and so, I wonder
Late afternoon, and I walk outside to pick up the mail, noticing only the lazy thick heat of the sun on my bare arms, the faint glint of light bouncing off the driveway. Abstractedly, I try summoning the energy to prepare dinner. I am insular, propelled, tuned to my own thoughts.
“Hey-ey!” Spotting me, my six-year-old neighbor stops still in her driveway, halting a full-on run, suddenly singularly focused on me. Oh, dear. I sigh, offering her a smile. Even standing still, she moves. Her voice floats; her hair falls in wild corkscrews around her face. She lifts a hand, brimming–no, spilling–with unbridled enthusiasm.
“Oh, hi,” I say lightly, with deliberate, audible I-can’t-talk-right-now reluctance. Reaching the mailbox, I glance briefly away from her to look inside. “How are you today?” This is a politeness. I love this child, but this afternoon I wish I could love her without work still waiting. I feel as though the last of my energy leaks through the soles of my feet. Much too preoccupied with urgency, I have no intention to linger. But my neighbor, she’s undeterred.
“Good…” She says. The word sizzles with an undercurrent of interest. And then, after merely a pause, she launches: “So, I was wondering, do you know I can throw a stick high enough to hit those leaves?” She gestures toward the tree in our front yard. “Watch. Watch! I can hit those leaves with a stick.” She races toward the tree, glancing back again and again to be sure I actually do watch, jerking a fallen branch from the ground (Had that been there before?). She hurls the stick toward the sky, still talking, only half looking up into the tree. She reminds me of a match, a flame suddenly igniting with friction. I think maybe I am the striking surface. “My brother can throw it higher, but I’m still pretty good at it. See?” Branch flies and leaves rattle and stick falls, forgotten before it reaches the ground. “Oh! Have you seen that flower growing over there?” She points to the bold red Gerbera at the edge of our sidewalk, points while she sprints to the spot. Gently, as though temporarily slowed by memories of her mother’s cautions (Don’t touch!), she presses the tip of an extended finger lightly against one of the petals. “It’s so pretty! Why does it grow here?”
So, I was wondering. From where I stand, I can see the dirt stains on her fingers, a careless smear across her cheek. It seems she has wondered maybe all morning, exploring the boundaries of unwalled spaces. I walk back toward the house, clutching my stack of fake correspondence, all junk–advertisements, mostly–bound for our recycle bin. “Well, I–“
“Ooh! Come here! Do you see that butterfly?” Before I can finish, my neighbor scampers around the side of our house, curls bouncing around her cheeks, bound, I presume, for the butterfly bush. Leaves, broken down into crisp brown bits, cling to the back of her jacket. I imagine her lolling in the grass beneath the trees, reaching skyward with her stick.
She disappears around the corner and I stop a moment at the turn in the sidewalk, weighing time too long. I look at the grass, blowing in the place where she just stood, bubbling with life.
In a flurry, she reappears at the corner of the house, wearing an incredulous–but entirely open—expression. What gives? She lifts her hand, gesturing wildly, beckoning me. “Come on! Come see!” She jerks her arm back toward the corner of the house. “It’s over there!”
I can’t help the grin, remembering a line from Kirk Byron Jones that I had slowly underlined, something about how John Steinbeck defined genius as “a child chasing a butterfly up a mountain (Addicted to Hurry, 109).”
Here, now, in the tired middle of the afternoon, this brilliance manifests right in front of me. Jones calls childhood “the spirit of sustained curiosity,” and Jesus said we should change and become like children (Matthew 18:3), and watching my neighbor chase that lemon-bright butterfly back around the side of the house, I think maybe the blessing of humility is in fact this unsuppressed wonder, this exhilarating acknowledgement of a world much, much bigger than the limits of perspective. My young neighbor lacks the self importance, the hurry, that makes me too busy for moments of awe.
Considering this, I drop the mail on the steps, on my way, chasing God’s transformation. My neighbor, she wheels back around and almost flat into me, beckoning still, urgent, but now in a whisper. “Come! Come!” She says, but now I hear the prophet’s voice: “Look! I am doing something brand new…Do you not see it (Isaiah 43:19, emphasis mine)?”
Around the side of the house, my neighbor and I slow, creeping stealthily, in time with the graceful undulation of the butterfly’s wings, which seem to beam like sunshine. We gasp, mutually stunned by fleeting beauty, captivated by the smell of the grass crushed beneath our feet. My neighbor takes my hand and looks up at me, her expression wide and just as beautifully radiant as those wings, and for a moment, the up-close view, the delicacy of the display, renders both of us speechless. And then, recovering, she asks in a whisper, “Would you like to hold it?”
She asks, clearly ready to show me, the wandering, now wondering woman, how to hold glory in my hands, and I smile, because I think maybe this afternoon, for a little while, I’d forgotten. Slowly I nod, grin spreading wide, because it takes a child to teach me how to become like one again.
