Rub Rub Pat Pat

Austin, Texas

Gracie’s hands go rub, rub, pat, pat on my back up to my neck. Hands soft yet firm and I lie my head on her lap. Pat, pat on the back of my head while I close my eyes and think of the last time I’d been touched and how touch speaks without words to the body that it’s all okay. You are home. You are loved. You are safe. How no person is made to be alone and untouched. Gracie’s hands go rub, rub, pat, pat and I think of how during lockdown many of us went without touch for so long and how after a while you get used to being alone and then you forget how much you need the rub, rub, pat, pat or the holding of hands.

Austin is hot, hot and bustling with sounds of AC units and cars and more cars and traffic and sprawling freeways and the sound of crickets chirping loud at night and thunder rolling in the sky. It’s drive South when it’s sticky and rainy and inter-tube down the river soft as satin under green trees and get a cold beer before driving home. It’s drive thirty minutes East to get eggs and milk from the farmer lady. Little chickens, yellow and brown and red cluck, cluck as they waddle in the yard and two babies waddle around the yard too and there’s a garden overgrown with rows of vines and small, green squashes and watermelons and taller plants held up by wire with small bundles of baby red tomatoes hanging off the branches. Gracie’s hands go rub, rub, pat, pat and I drop into my body like I hadn’t been there in a while. When you’re thinking of all the things to do and where to go next, it’s easy to lift out of the body and into the mind. But with the rub, rub, pat, pat on my back like that I drop into my body and out of my mind and I really like that.

Could home be pat, pat down the soil, black underneath fingernails? The smell of rain and wet dirt? The planting of seeds and watching baby green sprouts emerge in the Spring? The growing of that which you eat? Rustling leaves and a cool breeze and rushing water and blue sky endless above beckon that we return. But when driving in cars with windows rolled up and sitting in apartments with windows rolled up and staring at screens that capture our attention we cannot hear her because nature’s beckon to return is quiet like a whisper. Nature beckons a return to feel air moving in and out of lungs and drop into the body and out of the mind and feel grass in-between toes and watch clouds pass by and feel the rub, rub, pat, pat on your back by Gracie’s tender hands.