Zephyr

Each morning trumpeted into being with a chorus of baby squawks. Daffodils pushed through the barely revealed spring mud. Crusted snow clung to the curbs. In his crib, my infant son sucked his fist until he gagged. The polka dot mesh crib bumper that we painstakingly selected surrounded him. In the afternoons, I pushed the stroller around the block and around the block again, taking note of the finely painted Victorian homes, each so full of wood, waiting to be undone by one errant spark from a frayed electrical wire. I pushed the stroller around the block again. I put the baby in a snowsuit that made him look like a bear. The neighborhood nodded its approval. We left winter behind. My infant son smiled in my arms. Spring opened up to us, the days stretching like the baby himself in his crib after his morning nap. I was not on the couch crying. Who knew how the afternoon would unfold? I put the baby down for a nap. I cradled the baby in a creaky wooden rocker. I held the baby in my arms. He smiled. He bounced his open mouth against my shoulder. We lay on the living room floor, he on his play mat, me on the rug, listening to Joni Mitchell: O star light, star bright, you’ve got the loving that I like all right / Turn this crazy bird around. I walked the baby around the block in the stroller. The clouds nodded their approval, let fly a short frenzy of final snowflakes that glistened in the afternoon sun. The baby quaked his clenched fists. I put the baby in a vibrating chair that rocked back and forth and played electronic lullabies. Why is the bumblebee yellow and black? Why does the snow recede from the back porch like waves of sadness? The tulips poked up through the dead earth not unlike the tulips stitched into the decorative quilt that hung above the hospital bed where I gave birth. There, two medical students held my legs and joked about going to the gym. The epidural coursed strong medicine into my spine. The anesthesiologist flitted in and out of the room like a large hummingbird. Finally I held the baby in my arms. He opened his eyes. His eyes were all the hungover mornings I’d forgotten, every drunken sunrise I’d slept through. His eyes were four dozen Canadian geese lifting off a late summer river, all at once.