I Would Live That Moment Again - Carol Arnold

“Freeze this moment,” Andy says.

My husband gently pulls me to him as he speaks these words. We are standing in front of our tent on a rise overlooking the valley of the Tarangire River. It is dusk, a slight breeze carrying the scent of acacia and dung across the air, the cooing of the mourning doves winding down, another warm night emerging from the African bush.

“I want to remember this moment forever,” he adds as he wraps his arms around me to watch an event unfold that must have occurred a million times before at this place. A line of elephants is making its way down the valley to the river for an evening drink, about fifty of them, a few babies, some juveniles, mostly adults. Ears flicking, trunks swaying, they plod silently across the horizon, their bodies as deeply gray and wrinkled as ancient mountains. Their massive heads nod slowly up and down, as if answering some important question.

I feel myself falling in love, not just with my husband again, or even the animals, but something deeper. I feel as if this moment is part of my own being, as if my blood might at any moment flow out my body and deep into the bone-filled earth, and instead of dying I will be born.

Andy takes my hand and together we begin swaying back and forth to the rhythm of the animals’ trunks, a slow, steady movement like the ticking of a pendulum on a giant clock. As we rock back and forth it dawns on me that the question the elephants are responding to isn’t really a question at all, but an affirmation. “This is the way it has always been,” they say. “”This is the way it will always be.”

If only they are right.