It rained today as Emma and I walked to school. It had started in the night, great gusts of wind and rain hammering at the windows in my bedroom under the eaves. Emma, as used to be the case when David traveled more, slept with me. It had been months since she’d joined me. Her long legs migrated to my side of the mattress and her heat woke me before the rain. Only a few inches shorter than I am, Emma had suddenly taken over not just my bed but my body, in a way. She sprawled, jack-knifed, splayed and scrambled in her dreams until I had to shove her away. I lay in the dark listening to the storm pass through Cambridge and (after the obligatory dead of night stumble to the bathroom) thought about what I’d do the next day if the rain continued.
As it was, both of us found the damp, oppressive humidity and fat raindrops oddly invigorating, familiar and exciting at once. After all, how many wet days had we slogged through in London? We set off under the giant Wimbledon tennis umbrella, its purple and green stripes cheery under the trees. I felt snapped back to London and a wave of homesickness overtook me. Emma, for her part, didn’t notice, too busy keeping her backpack dry to see that my face had assumed an aspect way less cheery than the umbrella. “Remind me to give you your lunch box,” I said. I’d slung it over my shoulder so I could hold the umbrella.
We passed under a chestnut tree. Littered beneath it were the fruits of a long hot summer. Chestnuts rolled along the gutter, some smashed into pale yellow pulp, a few round and perfect. I stopped to pick one up. “Look,” I said to Emma handing her the shiny brown nut. “A conker.” Conkers are a prize in London, all rich brown and swirled with the grain of the chestnut wood itself. She took it and looked appraisingly at the color and shape. “Not a keeper,” Emma decided and tossed it into the road. Oh, I thought, no, give it here, I’ll keep it, I need it. But I didn’t say anything.
We crossed Brattle Street with the help of the crossing guard. In England we called them lollipop ladies after the paddle each held up as children trotted past them. Here, we greeted her and waited as she held her hand up, white gloved and seemingly too small to make anyone stop. But they did, and a good thing, too because in some kind of Pavlovian hiccup I looked the wrong way for traffic. “You’re such a doofus,” Emma said.
I left her at the school gates and took a different route home. Walking the neighborhood is something I always do, it’s the only way I can settle myself into a new place. So as I rounded Longfellow House I was confident that I hadn’t gotten lost after all. I’d been here before on the way back from Harvard Square the day I found my pool. Yes, the first thing I did when I could make my way through the boxes was find my pool. Anyway, on this rainy morning my feet crunched through fallen acorns under the mighty oaks that march along the road. I looked down and saw that literally hundreds of acorns were scattered on the footpath. Some were whole, their little caps jaunty as my umbrella. But many had separated and the caps were rolling around on their own. I picked one up and remembered how we’d called them “fairy cups” when the boys were little and we wandered through Kensington Gardens, even in the rain. Again, London pulled me home, or at least back. Nothing Proustian about it, I was getting whiplash. Am I here or there? Have I really settled or is our mad dash back to the Cape every Friday just another way for me to hold on to the illusion that this is all temporary?
No, I am here. I have my pool, the smell of chlorine already sharp on my skin. I have my farmer’s market, not quite Portobello Road but satisfying all the same. I have my shopping trolley, a colorful affair that has (three times!) caused drivers to slow down and eye me curiously. Mostly, I guess, I have Emma. She is very much here and I must be with her. Still, the smell of the rain, the Autumn Clematis, the roll of heavy clouds, the slow tap, tap as the last drops fall from the trees, these are things that are very much thereto me. When I got to our door I slipped my purse off my shoulder and found that it was Emma’s lunch box. I guess I’ll just have to go back.