The Perfect Afternoon

Note: I wrote this on 2/20/03 on a day when I was longing for a summer day (of course I was - it was February). I hadn't thought about it for a long time, but today at our church field day, I saw a bunch of folks sitting in the shade talking and it made me think of this short piece:

The Perfect Afternoon

Everything was golden and green and blue and warm and smelled of honeysuckle. The grass was a thick expanse that refused to show the ground beneath it from any vantage point. Its color changed from bright green, suddenly to a dark, rich tone where the shade from the trees covered it. The trees themselves seemed an explosion of contrasts, with every shade imaginable, but at random places where here a leaf was in full sun and there a leaf in full shade and all over were leaves in various combinations of the two. The limbs and trunks of the trees, which were full of children, ran in strong, dark, graceful arcs down to the edge of the creek, which was the only ground feature that broke the carpet of fine thick blades of grass.
In the small stream, children and adults alike waded, some adding to a small dam that they had been building all afternoon, some sailing small makeshift boats in the shallow pool behind it. One little boy was chasing water skimmers with a dipper, getting close many times, but never capturing his prey. Upstream just a bit was a young couple sitting on the bank, alternating between gazing at the gold-sparkled ripples and into each others eyes. They laughed and talked and, only after satisfying themselves that no one was looking, took turns stealing kisses.
Several people sat away from the shade, enjoying the radiating warmth of the sun and each other’s company. Some toddlers ran in circles around the group while others slept on blankets laid out under umbrellas. Old men sat in an arc under the trees with their legs crossed, a few whittling saplings and limbs while they talked about crops and the weather, but most napping silently, their chins cradled between thumb and forefinger and the wide brims of their straw hats pointing at their knees. The old women stood by the creek, still wearing their aprons from dinner, chatting amiably and watching their grandchildren play in the trees and in the water, occasionally asking them if their bare feet were getting cold.
Shafts of sunlight stretched from the ground to the green canopy overhead, seeming to lend it some kind of magical, ethereal support. As people moved through the shade, they appeared to avoid the silver columns as if afraid of breaking them and bringing the roof down and an end to all this. From the middle of the meadow, the sun overhead was a blazing star that brightened everything, turning the sky directly around it nearly white. Away from the sun, however, the whiteness gave way to a deepening blue until at the horizon, it was the kind of eternal, bottomless azure that cannot be fathomed.
The only sounds to be heard were the gurgling of the creek, the merry singing of the birds, the joyful sheiks of the children, the laughter of the adults, and the occasional whooshing noise of the slight breeze making the leaves move lazily against each other. The minutes on this day seemed a weakened enemy, struggling and groaning just to come to fruition.
It was as if the meadow and the woods had been picked up and put into a fruit jar, stopping time’s effect upon it and upon its occupants. Even long after everyone had packed their baskets and umbrellas and left, they would carry this afternoon with them forever. Every time that they took down this jar and looked into it, they would find it improved with age. The memories would ever be marinating, each picking up wonderful flavors from other tasty memories even while lending their own wonderful savor to all those others, all together becoming far better than their sum.
The world outside this jar might become a paradise, it might become as dead as dirt, but neither possibility seemed to be able to affect this most perfect afternoon.