Category: Writing

Frosty morning light, late April. A few birds chitter in the trees. Their songs more reserved, less exuberant than on warmer days. The cold shocks the waking world back into its shell, grinds to a halt the progress of spring’s bloom. The bluing sky looks crisp and thin. Winter pays another visit.

A chained dog (black and white) barks as we walk past. My dog stops to sniff the base of the stop sign. Near this intersection, a dog once broke its chain and killed another dog. I tug and drag. He’s an anchor insisting on sniffs. I mutter “why are you so difficult?”

A propeller plane crosses the sky faster than the white clouds drift. Once in the Mississippi Delta, a yellow crop duster flew low and near the highway – cotton fields. I held my breath as we passed. It was smaller than this plane. Both broke the silence, churning and chopping the blue-sky air.

On the umber-stained deck, pollen clumps in yellow dots like plastic stars glowing in the bedroom night.  A robin cuts the air with a sharp arc turn – lands in a weedy patch of grass. Behind me, I hear the static crackle of squirrels scrabbling up the loose bark of an aging pine.

Blue Jays scream… and scream and scream. Last week’s maple buds unfurl to waxy leaves of purplish-red, wine, fandango, and smitten eggplant. Each one a jazzberry jam popstar in the sparkling light – their Byzantium dawn. Pollen dusts the car, the railing, the backyard deck.  Eyes itch… and itch and itch. Jays scream.

The sun is out and there’s another article about the chatbot telling lies. I can’t rule out that this is all fiction. The sun, the dog licking his paw, the chatbot’s lies, the stories about the chatbot’s lies. This is just another tale about a guy waking on a sci-fi sunny day.

Song lyrics dance on the mind’s stage and just as quickly exit with a vaudeville hook. Talk is cheap, my darling. Eyes close, thoughts doze. This is the half-dream state of late evening. “Hime for treason” isn’t a sentence. Write it anyway. Words that aren’t words, write anything that crosses this canvas.

Winter’s gray chill returns. It’s snowing – though just a little. Yesterday morning, a man was found dead at the base of a parking garage – the second death near a high-rise garage in the past month. In this town, bodies fall: balconies, garages, construction sites. It’s snowing again. Here, the precipitation is different.

Wind whips rain. It’s not yet time to put away the heavy coat. The young tree in the back yard hosts two mourning doves. No buds yet, maybe a late bloomer. Distrustful of spring’s fickle warmth, perhaps it waits for more seasonable days. Perhaps it has decided to not return at all.  

Purple mist, sparrow, and finch. The grackle squawks like a rusty hinge, a metal pail swaying on a weathered nail. Hot coffee in a smooth, orange mug. We rise, we rise in the flannel cool. Behind the trees, the sun wakes from blush to blaze to glory rays heralded through thinning clouds.

The line of five short trees blooming white and green pokes above the roof-line like cotton swab tips. Out front, the maple buds turn plum. Dead branches hang bone brittle and barren. The rain stops, the gray sky brightens. I squint. Two robins race down the drive springtime splashing in new puddles.

In the sun-yolk dawn a wasp sleeps in the top, right corner of the sliding screen door that I’ve cracked an inch hoping she might find her way out. The light sparkles in my eye, blinds me. The day will warm. The wasp will wake. About everything else, I’m not so sure.