Nature is so exaggerated this spring, we’ve got hummingbirds like gnats. I got desperate enough for human contact I went back to my dentist to have my teeth cleaned, didn’t mind strangers putting their hands in my mouth. I came home with a bounce in my stride, a new toothbrush, and a follow-up appointment in December.

The sun set after 9 and it was hard not getting up early. I feasted on work, really dug in. Filled myself with pretzels the way a taxidermist might pack a rabbit. Pink Moon came on, the Nick Drake song. And I went back to England to a small town outside of Bath, my early morning walks around the village there mid-winter, past the church, the school, the corner shops…little details for the moment meant for that time and no other. We had our pasts to flip through at least, the interstitials between time and place.

Sitting outside as the storm gathers, on the outer edge of it: thinking that all things have their edges good or bad, where they begin.

The storm starts and I’m out in the middle of it hoping to see lightning, it’s so rare. The wildlife sounds tentative, falls into a hush. The colors to the west are a deep pink blanketed by gray. The dog is panting. The PowerPoint deck I did today was like that, battleship gray. The cat and dog groom themselves. I put in my clean night guard and say goodnight. Shapes defined by their edges. The sound of the mourning dove like someone trying to learn a new instrument. Maybe that’s why they’re called mourning doves, because that’s the sound of mourning: forced into learning an instrument you don’t want to play. A sound that’s grating and unchanging and doesn’t amount to much.

The stillness here every morning and night. I sit outside watching the rain with the scents of summer, the edge of another season of futures and pasts. A whole lifetime of that.

Categories: microblogging, prose, travel, writing

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