Earth Day

It was Earth Day. As far as I could tell, the universe did not seem to care one way or the other and I was at best an insignificant part of it all. Still, the sky had dawned a brilliant blue – the early chill quickly warming. I walked along Rhode Island Street towards the river to participate in an organized trash cleanup event. I supposed that on such a bright day that anything might be possible – but only in theory. Reality is only what actually is.

Half way to the river, I saw what looked to be an animal – maybe a cat – ahead about a half-a-block on the sidewalk. As I approached, the animal became instead a full grown opossum. I walked carefully nearly close enough to touch the opossum, but it paid no attention to me whatsoever. It was stepping out an extremely slow dance in a very small circle, circling ever inward around itself at the edge of the concrete – one dragging half step and then a long pause and then again a half step and a pause.

Eventually, I bent down on one knee. The opossum’s mouth gaped open near the ground – sharp teeth exposed. It looked like there was blood on its lips. Sounds of pain and struggle came from deep within, but only just audibly enough for me to hear.

The opossum seemed to me to be so completely alone – dying perhaps. Its life – whatever that life had been - was about to be over forever however beautiful the day. The opossum was apparently passing before me in some anguish.

In those few moments the universe became just me and the opossum – the air that we breathed into our lungs and the earth holding our bodies up was all. I said, out loud, ‘I’m sorry.’ I wondered what I could possibly mean by those words and then I repeated them again. I carefully reached out my arm and touched the back of the opossum with my hand. To me, that’s opossum’s fur felt so very unexpectedly soft.

And then I walked on.

This apparent ending was only the beginning of Earth Day, after all.

Bags of trash were picked up. There was a boat and people fishing in the low, yellow sunlight on the river. A white pelican flew high overhead flying south by southeast as I later reached the bridge. Mass Street took my walk due south to a coffee shop where I tried to make the baristas laugh with some silliness of mine. Suddenly, I so easily felt my own life within me.

Then I stepped back out to the sidewalk for the Earth Day parade. A young girl scout handed me a plastic packet of daisy seeds as she walked by.

Everywhere I looked, in sunshine and shade, I saw beautiful people on Earth Day. A fat young woman walking in cut off jean shorts that were riding unevenly up her heavy thighs. A thin man in a grey beard and glasses resting on his nose riding a bicycle with gigantic tires. A mother with her breasts freckling above the V of her dress walked by with her child.

It continued like that all day long. South Park filled with people and awnings. Kids scrunched their eyes shut, getting their faces airbrushed into tigers and zebras. Kids soaked themselves to the skin playing around the Roosevelt Fountain. Grownups talked about solar and recycling. Music played from the gazebo. Yoga in the grass.

And nearing home, a boy riding his first bicycle called out to me from under his bright blue helmet – except for the visor, it was just like the kind his dad wears when he rides his motor cycle. And then two neighbor girls stopped in at my house to see roughly ten thousand tadpoles in my garden pond.

And by evening, with the trees to the west leafing out and sun dappling through, my wife and I ate papaya salad out on the patio.

And finally then, near midnight, I stepped outside once more just to look around. Over the neighbor’s roof, the yellow moon, waning, shone through a hazy sky. And still when I turned, I could see my moon shadow against the dark grass and a budding peony bush.

What more should I say? The sky had not been cloudy all day. But I imagined that the opossum had died on Earth Day.