Three Things Thursday {Spring, Sprang, Sprung}

by Cassie

1. With a gentle kiss of warm southern wind, we bid winter farewell and welcome spring. A green-handed goddess spreads her cloak over the ground, a mantle of bright daffodils and barely there buds and dirt, rain-soft and sun-warmed. A fat crow pecks at a blueberry pancake under a Full Crow Moon I can’t see for the clouds in the sky but feeling it down in my bones anyway — looking at the place where she rises between two trees, feeling ocean tides turn over in the wash of my bloodstream, pulling at my womb, and it’s no wonder people once worshiped naked under the light of her. I light white candles and bake bread in the shape of bunnies, mad March hares, and pull the petals off roses the color of sunburned skin while reading out ancient words in an accent that refuses to settle down in one place. There is dark beer and darker rooms and one square screen of light to fold all my thoughts into, and it is quiet, and it is a good night, a good life.

2. An outline almost too sparse to be called such, more an extended timeline, but it’s progress and no small feat for a self-defeatist. Pen marks on paper almost immediately covered up by the baby scribbles she takes such pride in, and there are misspelled words and more questions than plot, but it’s movement, and it moves me to see it, the first flutters of a story, a long way from birth but an entire world of possibility just beneath my skin. There is naming and descriptions and random details like the Spilled Milk Saloon or Mazel’s Draperies, and there are debates with myself when I’m standing in the shower, blowing on dice and throwing them on the table, not knowing what any of the rolls mean but trusting the dealer because the only dealer is me. I fall asleep with one foot in foreign lands of my own making, and sometimes they come to me in my dreams, the not-quite people who populate them — if I’m lucky, when I wake up, there’s enough of a ghost for me to grasp.

3. Them, the two of them. The sun on her, her small head so perfectly formed, hair like sparks and embers, abandoned bonfires and a sunset harvest; her eyes the changing color of the sea, the legginess of her in her ungainly toddlerhood, the unfolding of a foal, and she is growing like the grass, green and sweet and hopeful. Him, his awkward half-hugs, his head bumping up under my chin, unrecognizable in certain lights but that same beautiful baby face I’d know anywhere when he’s sleeping. Getting older is so hard on him sometimes, and I do what I can to hold back the hurt, but maybe I can only be a soft place to land anymore. He is stuck in a state of Goldilocks — everything is too big or too small, and nothing is just right, except for every once in a while when we can make him laugh unguarded. His love leaps into every room and clears out every cobweb, the teeth he hasn’t grown into yet, the way he ends every day a disheveled mess, smelling of boy and big ideas and starry-eyed wide-open future. Falling asleep to her breath on one side and his sleep-whispering on the other, occupying the middle space made up of crazy-making love. Good nights, good life.