The grass was now the color of a pale copper coin not yet brown, more golden. The grass color had varied hues and smelled sweet and the smell reminded me of the harvest festivals of my youth. Further up the horse trail the grass was deep green and tall, flowering with the long feathery culms leaning willy nilly, endless. I loved the look of the wild grass and thought I could come here every day. There were also some weed-like shrubs flowering with purple cones clustered here and there. That soft purple offered some variety. And it was the variation amid the sameness that drew my eye, much like life: the subtle variations from the day to day stood out.

A cock crowed from a nearby house inside the private neighborhood of Rock Meadow, mostly surgeons and lawyers, people with the money to live with massive sprawls of land and all the benefits of the country with none of the hardships or inconveniences. Paid help.

The trail meandered along the backside of these homes to a cul-de-sac with polite signs saying get the fuck out. Their windows were cracked with well-balanced box fans and all the hydrangeas looked a perfect blue. Near here is where I often stopped to pee by an ivy-covered tree; English holly volunteers and Himalayan blackberry vines run amok. You could pretend you’re in the wilderness, 15 minutes from home.

I peered in the backs of their houses like a prowler or voyeur and recalled the way Dawn and I used to take our morning walks when we were young through the neighborhoods of north Seattle past the craftsmen homes, dreaming of a day we’d have a place of our own.

The grass was matted down along a fence that ran down the spine of a subdivision. Some dead blackberry branches hacked down and trampled, yellow mottled leaves. It hadn’t rained in weeks and now my ragweed allergies had kicked in right on cue.

The blackberry vines were stretched out to the sun with beautiful lime green nubs and brown speckled crowns. The trail had the look of somewhere backcountry, and I realized how much of my neighborhood there was to be seen within just a short walk. How wild it was on an early Sunday morning with just the crows and sparrows.

When you get to the end of the trail you emerge onto a road with a sleepy slope headed to our place, off the lake road. There’s a dusty shoulder with big rocks for sitting or I guess to dissuade people from parking, or deter terrorists or suicide bombers. It looks like most of the homes have hired landscaping help. Everything is just so. At our house we are going more for that controlled chaos look, but it’s a fine line and we’re often on the wrong side of it.

The developments have stupid, fancy-sounding names. They tear down all the trees, plant new ones, and then name the place something rustic like Pine Brook Meadows, Pine Lake Ridge, or Lakewood Lane. Some idiot like me is probably spinning out names like this from an advertising agency and charging a handsome fee. AI will do it better.

The signs at the mouth of the developments are proudly mounted with Pacific Northwest-inspired iconography: this one, a diorama-like cutout of pine trees just like the ones they probably cut down. In the signage industry they call these “monument signs”; more cynical graphic designers call them tombstones.

Look closely enough and you can see someone defaced this one: years back some little asshole spray painted the word FART everywhere on all the local fences and storefronts. Now you can just see the ghostlike remains of that word like the silhouette of a crooked body at a crime scene. (You need an eye for these things most people lack.)

The people I see out walking smell like fabric softener and are heads down on their phones or with their podcasts missing out on all the crowing and birdsong, the din of slow-going engines nearing. They all look freshly showered, privileged like me.

Some of the rooftops have moss killer scattered on top and some of the yards, water features. We are right on the border between the developments and real country places that contrast the manicured lawns with more white trash tendencies, like piles of yard waste debris as seen around our house.

The moss pods along the top of the stone pavers have gone a deep chocolate brown and I look forward to when they green up again with the first of the autumn rains.

My weather app says the moon is in waning crescent and will set today at 17:48. We lose about five minutes of sun a day but you lose more faster as the season wears on. You can see it’s started already if you look for it.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Poetry, prose

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest