Swings

The weather has been cool and gray the last couple of days. While this is weather that I generally appreciate, and will probably be begging for come late September in Los Angeles, I came to Minnesota in July hoping for some heat, some humidity, and, most especially, some thunderstorms. If you are from the Midwest, you will remember summer evenings and the power and show of a summer storm, the drama of the darkening sky, the smell of rain in the air, the stillness just before the skies unleash their fury. I’d like a little weather drama, please. Los Angeles provides nothing so exciting (in terms of weather).

This evening, Aaron and Zoe and I took a walk around my parent’s neighborhood, after Haven had gone to bed, after we finished watching a movie and yet still before the sun set. I forgot how long the summer nights are here, how it takes seemingly forever for the sun to slide down the sky and how it seems to do so with such quiet flourish here on the plains. We walked in the cool and quiet of the evening, listening to the junior high kids playing around at the park, watching the younger kids bike, with training wheels, down the street yelling that they’d just seen a cat (I know, so exotic), smelling a backyard bonfire, walking past a little backyard palm-tree-themed celebration. The evening light dimmed with each turn we took through the neighborhood and when we passed by the park on the way home I noticed the last flames of magenta the sun was shooting out in the northwest sky. We stopped at the park and took a spin on the swings, Zoe whining at us to give her a turn too. My hips don’t fit in the swing as well as they once did, but it still felt good to swing, to fly in the cool stillness of the evening.

We walked the long block home after that, with my mother slowing down and waving a cheesy hello as she drove by (on her way home from the grocery store – she had to get bread as Zoe helped herself to a loaf when we were gone yesterday. Rookie mistake). The front yard trees on my street have all grown up and our neighborhood looks older. It’s not changed much, for better or for worse. Perhaps for worse. I spend the walk wondering what it would be like to live here, now, in my 30’s with a family. I don’t know.

I’ve been asked a couple times this week what I miss about Minnesota when I’m not here. Evenings like this make the list.