Waking Up

I slept on the couch last night and this morning I woke up to a breeze drifting in throught the living room window and the quiet that sometimes suprises my Queens neighborhood. That combination of the breeze and the quiet somehow took me back in time to the mornings from my childhood that I would wake up in the daybed on the screened-in porch of my great-grandparents' house. Even though I knew I wasn't actually back there, I did not allow myself to open my eyes to see the sight of my own apartment over a decade later. Instead, I kept them shut tight and let myself be transported. In no time at all, I could hear the tv replaying the scores of the previous day's baseball games for my great-granddaddy. I could smell the coffee, eggs, bacon, and biscuits in the kitchen and hear the gentle murmur of my grandmother and great-grandmother talking. I could see the sunlight pouring into the three screened-walls of the porch, stretching across the acres of flat farmland.

Don't be confused, I'm not feeling sentimental this morning. I'm feeling fortunate. I'm up now, with my present-day sprawling all around me: books and folders for class, yesterday's newspaper still mostly unread, my bag packed for today's soccer game, my friend who stayed over last night sound asleep in my room, and the city blocks spreading into the distance that I can't see through the buildings cluttering the view. And for a few moments this morning, I got to live in both worlds. I'll probably never go back to my great-granddaddy's farm since he died several years ago and my great-grandmother moved to Florida. But at least today I got to visit.