Tonight I sat in the swing and let the world do its slow work on me.
The sky turned the way it always does in March — not all at once, but in increments, the light loosening its hold degree by degree until the pink came. That hazy, bruised pink that settles just above the treeline before the dark takes it. The trees stood in their black silhouettes like figures who knew something I didn't, patient and absolute.
I was wearing the sweater my niece gave me — thick and soft, the kind that doesn't so much warm you as hold you. I thought: this is what tenderness feels like when it has no words. Just weight. Just warmth. The porch swing rocked its small, slow rhythm, and I let it.
The highway carried its noise up into the hillside — cars going somewhere, always somewhere — but the sound softened by the time it reached me, became something abstract, something I could absorb without needing to name. And the hill answered back with its green. Already it is beginning to wake, that layered green of early spring, green laid over green, the new growth so bright it almost embarrasses the older leaves. I forget, every year, how much I have missed it.
I waited for the stars the way you wait for a letter you know is coming. And then there was the moon — risen quietly, as she does, not announcing herself but simply there, already full of her own business. I welcomed her the way I always do. Not with words but with attention.
And then I let my mind go.
This is the thing I am learning, or perhaps relearning: how to sit without agenda, how to simply be a woman on a porch swing in the gloaming, inside her one small life, and find it enough. The trees do not mourn the sun. The moon does not explain herself. Maybe there is a lesson in that, somewhere under all this green and quiet.
I came inside smelling of cold air and wood smoke from a neighbor's chimney, two things I did not know I needed until I had them.