the longest hug

We had warm weather on Thursday. Though the morning was rainy, the skies cleared up nicely by the afternoon. So, we invited neighbors to join us in the front yard for a visit in the early evening. In the early months of the pandemic, I sorely missed these weekly visits we’ve had with them the past few years. Finally, at some point this summer, we figured out there was a way to rearrange the seating circle so as to visit from a safe physical distance. Folks bring their own drinks and seating and…we just talk…and laugh.

That’s it. It’s so refreshingly simple but so crucially important in these times when it seems the world is tearing apart at the seams.

As we sat down on Thursday, the atmosphere was like clean glass. The half moon was crisp, bright and captivating, with two flecks of light positioned nearby…to the moon’s eleven and two o’clock. They look like stars, we noted, but they are actually planets.

We talked about the new tree the city planted in the parkway across the street the day before: a maple. The baby tree only has a few leaves left on it at this point in the season, but they change into such lovely red and orange tones. Like the tree in front of my family’s house, when the sun catches the leaves just right in the autumn, the leaves are actually translucent, no kidding. The effect is so beautiful that it’s not really possible to capture it with a camera, one neighbor noted—and she has tried.

As the evening wore on, we spoke of gun violence in the neighborhood and our city council representative. We planned how we would cooperate to host a short Halloween visit for the kids on the street—again, keeping public health at the forefront of those plans. The conversation seemed to happen in shifts, as a couple neighbors went back inside at a certain point, while a couple more neighbors ventured out not long after. And somewhere in there, two neighbors shared the kind of news that prompted sounds of delight, applause and laughter.

Earlier that evening, as we were sitting there straining our eyes to see each other’s faces in the growing darkness of the night, someone said it looked like the small slice of ground between our two properties was moving. They looked more closely to discover several earthworms had surfaced, relishing the moistened dirt from the rainfall earlier in the day.

So that we all could see more clearly, they illuminated the ground with the flashlight from their cell phones. We craned our necks and squinted our eyes to catch a glimpse, getting a little closer but still trying to be safe. We pointed and someone decided to touch one of them. In a flash the worm went back into its burrow.

“Wow! Look at that!”

He did it a few more times so others could see, and we all were amazed. If someone had walked by at that moment, they would have seen a funny bunch of old adults acting like children, marveling at the way worms squirm. In the midst of it, someone noted that with everything going on in the world right now, it’s amazing how nature just continues doing what she has always done. What a comfort that is.

As we packed it in for the evening, my heart was full. Somewhere between the heavens above and the earth below my soul had just been warmed by the longest hug.

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the longest hug

reflections by troy cady

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*Photo by Mesh via Unsplash. Creative Commons License.