Category: Daily Fifty-Two

It was dark. Now it’s pale and light. My fingers sting from the cold air walk. Jacket weather – this again. The dog shakes a spindly toy squeaky chicken with long and crinkly legs. His play is violence. A reminder that in the calm of dawn, somewhere, something is being torn apart.

Rain. The wind isn’t strong. It blows and rustles enough to be heard. This is the first day of fall. Autumnal equinox – two words that sound better when one pays attention to the syllables or lingers in the half-light / half-dark space between them… words falling and tumbling like the morning wind.

It’s dark. There are no morning noises and I’m waiting for the dawn. When the hum of the refrigerator clicks and stops, its presence (absence) becomes clear. Through the trees just beyond the parking lot, red taillights at the donut shop – different morning, different routine. I am struggling to fill this space.   

Between the aloe plant’s tentacles, two skinny stalk mushrooms sprout. I imagine being small. I imagine being under them. Pleated whitish-green button caps the color of glow-in-the-dark moons unfurl high like canopies. I think of the cool shade they would cast – how they might keep me dry in a pouring rain.

The world was busy and rush-hour loud. Dusk waited patiently for quiet before opening the door to night. The lawnmower next door stopped, the traffic on the thoroughfare hummed but no longer raced muffler loud and engine screaming. Even the sirens finished putting out their distant fires. Darkness and quiet, cool September.

The dog nudges my hip with his nose. He sniffs the air and whines. His wagging tail whips me as he walks away. Two birds are talking somewhere out of view. The backyard maple, maybe three years old, is browning at the top. Sunlight cuts shadows on the deck. The dog waits.

Ground fog hangs over a wide and weedy field gone feral. The sun glow orange rises over the distant hills. Two jays scream and chase a cooper’s hawk and high above in the thinning blue, two contrails form an x. This is the sky-stretched flag of departures – a nation going somewhere else.

Dissecting the waffle begins by removing the left two columns of pockets first. Then removing the right two columns – leaving a strip of syrupy buttery waffle middle three columns wide. Next the top two rows followed by the bottom two rows. The last bite, a nine by nine. Repeat. Every day.

Six minutes before the dog gets fed, a jay screams from a bush in the front yard. A touch of pink lights the horizon out back – another arrival of sorts. Gray clouds drift like continents, archipelagos in tow. Soon the world will yellow and wake. Watch and wait – there goes Madagascar.

Four long-sleeve, button-down dress shirts hang like the shell of a man over the back of a dining room chair: white with blue pattern, blue and silky, blue herringbone, darker blue. Here is where some part of me, that other me, shorn and disassembled waits stacked at the end of each day.

Through a break in the clouds – the pale blue light of morning. The sky moves slowly from left to right – rearranges itself. In this half-light, the white trim on the neighbor’s red shed seems almost phosphorescent. I can smell a clementine souring in the stoneware bowl on the table. Everything is changing.

Uniform and flat, the sky is an empty planetarium screen, primer gray and vinyl smooth. Someone forgot to roll the film – the one where the wisps of clouds mix and drift and starlings streak at improbable angles. It’s as if we’re in a made-up town waiting for someone to yell action.