Prayer Flag Charlotte

Matthews

— Kahlil Gibran

It’sMay, warm and so bright it almost hurts. Spring can tear at your heart, take you back to when you were five and knew less, back to when it all had a radiance. Just home from first year of college, Garland’s left a heavy-duty leaf bag filled with clothes on his bedroom floor.

Even though my rational side knows I shouldn’t, I choose to regard it as a kind of gift, a mission, something I can do that will reconnect the two of us, take us back to wiffle ball afternoons. I drag the bag to the basemen—plop plop, plop plop—and sort by color. I start the first load and press my ear to the washer’s drum as months of dorm life churn into the warm water. It’s dank down there, barely enough room to stand up, the metal ductwork, innards of the house, suspended like gargoyles inches from my head. This is when it dawns on me that his leaving, his coming home, the sheer fact of this manchild of mine, the whole way time spun forward, is outlandish. He is more alive now than I’ll ever be again. There’s really no comparison for it, nothing like it.

The clothesline’s beside the field where afternoons we practiced for the years he was in Little League. I’d throw wiffle balls while he taught me the moves to the game. It was where I learned the most about his life. That the woman who always wore a whistle around her neck at school was not the gym teacher. That the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz really did have a brain. That he was going to catch the biggest fish ever known to man.

I hang the clothes on the line, pinning both sides of each shirt, the cuffs of his pants, the waist of his shorts. I step back and admire the prayer flag resplendent in the May sun: green, grey, red, blue. Earth, air, fire, water. Some of his clothes are even the color of fishing lures, brighter than bright. They wave, not a promissory note, but a confirmation: Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.