Water's Ways
I found myself this afternoon. Amidst the aisles of one of Americana’s meccas with my husband and daughter I was busy alongside everyone else’s business. We discovered all the goods we hadn’t realised we absolutely needed until that moment. Before the opiate haze of consumerism crashed up against my soul, I stumbled outside into the blazing sunlight and gasped. I inhaled the free air and suddenly wondered when there would be a price tag attached.
I don’t know if it’s because daylight savings arrived a week ago or simply because we’re coming towards the end of a supremely busy month but time seems to have been operating at a distorted speed this week. I have felt behind; out of step with every link on the chain of events despite moving myself along at a breakneck pace.
Slipping away to my beloved fountain I breathed more nonchalantly. Solitude crept up next to me and took me by the hand. We sat on a bench and simply gazed. The afternoon’s sunlight and breezes worked their magic. Light and shadow played hide and seek across the tree tops and a leaf or two skedaddled along the path. The voices of restaurant- goers across the way held a muted conversation.
The Sunday afternoon fountain is very different from the one my daughter and I visit when we are engaged in peripatetic learning at the start of our school day. And yet it is one and the same. A spot crucial to the landscape of our daily existence but unremarkable to the naked eye. One needs to sit and stay a while to learn every quiet facet of this place. Whether in the brisk sun of an early morning, with concentration harnessed to the chanting of multiplication tables, or in the lazy expansiveness of a Sunday, where all that is required is an open heart and time, the fountain has become one of our indispensable elements.
As afternoon disappeared through the shadows of the arriving evening I sat outside on our patio. I listened to the burbling garden fountain which my husband, knowing my love of flowing water, installed a couple of months ago. The sound of water has been of great importance to me ever since we moved to the States. Exactly why this is I couldn’t say. But as the dog nosed around behind me in the plant pots and my son washed dishes through the open kitchen window, the water gurgled on and time’s steps made sense once more.
