The trail is dry at the park and crunches underfoot. For the first time I brought a bunch of people with me to my morning walk, Dawn’s family who’s visiting from out of state. We’d just be out for an hour I said, but it wound up being twice that as they wanted to stop for every slug, berry, or spider. And that was a nice, different way for me to experience it — through someone else.

Because I go to bed so early I woke to the sound of fireworks at 10 and lay there feeling like I’d missed out. Everyone else was there, right up the road. I had this feeling I was alone at the edges in my self-imposed daily routine that had me getting into bed by 8. And that brought up the dread I sometimes get, a deep-down sense of loss.

But getting up at 4 you get to hear the overnight radio program and on Saturdays the DJ was featuring a different card in the Tarot each week, using that card as the musical theme. She had a soft, low voice and I pictured her in the dark by the mic wondering what she looked like. I was waiting to hear what card we were on; she was talking about the government and a time for change and rising up and the music was all along those lines. The card was Judgment and she described an angel with a trumpet, sometimes called Renewal or Aeon, to be aware of the time we’re in and to awaken.

Having guests at our house, I saw the place anew through their eyes too. Dawn gave them a tour of the yard and I fiddled about the kitchen. I loved having young people in our house, shoes splayed out in the entryway: Dawn’s nephew, his fiancée and a former roommate of theirs who’d driven in for an outdoor music festival at the Gorge. They all had tattoos and piercings and different ideas about things. They were the Millennials.

I’d been out of work now for a week, back from a trip to the east coast to see my dad, his brother and sister and her family. But already I had an interview lined up for a new gig and was using my morning walks to practice my spiel, waving my stick as a geriatric form of strength training, holding it by the tip, doing curls. You get half an hour to form an impression of yourself to a would-be hiring manager and studies show that most make up their minds in the first 10 seconds. So I was practicing how I’d do that, mouthing the words, walking the trails.

The sound of the fireworks was so vivid I could picture the mouth of the canon they were shooting them from, the aperture of it, that singular sound of the launch. It triggered a primal thrill in me, though I kind of hated the idea of fireworks. There was still some youthful magic about it too.

We kept our flag up from the end of May to early September, bookending summer between two American holidays. The Fourth is like the Christmas of all three. They were selling big flags at Costco and I considered buying a new one since ours is sun bleached, got in front of a guy at the checkout who’d gotten one, said I like your flag but he didn’t respond, which made me wonder his political affiliation, as I probably looked like a liberal.

It’s always this time of year the cherries go plump on our trees and the birds do their best to eat them but because they don’t have hands, it’s hard going. They’ll grab the fruit and carry it off to a rooftop but then the cherries roll down the pitch into the gutter and they only get a peck. So I pick them off the ground and eat the ones that are still intact. I thought about getting a ladder out or climbing the trees but thought better of it.

Tomorrow we’ll drive down to Mt Rainier and show Lily’s friend the hike we did last summer with another boyfriend of hers. I hate to be this way, but I’m getting them up at 3 so we can be on the road by 3:30 and on the trail by 6. Hopefully the mountain will still have that early morning pink on the snow, a kind of Chardonnay-like, soft color.

When I got back from the park I took a look in the girl’s car who’s with Dawn’s nephew at the festival. She lives out of it and asked if she could leave it in our driveway for the weekend. I’d only ever met one other person who lived out of their car, a guy by the Starbucks corporate office who’d lost his house in a divorce and worked construction, lived out of his van. I don’t know what kind of image I had of people who live out of their cars but she didn’t fit that at all. She was young and healthy and working a job driving an Amazon truck, climbing mountains and going to music festivals, trying to travel the world. She was full of life and promise, though her parents hated the idea of course, most everything she owned was right there in her car.

I peeked in the windows feeling a bit like a snoop, the seashells she collected and the little stickers on the dashboard and things hanging from her rear view mirror. And I just felt sad for some reason, and then went back to my morning routine: the birds, the cherries, the worms.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, identity, Memoir

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