He smiled and waved as she ran past, and it was the wave and that look straight into her eyes that startled her. She'd lived in the city long enough now to know that for every tale of unfriendly New Yorkers, there was someone with a smile or word to a stranger. Not to mention a man with a wink and a catcall. She had an open, innocent face, and looked even younger than her 22 years. She figured she'd be forty before bouncers stopped asking to see her ID. The familiarity of his wave made her leave her eyes a moment longer on his face: he was an older man, in his sixties, she guessed, or early seventies, though she could not judge age very well in someone so much older than herself. His hair was white and dark gray, his features strong but softened by time. He sat on a bench beside the path, facing the stream of runners and walkers circling the Reservoir on this bright spring Sunday. He wore a blue and yellow jogging suit, a white t-shirt. She felt certain she had never seen him before, yet that look, that wave: did he know her?

This was her first run of the year, though she had walked in the park many winter afternoons, as the streetlamps began to glow blue and white in the early evening shadows. She knew he'd never seen her running here before; it was her first time all the way around the Reservoir. She had a regular walking route down the west side of the park, along one side of the Reservoir to the first of the benches, then back along a tree-shaded path, where she kicked at liquid amber pods and thought about California. Past a little pond, where she watched the ice wax and wane with the cold nights and slowly warming afternoons. Now the birds owned the water, gem-green mallard drakes and their speckled brown mates, Canada geese, some white ducks she could not identify. Up a stone staircase or the path curving past it. She looked up one day in early spring at the sound of a woodpecker--no, a pair of woodpeckers--tapping a hole in the bark of a slender maple. Around the corner of the small dirt track, then down a path back to the street and three blocks to her building.

Then the park had been all browns and grays; now, the baseball fields shone, their grass groomed green, sand swept a soft tan. The trees had begun budding weeks ago--at least some of them--until increasing warmth urged them into full bloom, leaves bursting from the branches, the cherries and wild apples donning white, the willows reaching golden-green fingers down into the water, like a woman touching her image in a mirror, tilting her head at her own grace. Around the corner, past the little dock, she passed a row of cherry trees, the ground white with their petals. Couples lay on blankets or leaned against the trunks of the trees, picnicking, reading, embracing, soft like the petals, like the light filtering through the branches. She relaxed her focus, letting herself lose perspective, letting the ground seem like a view of mountains from an airplane, letting the petals and fallen leaves blur together into snow drifting among cliffs. She thought about flying back and forth for all those years, coast to coast: her only view of the Rockies had been like this, from above, a vision not-quite-real.

She thought--felt--she might be in love. Her lover: was it sunlight, in all its shades and angles? Her memories were filled with shafts of light. Walking down the backstairs of her old house into a hallway empty and possessed by afternoon. Standing--silent--trying to draw the light with her, to take that light and wrap it around herself. To swallow it and breathe it, to make her words shine. Sitting on the warm brick porch of another old house, legs sticky with summer, raspberry iced tea a rosy jewel in a clear pitcher, the door to the house swinging wide open, the porch swing white and inviting, her book spread between her legs, her face flushed, skin hot. Staring off into the green prickly grass of the front yard, the trees lining the street tall, dark, and cool; she sat, distracted by the stillness of the day, the enveloping heat.

Yes. Light could take her back to a place, light and color. The dusty dirt jogging path scorching in front of her, the grass faded by sunlight: she was back in California, in the foothills along the San Andreas fault, the grass short, dry, faded, sunlight sucking water and color straight out of the landscape. From there to the desert, the Mojave, a peaceful place that made her desperate in its endless sameness. Only tough creatures could survive there, and the toughest thrived: small spiders, cacti with leaves so sharp she was still tearing them out of her fingertips days later. Desperation again flooded her senses, recalled by the small desert of the ground in front of her here, in a city bordered by a harbor and hills. No, light was not her lover, though it transported her.

@Kelly Vaughan, April 2001