Thick fog in the lowlands with the tops of the trees poking through. Fog making the landscape ghostlike with scales of light fanned out across the morning sky. Light for the first time in a long time. Crows out tending to the roads like they’re nature’s janitors, picking it clean. Licks of smoke and steam from the chimney flues. Impromptu streams and pop-up ponds from the recent rains and floods. The ground saturated, the fog curling, lifting as the sun climbs. Spots of blue in the sky, almost forgot it was there.

Feeding the deer in our yard, rolling apples like it’s a lawn game to a doe and her fawn. The look in their eyes as they watch me, chewing. If they could give a thumbs up they would.

Moss overtaken every surface, every nook and cranny. Thickest on the chicken coop roof with red spores like antennae. Some gangs of birds out picking, the first arrival. A fly landing on my wrist and though lowly, I allow it to check me out. At the lake the shoreline swallowed and one lone duck paddling off, disappearing in the fog.

Quiet Sunday mornings by the laundry dryer drum with the kids sleeping in. Canadian bacon and salmon locks, any day a holiday. Especially if there’s sun.

After my morning work is done there’s a spot in the driveway where the angle of sun is best and I can have a beer on the foldout chair with the dog beside me. It’s too early in the season for the drone of lawnmowers and leaf blowers and I play the radio low with the bay doors open, close my eyes and imagine I’m back in Tuscany, that small beach with the black, volcanic sand and our kids so small one was still in diapers. We’d get there mid-morning, sun ourselves for a bit and then hit the bistro right when they opened so we could get the first batch of vongole, crack a bottle of wine, head back to the beach and then home for a nap. Maybe a dip in the pool before dinner. Locusts coming on at dusk and having to keep the gate locked so the wild boar couldn’t get in. Picking the bits of rotten fig out of my sandal treads. Knowing we had it good then but not realizing how much.

And smiling now in our suburban home feeling the same.

Categories: prose, travel, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, pacific northwest, prose, stream-of-consciousness, travel, William Pearse writer, writing