04-08-2023, 03:42 PM
Because happiness throws a shower of sparks
Being a beloved thing means never having to wonder. Being a beloved thing means never having to be afraid. And she is a beloved thing, isn’t she?
The first child whose name was not like the others. The first child who, born to plain parents, emerged into the soft dawn as something different. And, in the days after her birth, the father stayed. This was perhaps the biggest difference of all.
(The father’s staying did not have much to do with the birth of the girl, though. No, the father’s wanderer’s heart had finally settled. The love of a woman finally became larger than his love for the wandering. There was nothing remarkable about the child, at least no more remarkable than the others, it was simply that she was the first to come along in such a dreadfully long time. She was the reunion, the embodiment of a love that had weathered decades.)
She has been wild since the day she was born, careening through the underbrush alongside the deer she so closely resembles. (Though she still bears a fawn’s spots, even at her age. She has never grown out of them and, because of them, she appears much younger than she is.)
Her laughter echoes sweetly through the forest and she shakes her antlered head, studying the shapes in the shadows. (And remembers, too, a time when the world had been plunged into darkness and the shadows had been a place for all manners of evil to lay in wait. Perhaps she had been frightened then, but she’d had good reason to be. They all had.)
How she delights in the flurry of summertime activity. The buzz of bugs, the soft calling of birds, the slanted rays of sunshine that filter hazy through the canopy overhead. And she is smiling still when a branch cracks, when she turns to investigate, when she calls, “hello?”
The first child whose name was not like the others. The first child who, born to plain parents, emerged into the soft dawn as something different. And, in the days after her birth, the father stayed. This was perhaps the biggest difference of all.
(The father’s staying did not have much to do with the birth of the girl, though. No, the father’s wanderer’s heart had finally settled. The love of a woman finally became larger than his love for the wandering. There was nothing remarkable about the child, at least no more remarkable than the others, it was simply that she was the first to come along in such a dreadfully long time. She was the reunion, the embodiment of a love that had weathered decades.)
She has been wild since the day she was born, careening through the underbrush alongside the deer she so closely resembles. (Though she still bears a fawn’s spots, even at her age. She has never grown out of them and, because of them, she appears much younger than she is.)
Her laughter echoes sweetly through the forest and she shakes her antlered head, studying the shapes in the shadows. (And remembers, too, a time when the world had been plunged into darkness and the shadows had been a place for all manners of evil to lay in wait. Perhaps she had been frightened then, but she’d had good reason to be. They all had.)
How she delights in the flurry of summertime activity. The buzz of bugs, the soft calling of birds, the slanted rays of sunshine that filter hazy through the canopy overhead. And she is smiling still when a branch cracks, when she turns to investigate, when she calls, “hello?”