Since Chelsea arrived, I’m spending more time in the backyard than ever before.
I am not an outdoor person. For me, the sun shines too brightly for my comfort; without dark sunglasses, I must squint and strain to see anything. My pale skin burns, but never tans. I emit a psycho-electric field that summons every stinging insect for miles around. (I can’t count count the times I’ve stumbled around the yard in crazy circles, batting at persistent bees and wasps.)
If there’s a spider web anywhere near me, I walk through it … and then spend the next hour pulling sticky threads from my face and clothes … and then spend the next hour being paranoid about whether nor not I have a spider in my hair. Pine pollen makes me sneeze. It’s a chaotic universe out there, and I’d rather watch it from a distance, thank you.
Chelsea, however, loves going outside.
She takes the “gum” in “sweetgum tree” literally, rooting around for those prickly, spherical seeds and gnawing them with gusto. She sorts sticks and pine cones, carrying them to odd little piles in distant corners of the yard. Where I see a concrete patio, she sees a fascinating, invisible mosaic of scents and odors. She springs through the monkey grass the way dolphins move through the sea: bursting upward and, seconds later, plunging beneath the surface again.
She delights in the warmth of the sunlight. She loves the way the wind drags dead leaves along the ground. She chases birds and butterflies and hornets and stink bugs. She contemplates the nature of the pool sweep, following its progress as it creeps along, swishing its mechanical tail and, occasionally, spouting water like a whale.
As much as Chelsea loves these things, she will not do any of them alone. She not only wants to be outside … she wants someone with her.
And so, I find myself sitting in the wrought iron chairs that ring our wrought iron table, straining to see my laptop screen in the blinding light of morning. (We’ve owned these chairs for at least a decade, and this is my first time to actually sit in one.) I’ve become aware of subtle changes in the color of the shrubs, the watery whisper of wind in the pines, the voices of distant dogs, the crackle made by a bug-zapper four yards away, and the way the moon aligns itself between two towering trees at exactly the same time every night.
Standing with her just before bedtime, I’m able to look back at the honey-tinted windows of our house. The floodlights are on, and I catch myself appreciating the contrast between the handsome Asian-inspired lines of our home’s archeticture and the riotous, chaotic shapes of the overgrown landscaping. The four sliding glass doors leading out to the patio suddenly strike me as four glowing screens on which the daily dramas of our life here unfold.
A sound distracts me. A few feet away, Chelsea crouches and yelps and snaps at moth — a bug she’s never seen before.
Standing together in the chilly dark, I share her fascination with something new, and delight in my own joy at rediscovering what I’ve seen a thousand times.
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