Tuesday, September 8, 2015

A Bridge Over Untroubled Water: Sunset on Lake Pontchartrain, and other beauteous things

It's 2 a.m. and I'm still awake, because apparently I'm in one of those special cycles wherein anything that makes me a functional human being -- like sleep -- gets kicked to the curb. My brain is breaking up with me. Everything I own is in the box to the left.

Anyway, since I can't sleep, I figured I might as well wax poetic about the sunset on Lake Pontchartrain. We went down South, see, to finalize Pip's adoption (by "we" I mean Mama, Dad, Pip, and of course myself) and by some sheer miracle of timing, we happened to hit the bridge over the lake just as the sun started to go down.

The bridge over Lake Pontchartrain is over 20 miles long, and the lake itself is some 630 square miles. Drive a few miles out, and it's like being in a Buick LaCrosse in the middle of the ocean: everywhere you look, nothing but water stretching away to the horizon. Looking at it, I finally understood how the early explorers thought the world was flat. The water just goes on and on forever.

The colors of that sunset on the surface of the lake! The light! The purple and orange and velvety blue sky so close I felt like I could reach up through the roof of the car and touch the it, and come away with a masterpiece of wet paint on my hands. The huge red eye of the sun hanging suspended over the surface, looking for all the world like it was about to drop quietly into the water and disappear... oh. Oh. I can't even describe it right. I can't do it justice, how it made me feel: excited and awed and deeply moved, bouncing in my seat like a small child, but silent, with my nose against the window. I've never seen anything like it before. I may never see anything like it again. It was... breathtaking.

I'd ride all the way to Louisiana just to see it again. It's worth a trip in itself.

We didn't get to see much in our whirlwind tour of the South: we were in New Orleans for a court appearance, and then we swung by my Mama's folks out in Georgia, and then we had to head home so working lives could resume on schedule. I wanted to drag my feet and look at everything, but alas, there was no time. It's nice, though, how just the experience of sharing rooms in little hotels with the 3 people one loves most and catching breakfast together in random diners before driving on is it's own little piece of everything. Sitting on a hotel bed eating a shrimp po'boy late at night while the palmetto bugs scream is a memory I will always keep. So is the childlike glee with which I encountered Spanish moss, palm trees, and pine cones bigger around than a baseball. (I brought one home with me.)

And then, of course, there was the adoption finalization in itself: not a legal hurdle or a fight to keep Paul, as some people have thought, but a proceeding to terminate the rights of his birth parents and so officially recognize Paul as adopted for life by my Mama and Dad, and to legally change his name. It was quick and painless. The only tears shed were tears of happiness. I was in the courtroom while the judge read the decree, and I cried at the beauty of the whole thing: the fact of Paul being born, and being real and alive and miraculous, and of coming home to us so we can love and nurture him and help him as he grows; at those words, "adopted for life." Tears slipped down my face. My Mama cried. So did Dad, though he'll likely deny it if you ask him. Something about it was so incredibly moving. Something about it felt, to me, like so many pieces to an eternal puzzle dropped neatly into place, right where they were supposed to go. It felt... right. Pip has felt right since the moment I laid eyes on him, and this was just a confirmation of that rightness. I was glad I got to be there for it. So very glad.

And now I'm so very tired. We'll see if Tiffany.Writes. Down. actually helped. Tiffany wrote down. G'night.