The Neighborhood Crazy (2)

As The Neighborhood Crazy (that would be me, see yesterday's post) goes about her (isn't it purely harmless? can you tell me who I'm hurting?) business here, she takes note: Not just of sunsets and tree splits and the blueness of sky set on a sheened slope of ice, but of people deep in the adventure of sheer living.

She has lately seen: A mom and a son in a public park—the boy with the loose line of his fishing pole dipped between ice floes, the mother in a beach chair with a book on her lap, her eyes on her son and not the pages. She's seen a father teaching his four-year-old daughter to play ice hockey, her skates a decorative and dainty pink. She's seen a boy in a plastic dish on a sledding hill, screaming all glory as his father leads him in a skimming down-slope chase. She's seen this boy, above, helping his father up from the frozen face of a pond, both of them laughing too hard to go vertical.

Lived moments—that's what The Crazy's seen. Time spent in the brisk outdoors in another's company, just being.