No one else would eat my cheesecake so I ate it every day, all week. I loved that it was just cream cheese, sugar, flour, eggs and cream. And that it bloated in the oven and turned a deep brown. Then I had the rest of the banana smoothie and took it straight from the carafe. A couple mandarins and my vitamins before bed.

I’d edged the lawn, cut it with the push mower (the tractor stopped running), gone to the store, cooked, cleaned up, edited PowerPoint slides, responded to work IMs in between.

I hit the bed hard, bent like a tree. Just a neighborhood dog barking somewhere with the window cracked an inch. The muffled sound of bedroom silence. Days stacked upon days. Breathing machines and night guards, dry scalp foam. A lone bird cry, then a jet. The long arc of it unzipping the sky. The dog calling after it. Days stacked like firewood.

Now I am in the forest so early it feels like I’m dreaming. Sections of fallen tree by the trail; fern fronds make a canopy of green. The grass so tall it flops over.

It’s a pity to race through the week to the weekend. The weekends go by fast enough; if the weeks do, then what of your life?

I use my walking stick like an oar and pretend I’m rowing a gondola in Venice or I’m the ferryman crossing the river Styx.

I am counting the days down until my contract ends. Then it will be summer and I can head back to the mountains like I did last year. Maybe now I am addicted to process, to familiar ways. Patterns.

This year I’ll turn 55 which feels really old based on how young I feel inside. Dad said he used to get the paper just to check who’d died but then stopped that practice, it got too bleak.

I have so much more to go but if it were a hike I can picture where it ends on the horizon, a distant valley. I really don’t know anything about it, I pretend.

The inside of the loo at the trail head smells like cinnamon chewing gum and human waste. You don’t have to worry about locking the door at this hour, no one’s coming.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, death, Memoir

Tags: aging, Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir