idyll
Calmly and without fuss, Claire cut her first tooth.
This afternoon after work we headed down to the new park at Treat and 23rd. It could hardly be any closer to us – two short blocks west, one block south. Used to be a Superfund site, toxic, a paint factory I think. They pulled up the contaminated earth and trucked it away and built this in its place.
It’s a great park. There’s a playground for pre-schoolers and another one for grade-schoolers and a gazebo and a community garden and a greensward for playing ball. It’s only been open a week or two and it’s already swarming with children, almost all Hispanic but with a smattering of white and mixed-race folks too. People are friendly, though mostly in Spanish and to my shame, no habla Espanol.
Claire and I stretched out on the grass. I listened to the kids laughing and smelled the steamy loam and felt the wet grass soaking through my jeans and watched white clouds scudding across the sky. Claire pulled up blades of grass and inspected them minutely. I’m snowed under at work and vaguely worried about money and where we’ll live next and how to make time to write fiction, but even so, lying there in the park with my best girl by my side, I was as happy as I’ve ever been.
