A little sprinkling of something magical

It occurred to me last week, while I was dog-sitting my dog (don't ask) because my grandmother left town for the weekend, that I'm grateful for the life experiences I've had, good and bad and bland and everything in between. I was sitting in the backyard, looking out at the 10 freeway and downtown as the sun was setting and casting an orange-tinged light on everything around me, and the trees were swaying rhythmically in a barely-there breeze and I just felt it, that thing, that quality, that has always infused my grandmother's house (and her yard in particular, with its breath-taking view of grassy hills, congested freeways, and downtown buildings set against a backdrop of orange and blue and purple and pink sky, all rolled into one chaotic but somehow serene picture of urban life)--it's magic, it's godliness, it's all the love my grandparents poured into us, their spoiled, eye-rolling grandchildren, and it does something to me inside so that the years fall away and I'm just me, ageles and timeless and bodiless even, filled to the brim with a sense of wonder and peace so profound my heart wants to explode and all I can do is feel and cry, cry and feel some more. As I sat there, letting this feeling roll over me in waves, I thought suddenly of my childhood, of all those summer evenings when Emily and I ran and played and ate Ninja Turtle popsicles in that very yard. That's what I remember most, you see. That's what sticks with me, what dances tantalizingly at the edge of my mind even when I feel like who I was then and who I am now are irreconcilable--that's what reminds me that even in my darkest, meannest, most broken hours/days/years I DID believe in goodness once and can do so once again. Innocence. Purity. Happiness. Acceptance. Love, abundant, unrestrained, shameless love. Those are the things that I remember when I stare out at the horizon and recall what it was like for me growing up. And I reach this conclusion: If I've known pain or heartache, even if they were dispensed in quantities no six or seven year old child should ever have to bear, I've also known love. Sacrificial love, unconditional love, the kind of love that has your grandmother walking up and down a hill three times a day to take you to and pick you up from school, that has her spending the remaining part of the day in the kitchen, cooking food you'll later turn your nose up at because you'd rather just drink Capri Sun until your dad comes home from work because he promised to take you to Hot Wings and you are SO excited (he calls later that day and tells you he has to work late [again], so Hot Wings will have to wait). I know what it's like to smile with my whole heart because my cousin is here and OMG, I think we're going to the park, and maybe the grown-ups will take us to Sizzler after so Emily and I can chow down on an odd assortment of dinosaur chicken nuggets, fruit loops, and garlic bread. All that, it's mine. The home videos belong to my grandmother (and she guards them with her life), but the memories, the hope it still inspires in my heart, are MINE. And I can't complain. I can't complain because I was allowed to be ME (such an elusive concept these days), to prance around in plastic heels at the park, to wear the most hideous clothes imaginable partly because I liked pink and so wanted every item on my body to be some variation of that hue but mostly because words like "pride" and "vanity" didn't exist in my vocabulary then. I can't complain. So I inhale deeply and close my eyes and allow myself to see the ghosts--the imprints me and Emily and Shearelyn and Tia Honey and Uncle Franky left in that yard, left in the deepest, most sheltered recesses of my heart--and I want to laugh out loud because so much time has passed and so much has changed but sitting here, mesmerized by a world awash in orange, nothing has changed at all and my desires are no more complicated or sinister than wanting Emily to come over so we can race around the parking lot in our roller blades. Love. It never changes. Maybe our teenage years got the best of us, maybe that cousin and I no longer speak because vanity and insecuriy got in the way, maybe I know now that even home-made Albondiga soup and weekly trips to Hot Wings can't and don't make the world the haven I once thought it was--but her love, their love, my love, OUR love, remain. I love them (those ghosts) for who they were, and I love them (those flesh-and-bone people who sometimes drive me crazy or say the wrong things or frustrate me to the point of tears) for who they are, for what they've brought to my life, for the magic they sprinkled on my tongue so that even now, at 22, I can taste fragments of it on a day like that day, when I sat in my grandmother's back yard, watching the trees and the hills and the cars on the freeway and the buildings that reach toward something in the sky that none of us can see.