Frozen Fossils

I used to see those very sleepy southwest Minneapolis moms with their coffee in hand, walking their kids to school in the morning. I would watch them silently from my car when stopped at the intersection as they hurried even sleepier children along, carrying their enormous bags and mouthing “I’m sorry!” to me as they took about nine years to cross the street.

Now that’s me. I’m the mom with the coffee motioning apologies to strangers at the crosswalk. And I love it.

We walk to school on the “city side” which means we are closer to the business district in my neighborhood and not the houses. Past the violin shop and the chiropractic cafe, across from the coffee shop where we sometimes go for soup and where I take all my meetings.  Turning by the Christmas Tree lot, passing the “old” tennis courts where we take city picnics and Lola learned to ride her first bike.

We walk too slowly and ponder our beginnings and she asks me how God and magic are any different & I don’t even know how I will begin to answer that and so I say “well magic is cool, but we feel God in our hearts!” And then she adds, “And magic is different from God because magic doesn’t know what we’re gonna do next like God does — He knew we were going on a walk today – even I didn’t know that!”

We are late, but we’ll make it before the last bell. Just don’t tell your teacher it’s on account of our dance party this morning to Silentó — WATCH ME in the living room, I think, because I know your teacher and she will say that’s simply unacceptable. That song is SO 2015.

But dammit if we aren’t learning all the moves in the video.

We talk about where Christmas trees actually come from and how they get them all onto the lot.  And did you remember that Taylor Swift GREW UP on a Christmas tree farm?  Which completely makes sense, right?

We become furious at the amount of people who don’t clean up after their dogs in the wintertime.  Lola steps in frozen shit.

We find fresh snow and trod through it to clean off Lola’s boots. We are late, but still. We crack frozen fossils on the sidewalk by jumping on all the thin ice, sheets of frozen time under which a rushing river of street water flows, and that somehow feel just like our life on this morning walk to school.

 

We run into other moms as we get closer, and promise each other coffee dates and play dates and wine dates and nobody has on any makeup because it’s early. It’s 9:35am.

When I turn to walk away I see Lola in the second story stairwell window of her school, waving goodbye and mouthing “I love you”. And I acknowledge in that moment that I’ve never had it so good.

It seems like time stands still when we are walking to school.

I love our life, even in this season. We are frozen in time & so limited by our circumstances, but still wild and free underneath; like water that’s only a spring’s thaw away from rushing into the nearby river, flowing towards the closest lake & evaporating into the sky & landing in the sea.

And this is exactly where we are supposed to be.

 

Now please enjoy this song from my youth by the band LoveDrug called Spiders.  The quality is awful, but you get the sentiment.