Bump-Bump

A postcard from a place with no soundtrack

[CW: grief, loss]

Walking in springtime means sharing the sidewalks with other people emerging, slow and blinky, from their winter lairs to reacquaint themselves with sunshine and mobility.  Today I gradually overtook a family group of some sort – an adult, either a partner or an older kid, then an obviously younger one, and then the smallest of the four being pulled in a red wagon with wooden slat sides.

They turned where I turned, so I crossed to the right side of the street so that when I overtook them I wouldn’t have to do the awkward pass-by thing.  I was almost alongside them, across the road, when they came to an intersection with a curb.  It’s a small side alley, and the city has never put in one of those accessible sloping ramp cuts, so they had to manually lower the wagon wheels down, front then back, from the curb to the street.

When the front wheels touched down, I audibly said “bump-bump.”