Gas Station and Black Walnut
By: Daniel Cherniske
Tags: Baby, Writing, Love, Nature, Poetry

Gas Station:

I held you as the mid day sun shown down upon us, the springtime heat causing rivulets of water to fall from the flat roof alight with logos and loud colors, which covers the pump stations. I am bouncing and rocking you as you wail, your innate intelligence sending red alert messages throughout your body as you felt your mother’s electromagnetic field move further and further away, as she got out of our car, adorned her black mask, and entered the gas station to use the bathroom.

I am holding you in a gas station parking lot, trying not to smile too wide as your wimpers and wails leave me in utter love, the cuteness too much, the communication and personality clearer with each passing day. This is the same gas station we stopped the day before you were born, 10 days before our estimated due date. The gas we bought at that station, across the street from an old barn with grey wooden lap siding and an old white church, easily 150 years old, propelled us through space as your mother breathed through the quickening contractions as I drove us home through the dark fog, rain battering the windshield, my body never more alert and engaged yet calm and steadfast. Magic.

I smell diesel fume and bad coffee, pizza and cigarettes, evaporating water on concrete. I hear the splash and play of water falling from the flat logo covered roof and hitting the hood of a white van while its driver stairs down at his phone, pump in hand. A sweet man I sense.

I am alive in this sacred moment, holding you my son, feeling the sweetness of life, the magic within the mundane, the depth of story and soul saturated in each seemingly godforsaken American landscape.

You’ve stopped crying now, your eyes shut tight as your two month old skin experiences the strongest sun yet, the strange smells working their way into your infant olfactory system, for better or worse. I wanted to steal you from this world, to buy a hundred acres in the middle of nowhere and grow, hunt, create, generate, make everything we needed…. To judge and watch the world burn while we sat atop a false vantage point, lonely and isolated, sick with separation and aching to eat ice cream with neighbors in the summertime. Your mother and I chose a different path for our family, a middle ground, a third way. Urban homestead.

~

The following day or so…

~

Black Walnut

66 degrees.

We sit in our small urban backyard, snow piles still melting in the shady areas. You are out in the world, a world alight and alive with the chorusses of returning birds, the constant surge of the freeway, the reggaeton music being projected so loudly from the passing car windows, offerings of tropical rhythm and ecstatic dance hall nights, bodies held close. The pulsing rhythm and liberated vocals dripping with romance and passion transports me back to Panama, where your mother and I lived while our souls and bodies, ancestry and genetic material danced and dove together, lighting lanterns in the realms where you existed, calling you to this place, this family. You’ve been with us a long time now.

The black walnut trees in our backyard are pulling life-force and sugar, spirit and matter from down below our feet up into the sun. I feel it. The trees hear the birds, the loud and proud red cardinal singing ever so loudly atop one of their branches. They feel the sun, the lengthening days, the warming soils. They remember the laughter of children and the aroma of summertime barbecues. Their buds are just swelling, light green and brown, fuzzy and full.

At this moment in time dear Leo, you are nursing while being bathed in the song of cardinals, flickers, seagulls, and so many more winged kin who I do not know but adore. The crows have come now, flying low against the blue and white sky. I feel amongst family for we are.

I am choosing to celebrate this moment, to cherish the vulnerable and sacred frugalness of your age, to feel at home in this new and loud place, to listen to the birds and be bathed in wildness and the resilience of nature, our nature.

I choose to celebrate the roaring of engines and the shouting of neighbors and feel at home within the human family at this tender and auspicious time.

For we are one family.