your house down

I went for a lovely walk in Prospect Park today with a friend who worked in Kenya for the organization that I worked for in Rwanda. She worked for them much longer than I did, but we overlapped for about a year and a half, so we attended some lovely team meetings and retreats together. And today we wandered through the park with her daughter in a stroller and baby T in a snuggly. Both of the kids fell asleep, T with his little mouth open and drooling onto the front of my t-shirt. We walked though woods and open fields, talking about Dutchness and politics and charity. We got lost and met another lost man and all three (five) of us wandered back along the paths we had just seen until we found a red sign directing us. As we followed red sign to red sign, hoping for our side of the park, the sky turned dark and the wind kicked up blossoms and leaves and dust until I had to squint through the yellow air. “It looks like tornado weather!” we yelled at one another over the wind. “Do they have tornados in New York?” (Apparently yes, according to the news tonight.) Swirls of sand rose from the baseball diamonds. The kids woke up and were miserable in the gusts. We were almost to the edge of the park, although not where we needed to be, when the rain came. My friend gave me the plastic cover from the stroller and gave her daughter E a blanket to use as shelter instead of the plastic cover and we all ran for a restaurant. I held the plastic cover over T’s head as I ran, trying not to suffocate him, while he calmly tried to eat it from the inside.

We waited out the rain in a restaurant, T mauling bits of pasta and then dropping them on the floor so the area under our table looked like it had been through a food fight, E drawing on a placemat, until it became clear that the rain wasn’t going to be out-waited. I descended into a subway station with T and the soaked hoards while the other two walked home. When I got home, I looked in the mirror to see tiny flecks of dust all over my face. And my scalp feels like I spent a day dumping sand on it at the beach. I am all-over grimy.

Life is so great when it's not boring.