“Life is like a rainbow. You need both the sun and the rain to make its colors appear.”

The sun is warmer than I normally prefer, burning into my skin, causing my eyes to dance and spin as sweat quickly pools down my back. The last few days have been cool, and rainy, mysterious autumn weather mid July, and I’ve preferred that. The kiss of a rainy morning, drumming on my roof as a child burrows underneath my arm, the forced march inside of simple household chores, coloring books on the table, creatures underfoot.

The sun today, while cleansing, is nearly too bright for my aging eyes, and I find shelter underneath bowed trees. I sip coffee and ice water alternately, reading in the shade, buffered by motorcycles and the rumbling of gossip beside me. I want to stay in that spot forever, the one beside the sun, where I’ve sat year after year, growing from child to adult, from maiden to mother,  the table in front of me once full of magazines and cigarettes, now cluttered with histories and water,  my girth expanded as much as my wisdom, or so I can hope. I can see a line straining from that girl wasting time on summer mornings in a little coffee shop in the Annex, waiting for life to happen, to me now, sitting still within a life, waiting for it to stretch it’s rubber arms and sigh. She’s not so different that girl, and yet somehow, despite the lingering smell of cigarettes and quiet, she is.

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