Five-Sense Friday

I've been hungry today to pick up this old habit again.  It's been too long.  So here we have it: Five senses, paragraph form.

Today as my feet walked the familiar pavement between home and the coffee shop where I write, I marveled at the beauty of the fall colors again.  We've been living it up this week under the impending doom of the forecast arrival of rain that will continue unending into the foreseeable future.  Enjoying the leaves while they are still crisp and dry and not yet a sludge underfoot has been my particular enjoyment.  What caught my eye this morning was the sheer diversity of color that each tree sheds to the sidewalk.  I tend to think of Maple trees as having red fall leaves and Oaks, yellow, and so on, but when I looked down I didn't see just one uniform color, but whole coordinating color families--yellow, orange, brown, or red, orange, yellow--every leaf a slight variation on the others, perfectly unique in it's color.  And lovely.

I ordered a decaf coffee and a plate of bread with Brie and jam, and claimed my seat at the long communal table.  The coffee, light and sweet, was just right, and I read the arts section of a newspaper left by someone before me, to put off my work while I ate.  Brie and jam is a rather hands-on affair.  Then I finally pulled out my computer and began the hard physical work of altering the 300 page digital copy of my book so that the narrative passages are now in chronological order instead of the (rather unsuccessful and choppy) essay-themed chapters they used to comprise.  After two hours, my exhausted body felt as though I had just done 8 hours of manual labor.  The baby kicked in tiny flutters against my waistband as I bent to pack my bag and stood to stretch my legs toward home.

The rain came this afternoon, cold against our skin and frizzling my hair as I pushed Lucy's swing at the playground.  I thought surely the rain on her face would make her cold and she would want to stop, but she could swing forever.  Her hair had curled into wild little ringlets before I put her hood up; another little girl's pigtails looked wet from the misty rain.  As she rode back and forth in the swing Lu commentated the movements of each of the park's inhabitants in her tiny voice with sentences unencumbered by grammar.  "They swingin in the blue swings, Mommy, they swingin.  That girl fall down.  She cwied and cwied."

She wore child's size 10 shoes today, which I had stored away until I realized this morning that they were no longer too big for her to wear.  And they are PINK and SPARKLY and lights flash when she jumps or dances, all of which translates to her absolute delight.  But looking across the park at her, I saw a little puppy just growing into her big feet.  The chubby face sticking out from underneath the rain hood was still my baby, though.  Can't believe how much she's growing every day. 

The rain released its earthy smell on our walk home, and the grass let out the electric green light that brings a certain luminescence to the long grey winters here in Vancouver.  I mused about how I would capture this in words for you and why I would bother.

I like to pay attention to these daily senses, in hopes that if I pay close enough attention to the details of this beautiful world, I'll be able to learn something about the beauty of the world to come.  Of course, the mystical links between this world and the next are hard to capture, but I think it's working.  I really do think it's working.