My Perfect Day

Our writing group set a challenge to write about our perfect day. Here’s where the prompt brought me. Where would it take you?

My Perfect Day

 

Someday when I’m older

wiser

wizened,

will I understand that they were all perfect days?

With children grown there is only profound and hushed gratitude.

Through the gauzy fabric of time

I see myself

exhausted, but willing,

to wake at two hour intervals to nurse an infant.

Chasing squirmy toddlers in osh kosh b’gosh.

Pushing swings for legs too little to pump.

Reading Charlotte’s Web

James and The Giant Peach

The Indian in the Cupboard

Carving pumpkins and gluing glitter on pinecones.

Displaying school papers covered in stars.

Spending Saturday nights with Indiana Jones,

afternoons with The Little Mermaid.

I know I was often bored and frazzled and so much in need

of adult conversation

that I spent hours on the phone to friends.

If given a second chance, I would take those hours back

and give them all to my children.

Now, I smile to remember

driving to school when he missed the bus

again.

Or when she forgot

her homework

her uniform

her lunch money.

I don’t smile

when I remember cleaning the room

and finding the speeding tickets,

but I say again a thank-you prayer

that I did find them,

and could broach the discusssion

that may or may not have been his wake-up call,

but he is still with us,

safe and less foolish ten years later.

I can’t remember now

a single day that wasn’t perfect

in the way that they are woven one to the other

like a medieval tapestry

with threads both dull and golden….

I see how my mother revisits the years

with my father,

and what was once painful has now softened,

like taking an open can of paint too harsh for the walls

and swirling in white to soften the tint

and bring out its lovliness.

Now he is just Norman once again.

Norman who was handsome in his airforce uniform.

Norman who had an acerbic wit.

Norman who fathered her only daughter.

Now, when only love remains,

they were all perfect days.

I recall my own restless years.

They are like pieces of quartz, agate, jade

turning over and over and over

in the rock tumbler of time’s perspective,

until all the sharp edges that once cut at my heart

are so smooth to the touch

I can hold them to my cheek.

and though I have known sorrows,

many of my own making,

still, in retrospect I cannot choose which stone

I would remove from the tumbler and toss

from the mix if given a magic decree.

I suspect, from my reluctance even now,

I would hold hold onto each for the rest of my breaths,

for each possesses, to me, a strange happiness too,

having once laid claim to it, and called it mine.

Having once embraced it as part of my life.

They are all perfect days,

these days in which I loved, hated,

laughed, cried, raged, lied,

betrayed, nurtured, wrote,

sang, danced, kissed, held,

protected, mothered, appreciated,

ignored,comforted, disappointed,

created, abandoned, re-created ~

for they are the threads I chose and wove and entwined

one to the other,

that say I was alive.

I was here.

These legacy moments in the tapestry of a life

that cannot be replicated, reworked or rewoven,

singular work of art,

mythical story,

mine and mine alone.

I declare it perfect.

And I am suspect of my desire to use

dreaming, creative visualization, and manifesting,

to sweep me away from the very real

and present joy of THIS MOMENT

and THIS LIFE

and tempts me to pick at a seed of discontent

only so that I can make a grand vision and plan

of a brighter future

in which life in a beach house with perfect white cabinets,

a black granite counter top,

a gas log fireplace

and the sound of the sea,

fills up the hollow spaces

of my human longing.

I have come to love my hollow spaces,

the aches that call me back to myself

from the maddening, grueling,

new and improved tomorrow-world

I have been yearning for like a child

waiting, on her birthday,

for Christmas,

which will surely be a better holiday

filled with more presents

less responsibility.

Loved ones who only cooperate.

Lovers who never leave

and children who never grow old.

I want to know now,

before I’m old and wizened.

I want to ask each morning

before I have decided otherwise,

“What is perfect about this day?”

And hear answers whispered

like butterfly kisses into my ear.

“You are here today.

Loving your children,

and the sky,

foliage,

and the smell of dying sugar maple leaves on wooded paths.

You are here.

Still.

Embrace it.”

 

Kathy MacDonald

 

 

 

 

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