Charlotte starts therapy today at the same time as Lily, which means by late afternoon the three of us will each be talking to different counselors in separate rooms, with Dawn waiting in the lobby with her book.

It’s afternoon already in Germany, and Eberhard is coming to take my mom to an airport hotel in Frankfurt where they’ll probably make a mini vacation out of it, overdoing it a bit, sending me bad photos later. In the morning mom will get on a plane for Seattle and land by noon, and I’ll get her at SeaTac then go to a bar in Issaquah where we’ll celebrate the start of our visit, and try to stay up as late as she can, probably 7.

My work contract now ends in July, and because we have family trips planned for August that means the soonest I’ll start work again is September. I’ll go to Las Vegas for a conference in a couple weeks and again, in July—likely the last times this summer I’ll need pressed shirts.

Outside, the cottonwood blooms have stopped and for the past couple weeks I’d sit out with my beer watching them fall, dubbing it ‘springtime snow.’ I tried to write a poem about the pattern they make going across the sun, linking it to a number of seemingly random pursuits (like blogging, or life) but it didn’t pan out.

The house to the east of us was vacant for four years, sold to auction with the intent of a tear-down followed by three new houses, but that didn’t pan out either, so the owners have finally resigned themselves to moving in to the existing house, and now they park their cars out back on the grass.

The grass had gotten so high that one day I spied an adult deer bedding down in it at dusk, and tried to capture the way she folded her legs in on herself and settled in, how the filtered sun through the trees made her face look calm and glow in the golden light. I wanted to feel that way, too.

A low is setting up shop off the coast from Alaska and we need to close the windows at night, or it will get cold. The fox glove are in full bloom and I’m starting to sleep in until 6. The other house to the north appears vacant now, a rental, so we worry what will come of the new residents.

We stopped our lawn service but extended them by one month, agreeing to pay cash vs. doing a contract and got the tractor serviced, followed by the generator, for fall.

Now I sit with my back to the large pine between our house and the new neighbors, the tree we’ll need to take out because it’s making the concrete patio buckle, disturbing the balance of the hot tub. And because we don’t have a fence between us and the neighbors I now have to be discreet about my manly habits: the belching, bottle-throwing, peeing on the shrubs or the side of the shed. All our excess. All our phones, tablets, apps, and counselors…and how badly I just want to head out to the woods and forget.

Categories: humor, Memoir, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, humor, journal writing, mindfulness, nature therapy, pacific northwest, social media addiction, William Pearse writer