You could see where the landscape fabric was poking through the bark I put down in the beds and that rankled me. I hated seeing the irregularities, the underlying scheme. I could get really anal retentive like that. We noticed the same tendency in Charlotte, the first time she discovered how you could remove sand from between your toes by using bacterial wipes. This came down from my mother’s side I think.

Things are bone dry now in the yard. The sound of sirens makes us worry about wild fires though we’ve never had one too close. Still with all these tall trees around, it makes you think.

I liked doing yard work without my shirt on when I could. It made me feel like the yard was really mine and a way to celebrate our privacy without people looking at my middle-aged body.

I got the wheel barrow and spread more bark to cover the fabric. I got the weed wacker and took down the daisies. It had a symmetry to it, a bookending of sorts: you stake the daisies in spring then cut them down in summer. All the grass was gold and looked like hay. I imagined the first good rain and how lovely it would be to listen to the earth drinking it all in. You could hear the ground gulping it down when it first rained like that. The tree frogs would be singing and the gutters too.

It was getting hazy and pink gold from the nearby fires. We had nothing to complain about, it was the first smoke we had all season. Everyone was looking at the freaking hurricane coming up California. All we had was the smell of cigarettes, a slight cough.

Lily was having her boyfriend over for dinner so that was a good excuse to spruce up the yard. His name was Blake and he had a beard and went to college in Montana. He didn’t do drugs or drink and had good manners so he was alright by me. I gave him one of my Cormac McCarthy books and said he didn’t need to return it.

Whenever I made dinner I tried to use something in the refrigerator that was going bad. You could get clever about making pasta sauces with cheese rinds but I wasn’t that sophisticated. It was more about using half an onion or vegetables that were going off.

I took control of the cooking to stem the tide of spending in our house. We were bleeding out the sides. How were we spending ten, fifteen thousand dollars a month? We didn’t eat out like we used to. No one had a cocaine habit I was aware of. (If they did, they might be inclined to vacuum.) We were blowing money to Kingdom Come and it wasn’t sustainable. Worse, we were teaching our kids it was okay to be wasteful like that. It would be a wake up call for them when it was time to fend for themselves. Then they’d really enjoy my cooking.

I pulled some old chicken out of the freezer and brined it. I bought some ears of corn and talked with the produce guy about AA and religion and faith. I put together a salad and used the last of some dressing someone put in the fridge but shouldn’t have. There was so little in the bottle I had to add water to get it out.

I put on my Liked songs playlist and we sat in the outdoor room even though the sky was a haze. I dug some old lemons out of the fridge and used them as a garnish on the serving platter with the chicken. We threw the corn husks in the fire pit even though we couldn’t burn them. Afterwards we sat indoors in the den and played a Smiths record. Lily and Blake sat on the sofa by the record player and I wanted to take a picture of them but didn’t, it would spoil the mood.

I went to bed happy and thought about the bark and how clean it looked now that the fabric was buried. I thought about being sober and was grateful for that, for going to bed early on a Saturday and nodding off to the sound of tree frogs. In the morning I’d take my walk, and all would be as it was again.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, pacific northwest