I went outside and sprayed coyote urine on the tulips to keep the deer and rabbits away. I don’t know if it’s coyote urine but it smells like hell. I don’t know how they get it in a bottle either. And I put the hormonal mousse treatment on my scalp for the dermatitis. There’s always something gumming at the edges of our lives.

In the park in the morning on the trail I keep taking the wrong turn but there are no wrong turns in life just different paths. Charlotte is unhappy with school and anxious about her future and I try to give her this kind of advice: happiness comes and goes so don’t let it get you down. Keep pushing forward, you’re doing great.

Snot rockets in the early morning, numb fingers and cold showers, push-ups, fighting back the aging process I will some day lose. Dad doing the same, 76, still walking every morning, doing yard work. No one should be getting up on ladders anymore.

The trail has broken fern fronds and river rock embedded in the mud. The idea all this is glacial debris, errata. The look of silt in glacially fed rivers early season and that magical turquoise green. Cradling my empty coffee mug rounding the last turn. The knobby look of moss growths on leaning trees like knuckles. Wishing I was on the coast in those old-growth forests by the sea. But here with the distant crows and stillness just as good.

What it looks like when a large tree topples over with its roots exposed, nature’s wiring. Posing next to it for a photo with the family when the kids were still small to capture the scale of it, the Washington coast, all of us squinting in the late afternoon sun. The golden hour it’s called. The golden hour of our lives, from start to finish.

The feel of cold black mud on bare soles. The way dirt adheres to the skin like a protective coat. Running and leaping through the dark across paths and tree roots in the middle of the night in the forest in summer without our headlamps barefoot with not a scrape or bruise and somehow all of it perfect. Night vision. Layered smells and sounds. How the fingers regain feeling after being numb and how the body self-regulates. Sleeping on the ground. Bathing in a stream. Coming back to my car feeling renewed, putting on the stereo. I’m 54. Better than ever.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Errata, Memoir, prose

Tags: aging, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest, prose