An Afternoon

The sky, mid-afternoon, a beautiful canvas graced with sky blues and pure milky whites. The blue in the depths beyond and the smooth, rounded, sugary sweet clouds in the foreground; February mornings were made to be like this. Stained white wooden porches, green plastic lawn and garden chairs and a yellow butterfly dancing above the steamy urban pavement with an invisible partner to a made up song.

Sitting on the porch waiting for Michele, tall, southern, red haired and fiery, I have to do much needed laundry at her house where the wash is free and the dryers do not charge by the minute. I am down to my second and third wearing of jeans and socks are scarce so sandals in cool weather are necessary. Basking in the delicious intoxicating sunlight, this is one day in the unusually cold Florida February that my toes are not blue and numb from wearing sandals. I rest my twenty-two-year-old English filled head against the siding on the porch and wonder; “Does it get any better then this?”

A little girl appears, frolicking, bursting with energy like a quarter machine bouncy ball, going every which way on the narrow street past the once beautiful two story houses, faded paint peeling in corners and cracks, old rusted bicycles litter dying grassy patches. The child, five, black hair adorned with beads of every color, a faded blue jean dress, yellow shirt underneath, bounds down the gravel street muttering garbled nonsense to her older sister, around seven years old with short hair--so short it was hard at first to discern whether she was girl or boy; puffy and crinkled to her head, shorts of blue cotton, a green plain shirt with a 7-up logo printed on it. She carried only one telling factor, a pink backpack, stuffed to the brim with who knows what odds and ends.

Their mother, hobbles behind limping slowly, with a brown, worn, wooden cane, a young woman made old by the hardships, which adorned her chocolate, wrinkled, worried face, wearing a sleeveless bright pink top and tight faded jeans with leather laces on the sides following the seam, both contouring a voluptuous figure, her black hair styled short, flat and to her shoulders.

The trio passes my place of observation on the graying porch and yell,

“Daddy!”

“Daddy!” I yell excitedly, “This bike is so pretty!” The bike is all mine and my Daddy’s secret.