Dispatch 05: In the Valley

it's 4:30 in the morning,
i am standing in a hotel room
holding our 3 month old
composing this in my head,
i can feel his breathing,
his pulse quicken & slow:
his body is slowly re-relaxing,
he is going back to sleep
as we sway:
                   right
left              right,
left                         shuffle
(think early-teen slowdance).

earlier, yesterday:
i held our older boys up
into orange & lemon trees
in the backyard of cousins
in the valley we never visit
& there we were picking the perpetual fruit
so used to wasting on the boughs, unwanted,
stubbornly holding on to the branches
so that fruit & stem & leaf come off into their little hands
& into the sack & eventually into the car,
but first we sample the delicate oranges
whose rinds seem so hard but tear so easily:
we let the juice run down out wrists
as we squeeze out the sweetest drinks
(as the sixty year old cousin jokes that
that last time they were picked  it was his wife
who drank one of the trees for breakfast with vodka
& that was years ago).

it would be easiest to make this about the weight of children
as they age, getting heavier & more independent,
but that is not what connects this,
this is about lightness:
the way the heaviness of fruit is tossed away in the rind,
the way the heaviness of discomfort is danced away in sleep
the way the heaviness of parenthood is nestled away in hugs
the way the heaviness of dying is appeased by last visits to beloved aunts who live in valleys so far away from home
& worth all the miles.