The State of Things

I am listening to Harper FaceTime her friend. They’re taking turns playing their brass instruments for each other. “When this thing ends,” Harper says, “the first thing I’m gonna do is,” and the two of them share all of what it is they’ll do that they can’t do now.

Hadley is in her room on a Zoom call with her soccer team. “It’s so good to see you!” Hadley’s says. I don’t see it, but I can hear from her voice that she’s smiling.

Two races and probably a third I’ve signed up for are cancelled, but some friends and I are still training. One says, ‘Well run the race anyway,” and so I am still running. Today, I ran 7.5 miles, the longest I’ve run all year. On our last mile, we were greeted with messages on the sidewalk written in chalk: “Stay connected.” “Smile and wave.” Our last two miles were our fastest. We were going down hill, so I’m sure that helped. I think the messages and that I was running with friends helped, too.

We went for a walk, the four of us, because the sun was shining and because there was nothing else to do and because we needed to get out of the house and listen for spring and not the inside noises of our home.

I’ve always liked the trails in woods that aren’t paved and are narrow and that twist. The ones I have to pay extra attention to so I won’t trip on a tree’s root or twist my ankle on a rock. Somehow the careful walking helps me pay attention to other things: How much Hadley reaches for Jesse and how easily the two can talk. How much Harper expresses without uttering a word. How exuberant Jesse is after having been somewhere, and seen something.

I liked the bridges on our walk the best – the ones that made it so we could keep walking over streams and bogs and deeper water, too – the ones that connected the land for us so we could keep going.