Keep it as a treasure

The sky was already clouding over by the time we left the house with our sandwiches and our cans of seltzer and the second-to-last bottle of bitter lemon in the pantry, but we ate dinner open-air in Capen Street Park, watching a tow-haired small child investigate some peonies and a rabbit snuffle up to the gate which we opened for it, but it remained prudently on the other side of the fence. The forecast claimed thunderstorms at six o'clock, so we were carrying an umbrella when we set off to look for a footpath on the other side of the stretch of the Mystic where we had eaten hot dogs for Memorial Day. We didn't find one, but because we ended up walking across the commuter rail tracks into West Medford, we did light on the oasis of CB Scoops right after I had been missing the two ice cream shops handily within walking distance of our former apartment. spatch went in masked and came out with orange sherbet in a crust of chocolate sprinkles for him and pistachio ice cream for me ("Don't worry," said the gravel-voiced evident local character who had emerged with his order first, "he's coming out") and we ate our respective desserts perched on the bleachers of Playstead Park until a magnificent bolt of lightning occurred over soccer practice and we walked home with increasing rapidity through a respectable thunderstorm which is still flashing and rolling beyond the windows as I write. The air smelled green and ozone. The lightning up Boston Avenue was near strobe-constant. Until the dusk began to come on, the clouds were the thick tracery of ink in water, rain-fanned. Things are not easy right now; it is important to eat sandwiches on a hot overcast evening and be rained on with ice cream.