I was standing on a chair in my living room holding a long thin branch with a piece of thread dangling off one end, attached to which was a pink stuffed dog.
“Ready, set, action!” the boy shouted, then hit record on his tablet and proceeded to hold up a paper for the credits. My name was on there, but I’m pretty sure I never auditioned for any part. I don’t recall agreeing to one either.
The boy then gave a fierce behind-the-scenes finger point to the girl, who moseyed on forward, looking like an actress that doesn’t care much for the director. The stuffed dog at the end of my thread trembled in anticipation for its big moment in front of the camera, but instead there was an exasperated sound from the boy director as he shouted “cut!” He chastised the girl for moving slowly, who then did a full blown hair-tossing indignant stomp off the set. So the stuffed dog took a nap and I went back to the garden.
The humidity was snuggling around me, all lovey-dovey. Despite the sweat trailing down my throat, I felt content in its embrace. Dark clouds shifted overhead, undecided if they were simply smeary grey clouds or heavy ones close to bursting a seam. In the distance, somewhere off toward the horizon, was the rumble of thunder. I wished I could inhale that thunder, or drink it, or somehow absorb it through the ground with my fingertips. Thunder just makes summer.
There are cicadas, crickets, a million dollarweed pushing up through the sand that my fingers had nestled into, and the humidity, and the smell of summer rain. There are the dramatic sunsets too, but none make summer like the sound of thunder.
I felt the thunder roll through me the nights prior, late after everyone else had gone to sleep. Maybe I had inhaled some of it. It came out of my fingers and into the paintbrush. Summer nights maybe are for painting thunder. Someone on my local Buy Nothing Project was giving away a mirror frame with no mirror. Nobody else wanted it, but I decided it would become a window on my porch to the beach within. And so I painted it.
I’m no great fancy painter, but summer nights call for painting, and the thunder needed a release.
The Before:
And Then The After:
I tossed a glance at the window to the ocean on my way back up the porch. In the kitchen I scrubbed all the dirt out of the lines in my hands that were like tiny mazes. Bacteria were invisibly wandering the gorges of my fingerprints and crevices. The cake had cooled and the children were assembling themselves at the table in preparation for the assembly of the cake. Fingers lightning fast were dipped into the frosting bowl, which I envied somewhat—touching that silky soft pillow of cream cheese icing with bare skin must be a pleasure.
“How many hummingbirds went into this cake?” the boy asked devilishly.
I pondered for a moment.
“Fifteen.”
“You said fourteen earlier.”
“One was a conjoined twin,” my husband said as he entered the room.
“Those things in it that look like nuts—those are actually the bones,” the boy said to the girl.
“Why is it called a hummingbird cake?” She asked sweetly.
“I don’t know…maybe because it isn’t just one thing…it has bananas and pineapple—”
“She is skirting the facts,” my husband said in passing, “it has 14 hummingbirds in it.”
“You mean fifteen,” the boy said.
I finished slapping the frosting on there, with a quick attempt at the frosting version of frills. It was decided that it didn’t make sense to save it for Father’s Day, or Papa’s Day in this case, because there would be enough to eat it then too.
We sat at the table eating cake and debating how it was that the hummingbirds were caught, and telling the boy, who dropped a piece, not to try to make it fly. The girl looked down at my plott hound, who has soft brown eyes on a velveteen face, and let her lick the frosting off her cheeks.
“Oh I love her so much. I wish I could tell her I love her and that she would understand,” the girl said between licks.
“She doesn’t need words to know. When you pet her, and look at her lovingly, and speak gently to her, she knows.”
And that also applies to the thunder, summer, hummingbird cakes, and my family. It especially applies to a thundering summer night making a hummingbird cake with my family. I love all of those things.