For as much as I liked walking in the dark it was much better in the pre-dawn, more color in the sky. Nobody out on a Saturday but me and the rabbits. More reason for the owls hooting I guess. If you were lucky with the dawn you’d get streaks of pink and that gave everything a cool soft glow.

When the light rose in the sky it made the edges of the rooflines sharp and what leaves were left in the trees, a rich pattern of shapes. Some low-lying fog over the meadows where the horses roamed and sometimes deer or coyotes.

These were the best times for photographers or landscape painters because of the light. All the subtle colors came to the fore. The willows drooped and the maples burned brick-red. Nothing like that bright turmeric against the dark forest greens.

Our arborist explained more about the Doug Firs, how the co-dominant ones are problematic at the stress line where the trunks diverge and create a V. They’re prone to splitting there.

All the fog blurred the trees and this made me want to be up in the mountains again, in the snow. Boy did the days end quickly though if you were camping in it this time of year. And it took forever in the mornings for things to thaw out. I got plantar fasciitis that way I think, kicking the hard ground to get my frozen boots to soften.

Those pink streaks were a crude rouge for a half hour at most and then faded into the blue. For the time being it burned like a soft coal fire.

The neighbors were smoking grass and man it smelled amazing. (It actually smelled horrible unless you were a former stoner and had ties with that skank.) A quiet Saturday morning with the sun low, just filtering through the last of the autumn leaves. To be baked and gazing out from my window with the reggae program on. Was so glad I was not.

Today I went nuts on the leaves, wanted them all gone. It’s hard to be super precise and perfect and get every one but you can bet I tried. In parts of the yard where the leaves got trapped in drain rock or more ornamental beds and it wasn’t practical to use a blower or rake I removed them by hand, a finicky practice I learned from my mother-in-law. You could really get rid of every leaf that way if you wanted. I would take the opportunity to stretch my hamstrings or squat, some yogic breathing perhaps, enjoying the rhythm of the birdsong, the distant yard engines revving, and genuinely blissed out on life. Plus when I was done everything looked immaculate.

The radio was playing one of my rock crushes, Beth Gibbons from Portishead. She was doing that bleak Górecki Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) with the Polish National Symphony Orchestra. Pure melancholic bliss. On Spotify if you scrolled down you could get even more of that through a playlist called Sad Classical. I figured I wasn’t ready for that yet.

Sitting in the dark of a Sunday morning alone with the cat, waiting to see what color would come up, you could mourn for the past or how the kids were grown and gone. There were just as many reasons to be happy. I preferred Sad Classical.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, prose

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