A Promise of Warmer Days, Left at the Ballpark: Day Twenty-Three

This post is part of the Secret Messages Project.  Every day for thirty days, I’ll leave my words in places where they might be found — or might never be found at all.  I hope you’ll join me. 

*

Today, as I write this, sleet patters my windows, and the cold moves through the house like a fog.  It slides beneath the window sashes and drifts, slow, two feet from the floor.

Yesterday, though —

Yesterday afternoon was shot through with sun, almost warm enough to pass for early spring.  I drove away from work early, windows down and radio up.

And suddenly I had summer on my mind.

I drove to the ballpark – the one in Wasena, down by the river – and found myself kicking around in the rust-colored dirt of the baseball diamond, my stilettos leaving sharp divots wherever I walked.

I stood for awhile in the batter’s box, and then leaned on the fencing behind home plate — hooked my fingers in the chain link and let the sun flicker over my face until I could almost hear it:  all the sounds and shouts and laughter that belong in such a place … Mid-July, sky painfully blue, air thick with flies and summer swelter.

Yes.

After awhile I took a piece of parchment out of my bag and scribbled down a few words.  Then I curled the paper into a roll and tucked it into the fence near the benches.

This is what it said:

What if

the voices
we hear
in this place —

the stairway
of laughter,
the wild woop
at the crack of the bat —

weren’t echoes
of a summer that was

but

premonitions —

ghosts
of a green season
coming,

and already here …

I’m brave enough to believe such things are possible. ❤