Kathryn Nicolai

Their leaves were arrow-shaped and soft with bright veins that I knew by the end of the summer would look impossibly big.

I looked forward to watching them grow on my walks.

I circled past the pond and around to a sunken space shaped like a clamshell with built-in benches and a stage covered with a canopy of thin wooden slats laced over by a climbing vine.

The band was already playing, a four-piece jazz band with drums, a stand-up bass, piano, and horn.

The benches around me were filling up with a combination of families and couples and people like me.

who came on purpose to listen, and others who had, by happy accident, heard the music on their way out of work and walked over to enjoy.

I leaned my back against the cool stone of the bench behind me and closed my eyes to listen.

The music followed a few familiar paths that I recognized from the old jazz records I'd been listening to since I was a child, then veered off into unfamiliar patterns and rhythms and circled back and veered away again.

I looked up at the stage and watched the piano player and the horn player.

They were watching each other, sometimes nodding in agreement, as if to say, yes, good idea, more of that.

Every now and then, one of them would crack a sudden smile and laugh.

And I realized that someone in the band had somehow just told a musical joke.

They were speaking a language that was foreign to me, and I couldn't translate it or say what the joke was.

but what I could hear was beautiful nonetheless.

I watched a little boy a few rows in front of me.

He was watching the bass player as she thumped up and down the neck of the instrument with confident, strong fingers.

As the horn blew,

and the melody turned in spirals in the air.

She spun her bass on its end pin and caught it again in time to pluck out the next bit of rhythm.

The little boy clapped his hands and swung his legs in time with the music.