sister golden hair

and there she is and here she comes, walking from the dining room, out our back door and past the deck and down into the shadowy deep green of the back yard with an iced-down can of diet dr. pepper and a few granola bars for me. i am weary and my eyes frame her path sideways, my line of sight tilted 90 degrees as my body rests on the picnic table. i smile and give a silly wave and she reciprocates as she approaches.

and here she walks, closer, and her hair is on fire: the towheaded suncaught ponytail netherwhisps blowing and creating a blinding white sun-aura around her face, and for a moment she shields the sunlight from my face. she's a rublev in egg tempera and gold foil. she's a sight for sore muscles, sweat-drenched dad that i am. i am reclining, smelling like mud and sweat and bug spray and cut branches and stems and gasoline and more sweat.

she is my quiet daughter. and for this moment in time, she's my angel as well. the granola bars and conversation, the soda and her face. i sit up and thank her and breathe and open the can. the texas summer is kicking in this week. i sit there and i remember bringing water out to my father as he worked in our back yard thirty years earlier, remembering that same smell, and thinking it a pleasant smell.

ours is one of the few neighborhoods in the city that still receives trash pickup along the alley, and from time to time we organize neighborhood-wide cleanup days to maintain the right of way for the city employees who perform the thankless task — emptying our garbage and hauling it off twice weekly. not having to put trashcans in our front yards is a luxury, and the city is quick to remind us of this whenever we let the alley-ways get too overgrown.

they sent us a reminder, more of a warning really, since alley maintenance is a code compliance issue. nina and kathy and carlos and katarina and hugh and i were out there clipping and filling a flatbed trailer full, heaping branches upon branches: brown, green, grey, dead, living, soft, thorny, sappy, dry, brittle, mossy, crumbly — all of the branch archetypes were represented except, say, evergreen: we're in san antonio.

the alley cleanup crew offered me a glimpse of real community. multi-ethnic, cross-generational, disparate interests, working together. sweating together. then, like my favorite gatsby moment when all the beautiful people are gone in the late afternoon to primp and prep, i was left alone, surveying my strip of alleyway in solitude and silence.

that's when i crashed on the picnic table, and that's when my abigail-in-sunlight visited me, bringing food and drink for the weary.

fleeting, to be sure. i wish she could stay nine forever.

i wish my alley-way could stay trimmed forever. but grow it will, and i must tend to it and prune away parts and encourage other parts to flourish. i cannot control the growth; it's out of my hands. but i can tend to the stray vines, and maintain the alleyway. and remember to occasionally stand back and take in the beauty of sunlit moments.