THE day we saw them all
THE DAY WE SAW THEM ALL
09 09 26
Before the walk, he said, “I want to see the butterflies.” We go back some days looking for them near the house with the Spanish tiles on the risers of the brick staircase. Last year, this place was swarming with monarchs. This year, not so much. We saw a few. But only a few. He’s walking now, too. Much has changed. We were searching for butterflies when we heard the landscaping tools nearby. He sat on the brick staircase for a while, wanting to go farther up. A verbal boundary was enough to stop his progress. Eventually, we jointly decided it was time to go look. “Is that a leaf blower?” he asked. “It sounds like a weed cutter,” I said. Several clips later, after he finished drinking his water, I suggested we go see the leaf blower. He agreed. We just didn’t agree on how to get there. He wanted to go “that way,” which was away from the leaf blower. I gave him the lead. We stopped along the way. We sat near a lime tree and picked one. We played in gravel. Then we continued down the long, curving road. By the time we reached the end, he said he wanted to go home. So I led the way back, without his usual “that way” offering another direction. I remembered the street where we had heard the leaf blower. But we could no longer hear it. We first saw the lawn mower sitting near the curb on the grass. Then the leaf blower on the ground, settled beside the weed cutter laid across the brick. A man stood at the top of the lawn, chopping overgrown shrubs. He waved and smiled. I did too. Malik didn’t. Not far from the lawn mower, we noticed the rake. Four garden tools. Three of them are tools we usually hear from the window and make a game out of guessing. “Is that a leaf blower?” “I think it’s a leaf blower.” The rake came differently. Malik recently learned that word from several farm-related books we bought. Now here they all were. In one place. Silent by then. The men using them were finishing up, packing their equipment and waiting for the pickup truck that arrived about ten minutes after we did. Had we gone the way I originally wanted, we probably would have seen and heard them the way we normally do: running, loud, across the street, and out of the way. “That way” allowed us to see them differently. We looked at them and talked about them until the men packed everything up and drove away. Instead of seeing one, we saw them all. His way took longer. But his way got us closer.
