May ends with us watching live footage of downtown Seattle getting destroyed by thieves. All those angles of street corners and store fronts we recall from another time. Haven’t been down there since my last day at the office when the bus drivers had just started wearing masks. Nice to hear that hundreds more turned out today to help clean up.

Friday night I sit on the chaise lounge well past dark with the animals lying on the warm stone. Cottonwood blooms like feathers from some pillow fight between the gods. Time to flip the page on the calendar, and I did so with hope that the new month would bring something different.

I cooked all weekend: a Goan vindaloo paste, French curried cauliflower soup, stir-fried beef with Sichuan peppers and cumin seed. Time, this gray fabric of cloud unspooled around us. My beard, my hair. The kids’ lives like ours, suspended. Hovering in a gray non-reality. Like passing through the atmosphere and trying to see outside the plane, but it’s hard to make out anything below or know when we’re going to land.

The sweet spice in the curry powder and the scent of toasted flour and sautéed onion takes me back to my mom’s kitchen in Germany, to drinking beer and standing in one of her aprons stirring…full-blown nostalgia. It’s well past noon and Charlotte is still asleep on the couch. I hope one day that she’ll remember these smells herself, and long for home.

Categories: Memoir, microblogging, writing

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