After getting my ears pierced I thought my life would change but of course it didn’t, not one bit. This is what inclines people to get more holes or tattoos. The Hole That Can Never be Filled.

It got so dark so fast and somehow I’m always surprised by this, every year. The coming dark at 4 felt ominous as I rounded the house putting things away, circling the yard for dog poop, eying the suspicious tree on the neighbor’s yard.

I now had two arborists on the case, to assess if that tree was hazardous and needed taken out. I even snuck onto their property (we have no fences, the boundaries are somewhat loose) to see if there were any funny mushrooms around the base but there was only one garden variety sort (looked like a cremini) and another, that looked like a blackened scrotum. We’d see what the arborists had to say about that. Our neighbors didn’t have the money to remove that tree but a few years ago we’d paid to do one on their property and now it was their turn, I thought.

By 6 I was taking my bath and reading, trying to stay awake until 8. Dozing off at 7:30 was pathetic. But with the time change it felt normal. The days drained down and sometimes I wondered what I was doing with my life. Dawn was taking an AI filmmaking class at the university and tied up with that. Charlotte, competitive dance every night. I didn’t gamble or lift weights or drink or watch sports so it was just me and my book and the bath, then bed.

But maybe the seasonal change required some actual observance, to acknowledge the loss of light and shift my patterns to be more cavelike than normal. So after dinner I got into my bedroom/office, shut the door and lit some incense. Slowly we’d been primping things up, like dusting the nightstands or cleaning the toilet. Both could go undone for a very long time. Until you could draw things in the dust or the toilet bowl had a five o’clock shadow under the lip.

There was a wind advisory in effect until 0500 with strong northerly gusts so I got more non-ethanol gas for the generator. They said with that type of gas + fuel stabilizer it could last upwards of a year (normal gas goes bad fast). So I stocked up. Last November’s bomb cyclone was unique in that the winds came from the east, which they never do. The extreme low pressure system sat over the Pacific to our west, sucking winds easterly through the interstate that cuts across the Cascade mountain range. That turned I-90 into an evil flute channeling those strong winds right through the foothill communities like ours, making match sticks out of our conifers. There are still a few homes in our vicinity being rebuilt, that were totaled. We had half a dozen trees or more come down on our little road. (So I’m not being a total freak worrying about it.)

This morning on my walk I thought about stocking up on water and canned tuna in case the shit ever really hits the fan (earthquake, nuclear war, etc.). Whenever I have thoughts like this a) I never wind up buying anything and, b) I think about Cormac McCarthy’s book The Road. And then I imagine getting a gun so I can shoot any zombie/cannibal types coming for my kids. Instead I would favor offing myself in the garage with the car fumes. Those musings never end nicely, nor does the world I guess. It’s easier to take a bath and not think about it.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Errata, musings

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest