At last all the leaves were down. I used the tractor to grind them to bits and the blower to scatter the remains.

In no time I’d been to Portland and back to the dark of my morning den. The candle burning low / wrapped in blankets in the corner of the sofa / same as before. The days taking their good old time. Scents of cinnamon and burning wax.

A late-night, early-morning haze made the firs look ghostly the way the neighbor’s porch light cast shadows. But for as chilly and dank as it looked I longed to be out walking through the dark, ruminating in it.

The earth looked picked clean and bare. I kept my shirt tucked in to trap my body heat and wore gloves and a hat. Pretended I was in the mountains though it was just the suburbs. The leaves were the worst over our sports court, the brown maples ground down to a sludge like milk-soaked bran cereal. I used a deck brush to sweep it clean, retied a tarp around the patio furniture. The yard looked desperate and soggy. But spring came fast to the Pacific Northwest.

In the morning the heater groaned as the vents rattled and the engine blew. It was a comforting sound, a low rumble. The sound of winter. With the windows sealed shut everything shifted in on itself, a season of reflection and collapse. Just like the earth.

There was a wind advisory in effect but it never amounted to much. Still, some gusts blew the last of the leaves hanging about the garden beds. I had the image of a cartoon Greek god of the winds, always aggressively male and Aryan, with cheeks swollen and lips pursed, blowing WHOOSH —

I fiddle-fucked in the yard, rounding up more leaves, tearing out dead things, primping. The volunteer fern fronds broke off easily enough but still when you packed the debris into a garbage tote it was heavy, had real weight. My friend in Portland’s dad died recently and for some reason he had his ashes in a gym bag by the fireplace, said he needed to get them back to Connecticut but you can’t take ashes on planes.

Before dusk fell if it was clear I’d do a short loop around the yard to take in the vibe of peeping birds and little sounds. With it so wet there was a chill distinctly different about. There was still a ghostlike thing in one of the neighbor’s bushes that was hard to ignore, a sheet with a human form tied inside. Others hung from trees like corpses, scenes from a medieval battlefield.

It was always this hour I liked best when winter came and the dusk fell and there was some color in the sky. The remains of a jet’s arc like a child’s chalkboard scrawl. All these big beautiful trees around us, pushing up. With no winds they just stood there still and silent gazing down.

Nothing was better than the look of the sky at dusk after a rare snow when the sky took on the reflection from the ground and turned a deep indigo, the phosphorescent blue of some deep underwater sea-scape. I loved the dark of winter, it had more depth.

The neighbors still had some Halloween-themed lights going, which I combatted with a fake Christmas tree by the desk in my office facing their place. It gave a warm, white counterbalance to their queer orange and purple.

The dog was incontinent and had to be fitted with a diaper now and when she wagged her tail the sound was audible like a windshield wiper.

The birch trees at the end of the driveway were the color of bone and crumbling. The moss, when the low-angled light caught it, electric green and sparkling with dew / alien green like an oversaturated photograph.

When it got real quiet you could tune in to the din of the distant freeway cut through the foothills, extending all the way from Seattle to Boston. The dog sat waiting for someone to come home though the ground was cold and wet. I waited too. There was nothing much to say about anything so I turned out the light.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, death, Diary

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