The bobcat in our yard must have disrupted the balance because everyone was talking about it from the crows to the neighbor dogs to the lesser birds and bats. They were all peeping and cheeping and the crows, with that bad language they do so well. Now the bobcat, he or she just pranced on by uncaring, a little stub of a tail sticking up like an antenna. It went inside the overgrowth for a time and then I got the cat inside. And then it moved down to the neighbors and the crows tracked it like the media might, gawking and squawking from the treetops.

At the very end of the day when the sun goes down it turns the tops of the tall trees gold and the puffy clouds pink-orange. There is no one around. The windows are open so I can hear when the clocks chime and there’s the thought of work, but not the pressing kind. I move slower in the mornings it seems. But I look forward to the fall and all that comes with it, the moving on. The culling that comes with the end of the season in a pile of organic debris: you can burn it, or let it disappear in the garden beds.

The days bled into one another. The tractor crapped out and I tried to troubleshoot it with the owner’s manual, but I gave up and cut the lawn by hand with an electric mower and a long extension cord. The cord had to be managed the way you might a rope on a glacier, stepping over it with care, gathering it by hand, meting it out length by length.

And so the days spooled out like that, the garden hose stretched out and reeled back in again, the slow loss of light. The odd hastening to a time we imagined might be different, if only the same again.

Categories: Memoir, prose, writing

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