The how and the why of us.

We've been marking time in leaves. An awareness of the seasons, the tiniest changes that mark new weather, new life, has become something I know intimately, a tender, secret mark in the marrow of my bones. It's that way for all of us, I know. It's been stitched into the fabric of our family. It's how we've come to know ourselves.

It's strange to think of it, but the park has become almost a silent member of our family. It's our touchstone, the thing that draws us together every day, as nourishing as a family dinner every Sunday. It's the comfort of bowed heads and prayers, hand holding and snuggles.

My oldest daughter discovered her love of snakes here. She uncovered the strangest bugs and snared toads. She's named her favorite trees and come to know the paths as well as she knows herself. It's where she first began testing out her limbs, the strength of her muscles. Running down sidewalks, climbing small walls, jumping with abandon.

My youngest has followed in her big sister's footsteps, spotting skinks and cooing over copperheads slithering across the path in front of us. She's fallen and scraped her knees and we've celebrated it, the essential childhood markers of scabbed knees that come from exploring your world to the fullest, the healing that comes from picking yourself up and moving on again. It's a challenge and a blessing for her, a life lesson in every single moment. She gets stuck on the smallest details, the tiny grasshoppers and the snails--and the bigger details, too. The largeness of her big sister. The wild calling of the world.

Together we've learned the value of getting lost in a moment, of escaping the everyday. We've become us, the complicated tangle that we are. It always seems to get smoothed out on the trail. Where together we can just be.

This year has been more special somehow, watching the floods take over our park and recede again. The landscape has changed, and we're relearning the paths and the magic of it all. In the heat of summer we're already thinking of fall, ready to feel the cooler wind. Ready to watch the leaves change. Ready to see how we change with them. Again and again.

A time lapse of helplessness and grit.

"It's the crookedest, jumbliest little house. But it's happy, now, and so am I. It's been worth the exercise, worth the filth, as change always is, no matter how sore or how broke you are the next day. It's a time lapse of a helplessness and grit, turns of growing up and growing softer until you land somewhere in the middle, safe and sufficient."

(From here.)

We've got another thing coming undone.

I can hear the sound of destruction, a large cracking as trees are wrenched from the banks and pulled into the swollen river. I can watch my little forest nymphs running along the sidewalk, hair spangled with storm remnants, wet and shining in the green and gray around them. I can pause at sidewalks made impassible from makeshift rivers and transient waterfalls. Water has a way of claiming the season. Of claiming everything, really: bridges and fields, skies, insects, me. I have lost myself to this endless rainy season, traipsing through the woods every evening, chasing impossibilities: forever and on and forever.

Here they are barefooted and nimble, squishing through mud with abandon. Here are the ants seeking higher ground for their homes, holding little white eggs aloft. Here is a giant wolf spider drying itself off on a low part of the bridge. Minutes later that part is under water. The spider's inched just a bit higher.

Everything is washed out of hiding: toads and frogs and tiny pink worms. Everything is washed out of hiding: me. I have lost myself to escaping the four walls of my life, the trapped confines of my life. I have given myself to a world bursting at the seams.

The trees have burst into fragrant white blooms. The children are tired. Dark is falling fast and the fireflies are rising up and out. Let's go a little further, one says. Let's go home, says the other.

I want to say: Let's never ever go home. But the lightning is cracking and thunder is shaking everything. It's one long deep breath back. My chest is full-to-bursting with the long walk, a rattling that sounds like trees crashing down, rending the air into pieces. I'll let it out tomorrow when I have another chance at the wet, ruined world.

(Title comes from "Runaway" by The National.)