Unreachable

The South is a land of near horizons. Everything sits in the foreground. Trees, rivers, buildings, and people are always in sight. More of the same lies behind, but you can’t see it from here. So distance is skewed; places merely out of sight seem very far away.

Southern heat compounds the phenomenon. Our sun seems closer to Earth. Hot air touches your face and reaches into your clothes at every crossing between air conditioned corridors.

In a heat wave as we’ve been having, we spend our days indoors and too much time together. By midsummer each year the charming closeness of Southern life begins to grate.

But around noon, yesterday, the bottom edge of a passing front reached Baton Rouge to temporarily drop the humidity and whip up a breeze. It was a little taste of April, complete with wispy white clouds and the pale green backs of leaves turning against the wind. The kids and I broke out of the house after dinner to celebrate with a ride to the park.

I packed two canned lemonades, some plastic cups, a book and my wristwatch into the panniers on my bike. The girls threw on their shoes and helmets and rushed to the edge of the driveway to wait for me, kicking at the ground, as I gathered my things.

We found the park filled with engine noise. Eight young teens on four off-road vehicles spun donuts and leaped the creek bed in rapid single file. They raced a circuit around the several-acre wooded park, carrying the sound of their fun with them. Foul mouthed boys at full holler. My girls stuck close, dragging their feet in the playground sand and following the boys with their eyes and ears until their last decibel disappeared into the neighborhood.

“Can we check on the Fairy Home now?”

This is something I haven’t seen, a thing they discovered on a past visit—it’s a little hole in the base of a tree, near a bush, by a big log. It was their first secret place I never saw.

I told them to go ahead but to keep me in view. As they crossed the creek bed and passed the first line of trees, my girls grew smaller in my sight. They passed together into patches of sunlight and into shadows and finally vanished.

Our little neighborhood park grew suddenly huge. It was panoramic, an IMAX experience full of color and movement, too big to take in without turning your head. After five minutes, feeling silly, I stood up.

There, running. Two tiny figures sprinted across impossibly small distances beneath the oaks at the far border of the property. They made no sound but were probably laughing and hurling ultimatums at one another. Together they ran a third of the park’s circumference, about half a mile, before slowing to a walk. The sound of their voices reached me then, unintelligible but discernable from the calling crows and the whistling kites. They came back in to say the Fairy Home was gone.

My girls are mostly faces to me, I keep them so close. I direct them into their seats for dinner with a hand on their shoulders. We meet eyes across tables or board games or the living room sofa. But they have legs too and have learned how to use them. They’re good runners now, and for a while in the rare vastness of our little park they were unreachable.