Like A Definition Of Love

We have arrived home in Seattle and it is hot here. Well, relatively hot. Hot for the Pacific Northwest. Windows are thrown open, we don't turn on lights and we can barely sleep with sheets on. No one in this part of the world has air-conditioning and we only need fans maybe this one week of the year. It doesn't help to be 31 weeks pregnant. I'm feeling nostalgic for the white house with green shutters where I grew up, which had a wrap-around upstairs sun porch off my parents' room. We'd ro-sham-bo to sleep in the canopy bed out there in the summers. Soft breezes would rustle the leaves on the trees, drift through the big screen windows and lull you to sleep. Even better was sleeping out there during a big old midwestern summer thunder storm (I miss those too). Ruth Stone's poem below taps into that childhood memory and melds with the everything-is-right-in-the-world-feeling I have now when my sleeping son is curled up against me. Isn't it amazing how another person's poem, someone else's very specific experience, can hurl you beautifully back into your own life? 


Green Apples

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
to the back porch
and slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
telling me something:
saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
and rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night long,
shaking me in my sleep
like a definition of love,
saying, this is the moment,
here, now.

~ Ruth Stone