It was beautiful enough to tear up the schedule. The agenda could wait, the sun was claiming us on the balcony, with all around this slightly muddy ground typical of the beginning of spring, when the ground is still struggling to soak up everything that melts on its back. I had picked up the little one a little earlier from kindergarten, in a gesture of gentle rebellion that seemed necessary to me in the face of the months that remained too long before the real vacation. I imagined myself writing my column or my session work sitting outside while she played with the dog, and that I could combine all these women in me, in a form of harmony that would give the answer to the sun.
But it weighed down on my screen, this sun. The parasol was nowhere to be found in the shed. The little one had slipped in the mud as the dog jumped on her, and the big brother had come home from school with a stomach ache. I got impatient, asking for “five minutes without being disturbed” then I ended up crying with discouragement when the “mom, I don’t feel well” had turned into real gastro for the oldest, the third since January.
Mother’s illusions tend to forget that landslides are always within two or three circumstances of happening, the ground of parenthood being just as muddy as that of early spring, with or without sunshine.
But, as the tears of mothers who clean up vomit are never more than little tears leaking from slightly worn shock absorbers, they pass as quickly as they arrived.
Spring continued to shape the world, turning the outdoors into a stage for vast reunions. We had to quickly go and rediscover our green shoots, the forget-me-nots that carpeted the land near the CHSLD, our neighbours, our bikes and all those gestures that winter and the cold had forgotten us, and the layers of snow they had thrown on our impulses.
My country is spring, whatever the poet-monuments say.
A look outside had been enough to bring me back in the “direction of the world”, especially since the window of my kitchen overlooks a wood which, for its part, barely hides my neighbor of the last fifteen years: the CHSLD. Imposing building in its structure as much as in its symbolism, what it contains in its walls always acts in me like a reminder of the time which passes and which escapes us, of the fragility of things and memories which could one day fray of me, just long enough for me to cross the woods, find myself on the other side of the mirror, perhaps looking out of my little window at a house that would remind me of something good.
This neighboring CHSLD inspires us with a thousand and one jokes about a tunnel dug under the woods that would allow us to never leave our house, its memories and its echoes, except to go and receive care on the other side that would not encumber not our children. We laugh so as not to mourn the misery divined behind the small windows that accumulate high up, rising higher than the trees, containing worlds that we imagine made up of loneliness, sadness, confusion and wandering.
We smile sometimes thinking that there is surely also light which enters through these same little windows, the same which calls us outside, the same which goes to our own windows, on our side of the wood, that where we still have so many luxurious minutes that pass for our purposes.
The CHSLD, my neighbor on the left, my little trigger for so many “meditations on time”, always allows me to get out of my micro-dramas as a privileged woman. It brings me back to the vertical of time, in this only possible posture, the one that understands that nothing, absolutely nothing is guaranteed to me. I thank him, him, and his wood, which I only hope never to see transformed into a parking lot.
Once the big one was in bed, hydrated, “gravelled,” we went out without a coat that day, the little one and I, even though it was April—and you know the rest. On the one-way road next to the house, she got back on her little pink bike with no little wheels, the one she couldn’t quite maneuver last fall. Suddenly so tall, skilful, she began to pedal alone without my supporting the bench, deploying her pride in her maintained balance, snatching from early childhood one of her last triumphs.
She was already so big, my little one.
On the one-way road, she was already going far, going in the only possible direction, the one that would also take her in a long, very, very long time, I wished, one day to consider a kind of crossing to the other side. wood.
I was holding back other mother’s tears, those sweeter ones, when my daughter met on her way a lady going in the opposite direction, seated in a wheelchair pushed by a man who had one day also had to triumph over the little girl. childhood on her two-wheeled bicycle under her gaze, her once young mother, worn out because she was a mother, but so young.
It was spring for everyone, for my neighbors on the left too.
Gazing into a mysterious elsewhere, she passed a triumphant little girl on her pink bicycle and smiled at her, as if it reminded her of something good.