Then People

Summer’s trying, and honestly that’s all I need. Just one small indication that the planet is not against me, that nature is moving forward, that a grass smell-filled, warm and swooshy breeze will still ripple through the green leaf streamers and rustle that organic rhythm. That my skin will feel the sun, and my temperature will rise, and I will sweat behind my knees and down my sternum and across the nape of my neck. 

Taking a walk in May. 

I’ve written about my neighborhood walks before, how they always give me something to ponder. This is how it is. I go out for a walk to kneed the dough of my thoughts into peaceful loaves, to let them rise in my subconscious while I focus on my body: my stride, the joints and ligaments, the sound of my feet in my shoes. But I always find a new thing on the way, and it always carries me home and gives me something else to think on. I go out with the temporary itch of work and love and trial and error and come in with the infinite wonderings of whimsy that are held in the mystery of life outside of human confinement. 

Today it came in the form of two sidewalk chalk words done in grey: Then People. 

I stopped. Of course I stopped. There was wonder implied. What did it mean? Reason suggested that it was a child learning about the properties of the lower case letter e. How to draw its shape. How its sound changes when preceded by different phonemes: the bilabial p, the dental fricative th. But something else in me wanted the ambiguous question of, Then people…what?

What did the people do? Who were the people? And could I be one of the people? Standing here looking at the words thinking about the meaning, did that automatically make me one of the people?

There were no other words scrawled on the cement, there was no other information or discussion. Fitting on a day when clarity is sparse and commentary is dangerous. The last two months have been like this, like a bad hand of scrabble tiles I prop up every morning and shift around, sighing as I wonder what to do with the Z while simultaneously feeling both bothered and grateful that I have four E’s. Surely I can make a meaning with this many vowels. But it’s awkward and embarrassing and tedious to constantly scan and shift and reimagine. To come up with something of value. Every day I am shy to lay down what I’ve come up with in work and relationship and reflection, aware it’s not my best work and aware that it is the best work I can do on this day at this time. 

Fractured is still functional. I am learning. Maybe this message was meant to be open-ended. Then people: took walks, called their families, started reading, gave themselves grace for human error, tried to love again, stopped cursing, ate vegetables, learned their neighbor’s names, got a library card, let go of the past. Then people did their best, holes and all, and showed up anyway, and put down what they could, and everyone else said, That’s amazing what you’ve done; look, I tried my best, too.