When the macadam broke on the road it took on the texture of a lizard or elephant’s skin, deep ridges spidering out in broken patterns. It was light enough to see on my walk by the horse farms though still pre-dawn. They’d filled the cracks with a black sealant that now looked like cartoon scars, worm-like and jagged. It was basically a private road, self-maintained. I got used to the cracks and bumps as part of my morning routine. It had a peace like being in the woods though I was just 15 minutes from home, surrounded by mansions. The ultraviolet glow of screens in some of the houses giving a cold look. The cracks also looked like veins or blood vessels the way they splintered out. In fact the closer you looked the more you saw more cracks. As a kid with not much to do I’d get entranced by designs in the sidewalk like that. The haphazard pattern of breakage, beauty born out of failure.

Some of the lodge pole fencing was leaning and the leafless trees had a desperate look to them too, the way they reached out to the sky. Nature was perfect in its imperfections.

In places they’d spray painted the pavement with markers and symbols indicating where the underground utilities ran, suggesting the road was planned for development. I surely hoped not. The area was worth millions to a developer, all this open land, just a dozen houses or so. It wasn’t hard to picture it cluttered with new homes and cars, sidewalks. Harder to see it the way it used to be before. But this was the time of year we gave thought to the native people who were here first in a tribute that was really just about conquest and slaughter. I didn’t want to dampen things with my wokeness but it was true.

Some horse was smelling another one’s butt and a third one was lying on its side waving its tail like a dog. They all looked at me like disinterested union workers counting the minutes until their next break, then went back to sticking their snouts in the ground.

The leaves were tricolored in the early morning light, gold, brown and red, confined to the curbs neatly as you’d expect in a well groomed place for the rich. The leaves were perfectly symmetrical like the kind we learned to make out of paper in grade school: you drew the shapes on either side with a pencil then folded it down the middle and cut around the edges. I wondered if kids still did that. All the neural pathways built by hand. Some of the lodge pole fencing was blotched with lichen that made it look spotted, the color of toothpaste. Electrical wiring ran along the top, reminding me of a friend who once got drunk and put on an invisible fence dog collar and ran across the line to see if it would hurt (it did). In other spots the leaves were small and looked like confetti thrown from a passing parade float.

I didn’t mind the gray in the mornings but it could hang on for days like that. You couldn’t keep that gray from getting inside of you. But I was drawn to the dark and liked the weird patterns in the clouds. There was always some variation if you looked closely enough. Nature rewarded the careful observer and never uttered a word. All you had to do was look for the signs.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, prose

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