clicking up trunks.  I catch a black blur of movement, tiny hummingbird hovering at the edges of a bush, and my breath catches.

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I pass by an old log cabin, owned by the park, and can't resist the invitation to sit on the porch and swing on the bench.  My heels rock, back and forth, rocking my soul to rest after a weary day.

It's here, outside, where I look up at the sky that has no edges, stretching further than my eyes can see, that I remember.  That I am held.  That I will be ok, one day, even if I cannot see when.  It's here that I remember, if God cannot redeem all this inside and around, I may as well stop writing here about beautiful rubbish.  

Linking up with Lisa-Jo and the community of Five-Minute Friday writers.  The theme this week: Remember.