Nashville Int'l Airport, Gate B4, 6:17am

 

So many different colors of green

“I love how the leaves are so many different colors of green.  Look, there’s dark green and really light green and so many different colors of green.”

We’re sitting on the deck at sunset and Grant is admiring the foliage.  It really is beautiful.  

“They’re all the same color.  It’s just the sun that makes them look different,” Audrey argues.  

“No it’s not.  There are all different colors, even without the sun,” Grant snaps back.  

“It’s just the sun, Grant,” she retorts.

My children are 11 and 14.  They are oil and water.  They are candle and flame.  They are the stream 

and willow tree 

growing on its banks.  

They continue their quarrel over the role the sunlight might or might not be playing in the appearance of the leaves on our backyard trees, and as they do the sun sets behind said trees, rendering their argument 

quite irrelevant.  

Their debate has outlived the question, 

and indeed 

my interest in listening to it.  

In my mind I am fading away to a day when I am no longer of this earth and my yin and yang progeny are young adults on their own.  

Audrey is in the library and has been there for more hours than she can count.  Grant goes in and finds her, tucked away among the stacks.  He tells her that she needs a break.  He takes her by the hand and leads her out to the lawn.  There they lie under a tree and look up at the clouds.  

He tells her that she needs to take breaks more often.  

She nods and says that he’s right.

And he is.  

And she promises that she will.

And she will.  

“What do you see?”

“I see a sheep and a car.”

“Where’s the sheep?  Oh, yeah, there.  I see it.  Do you see that big heart?”  

“Oh yeah!”   

Audrey asks Grant if he paid his rent that month.

He shrugs and says he’s not sure.

And he isn’t.  

And he didn’t.

But he will.  

She reaches for his hand and says that she still misses me a lot and he says he does too.  

"I wish she could be with us now," he whispers.

And he blinks back tears.  

She checks her phone.

And I laugh.  My fire and ice babies are finally in agreement and yet in this particular instance they could not be more wrong.  

Because I am there.

Of course I am there.

They just don’t recognize me because in this moment I have chosen the form of a sheep 

and a car

and a heart.  

And a ray of sunshine shining through the leaves.

And dark green and really light green and so many different colors of green.