I just took a look outside this morning and saw that most of the pavement outside is dry. There is still the reflected shine of water on the streets, but all that water that fell yesterday and last night has dried up. The wind has been blowing through the night, rattling our windows ever so slightly and taking all the water away.
I had booked a trip to get rid of some garbage in my basement last night. I call it a “dump run” which it really isn’t because I don’t actually go to a dump. It’s technically a transfer station. It’s a massive concrete hangar where anyone in the city can go to dump their garbage for a fee. You weigh your vehicle on the way in and then you weigh it on the way out and pay for the difference. I suppose there are huge garbage trucks that come to scoop it all up and take it out of the city, but I’ve never seen that part of the process. It’s a great way to get rid of garbage though.
We’re still trying to get our basement in order, so I was going to run a bunch of old scrap wood to the dump to clear out some space, but the rain started to fall a bit before noon and was freezing on the ground and the trees. I could see that the trees were encased in a beautiful shiny coating of ice along College Street when I left work last night. The grass on the corner of College and Elizabeth street looked like it was made of crystal.
It also didn’t seem like an ideal situation to be trucking garbage from my basement to the van and then driving it across the city in the dark and the ice. So I cancelled my date with the dump.
It would have been so great to get that garbage out of there, and I will rebook at some point in the next couple of weeks. But as it happened, it felt like a real gift to get the evening back. It became a gift that was celebrated throughout my house when it was announced at dinner.
You see, we’re in the final stages of one of the most exciting books that we’ve read together as a family, or at least the four oldest of us. It makes it challenging to find time to read it because we don’t want to deliberately exclude my youngest daughter, so it only seems fair that we read it when she is in bed, and all the evenings this week have been filled up by one thing or another, so it didn’t look like we were going to be able to read it at all this week.
The book, in case you’re curious, is Watership Down by Richard Adams. I haven’t read this book since I was a kid and I’m not sure if I’ve actually read the book myself. I think that my Dad is the only one to read it to me, but it’s one of those books where it all comes rushing back to me as I go through it and I recall how much I loved this book in so many ways. There were so many moments that captured my sense of adventure and wonder. The fact that all the characters are rabbits only makes it more wonderful I think. I find myself thinking as I go through it, “This is the best book in the world. I love this book.”
It’s a rare book because I don’t usually read to my oldest daughter anymore. She reads books like an elephant eats leaves, so although she’s often in the room when I’m reading to anyone else, she’s generally got herself immersed in her own world. But when I started this one she decided to join us, so we’ve gone through it together, and now my wife has joined us, so on top of being such an amazing story, we are sharing it together.
We never planned for it to become this thing that we were going to do together. I was picking a new chapter book with my son and I urged him to pick this one and he did, and the next thing I knew my oldest was there with us. Then in the second half my wife became a member of our little group.
So the freezing rain came and cancelled my plans and gave us a chance to be together again. I wish there was a sequel or another book that would rope us all in so completely. There are, I’m sure, many books that would be just as wonderful as Watership Down but I have my doubts as to whether this will continue.
I’ll certainly do my best to suggest such a book, but these beautiful moments seem to come and then they seem to go. It often seems like a magic that cannot be held on to. There are so many times in life where you look back on something like this and you wonder why it ended? How could it have ended? But inevitably time moves on, and I am so thankful for the persistence of memory that lets us hold on to this gift long after the freezing rain and the time have gone.
