You get enough light to walk by now a half an hour before sunrise. Still it was too dark and I jumped the gun driving to the state park in the rain. You could see it in the headlights and my rain jacket wasn’t the best. Sometimes I would just turn around. Other times it was nice to walk in the rain. I sat in the car for a while writing, listening to Alice Coltrane chanting on the aux, the sound of the heater and wiper blades. Then I put my hood up and got out.

They still had the cougar warning signs up at the state park with a list of Dos and Don’ts at the trailhead, the silhouette of a sleek-looking cat. There for a time I was diligent about bringing bear spray or whistles or knives but now it was just my stick. I don’t think they’ll ever take the sign down, that was last summer. Now you see people out everywhere with their kids, dogs, bikes: no one has bear spray or whistles or knives.

I would do the horse farms in the dead of winter and Soaring Eagle when the days were getting longer again. February was a good time to switch routines: the month was named for a Roman purification ritual, originally the last month of the year before things reset in March. Pay your debts, atone, start anew.

Since New Year’s I’d reconnected with two old friends I lost touch with. I messaged one of them on New Year’s Eve and the other messaged me in parallel. They didn’t know each other. But it was good reconnecting with people I thought I’d lost. It was so easy and satisfying. Sitting across from an old friend at a coffee shop, catching each other’s eyes and holding them, like saying I know you on some deeper level. The past rejoined with the present.

The other friend I hadn’t talked to in so long I couldn’t remember the last time. Maybe 2002? We’d known each other almost 10 years when we lost touch and he’d moved back East. We talked on the phone for 45 minutes Sunday; his voice was the same. And now I’m taken back to those times in meditation, remembering the people we both knew in Pittsburgh or Seattle, wondering where they are now. Detailed, weird dreams.

The knife was pure Damascus steel with a camel bone handle, and my uncle said he wore it cross-draw style, got it on Amazon for $19. So I got one too. It complied with open carry knife laws in our state; the blade was just the size of my thumb. But with the snug grip on the camel bone handle you could be stealth about it, and I practiced wielding it in the mirror by the hall tree. The knife wouldn’t do jack shit with a cougar, it was more the idea of feeling safe. In fact I wondered why my uncle was wearing one in public and what was going through his mind. It was probably best I stopped giving my money to Amazon.

As the sun rose it turned the sky a very light gray, the color of ash or snow. It was easy to feel the seasonal depression tugging at your side, always just behind the curtain, off stage. You had to get out and walk, even in the rain. I would glaze over on the couch watching it too. Already the hellebores were coming back, stretching out their necks. Bits of life here and there in the dirt. It was a short month and the light was different, though still the color of bone.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

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