There’s just an inch of pink in the sky in a sea of clouds. The clouds are a Rothko in shades of gray, swollen at the bottom. But the clouds move fast and offer more strands of pink below, a strip-tease exposing some blue. And everywhere at the horse farms the tall grasses are the color of sand and leaned over. The outer lying grass Irish green. Clots of upturned soil and wood chips for gardening. Some bare trees adorned with glass ornaments. Fake deer illuminated with white lights, red bows and silver balls hung by their necks. The birch trees are bone white with horizontal stripes like the necks of some gazelle in the bush country. Look closely and everywhere at the fringes there is moss. It’s like the world has been spray painted in lichens: the orange graffiti lichen, the pendulous beard lichen that hangs from trees, the black map lichen patterns on rocks, pixie cups, bryoria. Nightshades, glacial errata, English ivy, Himalayan blackberries. Exposed roots at the base of these trees like bare knuckles gripping a purse. Evidence of moles across the pasture. Horses posed for a painter.

The best day of Christmas break is the first day, the very beginning my dad said, because now we have the entire break before us. He said that in the ‘70s when I was 6 or 7. I still remember the scene, in the stairwell of that apartment where I grew up on Lehigh Street. I told dad I remembered him saying that earlier this year but I’m not sure he heard me or it registered. Still these are the things that bind us, the banal bits of our lives. The broken parts that fall to the bottom of the bag.

I have taken down all I can this year, shaking the sifter. Diaries we write for ourselves, stories are for others. Thanks for being a part of mine.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, prose

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest, Poetry