It was really hard to sit in the dark in the early morning and do nothing. Blame it on the coffee but my mind raced. There was an odd peace at that time of day standing in the yard with just the moon and stars, the first autumn frost. But the deep-down worker part in me wanted to be productive and make use of my time. Instead I forced myself to sit on the sofa by the candlelight until 0400 before setting out for my walk.

The stars seem different this time of year and where we live there’s little ambient light to crowd them out. I’ll walk to the horse farms where the sky opens up and do a loop. In one direction you can cut through a grassy pasture with horse trails but it gets too muddy after the rains set in so I stick to the road. The horses are in their sleeping area with a string of white Christmas lights glowing. A few are out milling about with their coats. There’s a distinct smell to horses I can’t describe but it’s like the earth, wild and real.

It should be obvious there’s no one out at this time of day and I’d be scared if there were. An older retired guy puffing along with his headlamp and German shepherd, trodding up the road in his sweat pants. Whenever we talk he seems high on life, glad to not be working and still be alive.

It’s hard to just sit on the couch and do nothing so I write to loved ones and read the news and imagine myself doing something worthy, like meditating or launching a new creative project but I never do. I just while away the time. Then I think about the compounding effects of that and grow sad. So I write to beat back that feeling and do something.

Along the edges of the horizon the dark was softening to a faint turquoise and looked dramatic with the calligraphic silhouettes of the tall trees. I’d often say a wish for someone and today it was for Dawn, how much light she brought me. How comforting to think of her just before sunrise. I caught a comet as I was thinking about my mom and made a wish for her too.

The next door neighbors who were overly enthusiastic about Halloween now had a fuller display going, a curtain call for the undead lined up at the bottom of their driveway. We’d reduced our display down to a couple witches and a skeleton. One of the witches was hung just outside the window by the kitchen table dangling from a tree, a large cartoon face with plump cheeks and a long nose smiling menacingly, big eyes and a pointy cap.

Driving home yesterday someone had a decapitated head attached to the back windshield of their pickup and from the trailer hitch something flesh colored and bloody dangling, perhaps a set of hands clasped. It was unclear if the hands and head were part of the same theme (like had the hands come off at the same time as the head through a staged accident) but maybe it wasn’t as well choreographed as that. Still I could not stop staring at the head and hands and got dangerously close trying to. Were they hands or genitalia? Pig hooves? In fact they were delicate, small lady hands with some of the fingertips missing. They were tied by a string to the back of the truck like a trophy from a medieval warfare scene.

In a world like this, who needs fiction?

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Humor, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, pacific northwest, prose