Love Is in the Air--and It’s Contagious, No Matter the Season

The baby sitter’s dog had run away three times in a week, stealing out under the fence after dark. All night, he would trot down the sidewalk and into other peoples’ yards. The baby sitter believed it was love.

She laid out this thought as a preface to her overarching view, which was that romance is a contagious thing. On the day after her dog discovered moonlight, her teenage son came home from school, dropped his skateboard, flung himself across her double bed, picked up the telephone, kicked the door closed and wasn’t seen again for about five hours.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked him later.

“Nobody,” he said. From this transparent and futile attempt to elude her radar, she divined that he was smitten by a girl who was just a pal last year, that the girl liked him back and was afraid to say so and that he was too doggone shy to make the first move.

“Mommy,” he moaned, rolling his eyes in exasperation when she made it clear that she knew. “Really. We’re just friends.”

“Mmm hmm,” she said.

They say that springtime is the time for love, but seasons can be tricky here. Just about the time you start hearing “Jingle Bells” at the mall, one of those California warm spells will blow in with delirium on its breath.

Usually, you don’t notice it, what with the pressure of the holidays, all running together the way they do in a flurry of “to do” lists and free turkeys and Christmas

tree lots. It’s tough to notice a balmy breeze when you’re trapped in the Barbie aisle at Toys R Us.

Last week, though, events conspired. We were standing in the kitchen laughing fondly about the sitter’s plight when we caught a glimpse of our elderly neighbors in their driveway across the street. They were moving slowly, and this drew our attention because, in the seven years since we had met them, never once had they not been bustling.

*

He was a businessman before he retired, and his manner has remained brisk and can-do. A spry do-it-yourselfer, he once dashed off a memo on his favorite formula for eradicating driveway weeds and slipped it into our door as a housewarming gift.

She is equally energetic, a plump, friendly woman in a warmup suit, always digging in her azalea beds or pinching dead leaves from her geraniums or hustling off to potlucks at the Baptist church.

Their puttering, their projects, their general aura of busyness has been part of the backdrop of life on our block. Sometimes you can hear them across the street, giving each other orders in that particular shorthand that comes with lifelong couplehood.

But on this afternoon, there in their driveway, they were moving slowly and carefully--now past the bed of orange Iceland poppies, now past the crimson poinsettia hedge. His hand rested tenderly in the small of her back.

One night not long ago, she had awakened in pain, and for some reason, he had had a bad feeling about it and had taken her to the emergency room.

She had insisted she’d probably just wrenched a muscle pulling weeds, but he’d hear none of it. And sure enough, the doctor had discovered two severely blocked arteries. Had they waited, the doctor later said, she might have suffered a fatal heart attack.

*

Seeing them there in the autumn sunshine, framed by our kitchen window as they made their way toward the house where they had been together for so many years, we thought about time and marriage and fragility. We thought about the way life can seem an endless collage of projects and deadlines and “to do” lists on one day, only to reveal itself as a fleeting waltz, a flicker of moonlight the next.

Our teenage daughter was in her bedroom, her ear welded to the phone. The kindergartner was watching “Toy Story”; the baby was in her crib. There were lists of unbought groceries tacked to the refrigerator, heaps of unpaid bills on the counter top. All we could think of was the sitter’s love-struck household and the grandparents making their way so slowly to the front door across the street.

“Let’s take a walk,” my husband said.

And so--though it was not springtime, the designated time for this sort of thing--we headed out, just for a few minutes, out onto the sidewalk where dogs were romping and boys on skateboards were whizzing by.

The air was thermal, almost moist, and as we turned the corner, there was a sudden breeze and on it, the sweet fragrance of citrus trees in bloom.

The moment was so vivid, so fragile--so contagious--that we closed our eyes and stood still. And when we opened them again, our hands were on the small of each others’ backs and it was time to make our way home.