Shoulds

She should be rewriting a chapter. She should be revising. But the sun shines, the breeze blows puffy clouds across the sky, and the summer is short.

She brings the Gingerbread Boys to the pool, and the younger one has gone to play with his brother.

First, they stand under the buckets that dump as they're filled with water.  Yellow, then the green, orange, blue, and red. They move under the blue mushroom, curtains of water cascading down around them. Next, the palm tree where three spouts shoot water which they catch on their bony chests. They move to the silly face, eyebrows, eyes, nose, and red lips shooting water. The older Gingerbread boy turns the crank to increase the water flow. The younger one giggles, following right behind.

They make the circuit again, and she wonders if she should get out the camera to take a picture. Will she remember this day without an image to carry it? Like that day in Jeju-Do, when they returned to the beach and the boys rode wave after blue wave, and the sky was perfect and the sand was pink. She desperately wanted to take pictures, but the camera wasn't in her bag. Will she remember that day? The perfect colors? The motion of the sea? The arc of the spray? The glee on her children's faces? She has the camera with her today; she should take pictures while she can.

But by the time she looks up, the Gingerbread Boys have become bored with the water spray and have returned to the slide, where they are the only ones in line, so they go down again and again, each time with a big grin on their faces. How tall they are getting. How quickly they're growing up. Would a camera even capture this joie de vivre? She's certain it can't.

She should be revising, but on such a perfect day, she leaves the camera in her bag and decides to etch this image in her mind.