I paused at the end of the drive a little more than two weeks ago to take the picture below. I was on my way to a hospital.
My niece had a baby on a Saturday morning, more suddenly and traumatically than we had hoped. I got a call from my sister that her grandson was on the way, like, now, and I packed a waiting room bag and walked out of the house.
At the road, I stopped and hopped out of the car. I didn’t jump the ditch (see the power lines in the upper left corner?) but I did cross the road. I wasn’t even sure why. I had some wild idea that I’d show him what the tree and the sky looked like on the morning he was born, not that he’d care about that for years and years, if ever. It wasn’t until much later that I really looked at the picture, and it was days later that I showed it to his mother.
A lot of things happened pretty fast that morning, and a large percentage of them were kind of scary. Baby boy took a helicopter ride before his grandauntie ever did and hopped the Air Bear express to the children’s hospital. Everybody was happy that the helicopter exists, and nobody was happy he was on it.
Things have settled down. My niece is doing well, and her boy is getting stronger every day. We have all taken in a big breath of good air, even if we haven’t released it quite all the way yet. We’ll do that when they kick him to the curb and he starts keeping his mama up nights.
And man, but it seems like my tree was a prophet that day. I think I was taking a little hope from it even then, before I stopped to think about it what it meant.
The foreground was dark and foreboding that morning. It didn’t look very welcoming.
But, oh baby, look at the light behind.
