Sycamore

Sycamore

Soft rain simmered on July’s tin roof. Pattered. Murmured its samba prayer to my baby, who awoke with a timeless need. Her mother next to me, pulled the covers harshly by way of seizing the floor, and croak-grunted, “It’s your turn.”

I could see the logic in it, say, if we were digging a hole and had but one shovel. If we were building a home and had only one hammer. Or…I was drifting back to sleep musing when both the females in my life put me square between them. Baby Simone demands attention, gearing up in agitation. Reaching, ratcheting to her aria. Tina digging in, adamant about twists and whose turns. The imminence of escalation put me on my elbows trying to join those who were already awake. I forced my eyes wide trying to orient the room, the path to Simone. What the hell does a dad do for his newborn child at 2 a.m.? Without the gift of nourishing breasts, I got up to feel my way.

Instinct rose from my ancestors’ bones. I picked up my month-old daughter from her cardboard-box bed on the table, swaddled her and myself well and dance-paced the rough planked wooden floor. I gave her a waltz. I gave her safety against darkness. I gave her foundational rhythm, un-mortared as it was.

When she calmly fell back asleep, we eased onto the old rocking chair by the hearth. The smell of sycamore ash radiating from the rocks. Branches we had gathered from the stream banks that morning. Carried across the threshold for the ambience of fire. How fast the sycamore burns.

We floated in the rocker as if on the sea, my head fallen back, my jaw wide open. But I wouldn’t sleep for a while. Stared out the screened windows into the night. So this is how my life is going to be. And dreamlike there I became my father holding me when I too was new to this earth. This realization crashing to my mind so hard for the first time – my dad had done this same dance for me some 23 years ago. Though he never once mouthed the words, “I love you.” And I thought again of my mother’s warning, “Now you will know what love is.” I kissed Simone’s soft fontanelle, took breaths of her bonding smell. Wondered on the waves of a mysterious joy.