October 28, 2018 (Sunday)

The moody look of the freeway heading east toward the foothills with the rain coming on and the color draining out, now down to yellow. Fog and clouds over the dark mountain contours. Lily and her friend Meg in the back seat with me playing one of my favorite singers, her voice low and smoky, crackling like campfire wood. It is the time of poets with this color palette, the time of cardigans and corduroys, of lap cats and candles: me in my den with a decorative pipe and a long, sullen smoke: the warmth of wood fires, wool, and whiskey. The time I go back to that first stop we made in Scotland this same time of year, some town without a name just outside of Arbroath. The beating wind and rain and the thickening mud, the sense if we wanted to, we could fade into the ground ourselves.

Categories: prose, writing

Tags: alliteration, Arbroath, autumn poetry, journal writing, Memoir, pacific northwest, poetry, Scotland, short form, William Pearse writer