March came and so did the arborist, all of it on its sides sagging down: the trees and shrubs, the lawn, moss taking over but I like the moss, it leaves your outline after you lie in it. We hadn’t dusted in months. Charlotte, with intermittent bloody noses from the dryness maybe, I don’t know. The water heater went out, forcing me to go into the crawl space under the house and negotiate mouse traps and corpses, flipped-over pieces of insulation, a foot of standing water. The laundry machine too: things go in three’s. I walked to the lake with the dog, the snow melting from the trees like it was raining with the sun coming through. Sat on the recliner with the garage doors open listening to it. Took a nap, with my phone. Browned four pounds of skin-on, bone-in thighs, worked some, finished a growler. Vacuumed and did a load of whites, no shower. Lay on the sofa with the same five seconds of music playing in my head every day now for a week. Wondered to myself what madness must be like, if I was starting to turn. As I slipped off, that afternoon sleep, I burrowed into a memory of my mom’s house in Germany, of napping there: it was in that same bed where she and John slept, our room, and how odd, we were there about nine months but never really committed to it as our room, we kept some space from it, maybe wanted it that way, and I imagined the church bells tolling every quarter hour but couldn’t hear them really (it’s not the same in memory), and detailed a typical afternoon for myself and it was nice, we’d nap and rise in the 4 o’clock hour, have a drink and start making dinner, and it was just about being together, that’s what we did. I slipped off and when I awoke made the mistake of looking at myself in the mirror, thought I should start in on the chicken, the arborist was coming. Time to prune, thin, cut things down, burn.

Categories: prose

Tags: Cream, creative nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest, postaday, prose, stream-of-consciousness, William Pearse writer