Category: Writing

The man at the red traffic light waits to make a left turn. The light changes. He doesn’t get the arrow. It’s a long intersection and oncoming traffic usually runs the yellow. Traffic runs the yellow. The man at the red light waits to make a left. He doesn’t get his arrow.

A glass with an inch of water sits to the right and slightly in front of the poinsettia with a broken stem. In front of that a cellphone sleek and black. A little further back, the QuickVue box with one at-home rapid test left. A pen points back at me. Still life.

Maybe it’s this cold, the glass scratch throat, and the coated tongue. Today, I can taste the cloudless sky. I can taste its color, the aging paste white and gray. It settles between my gums and lips. It lines the roof of my mouth. Drips from the back of my soft palate.

Light snow coats the ground. Winter clouds sail a strong breeze across the face of a near-full moon. This has been happening for centuries: moon, clouds, and looking up. The barren tree in the neighbor’s yard reaches skyward like an anguished hand breaking through the earth – all forearm, fingers, and tightened tendons.

Dozens of starlings peck the thawing lawn like busy fingers feverish on a keyboard. The landscape through the picture window twitches with life: sparrows, jays, cardinals, and wrens. Robins frolic in driveway puddles. Chickadees climb a rotting tree. En masse, the starlings take off with a wing-beat whir I can almost feel.

The morning sky is not starburst bright. It is not opal white. It’s not a bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter, nor is it the dust on the wooden trunk at the end of the bed. It certainly isn’t the electric blue windbreaker hanging in the closet. Maybe it’s a rhinoceros.

OMG! Raining again. Does OMG count as one word or three? Interject a semi-silly question – distract from the fact that it’s raining again. This entire morning of pissed-offedness, I thought, it’s not an atmospheric river. I compare cloudiness and rain data here with other cities. Justify my outrage. Prove I’m not crazy.

Science and astronomy say the days are getting longer (incrementally so). This is not my observation. Today feels darker than yesterday. It rained again last night. What might walking a muddy lane four times a day for two weeks teach one about the world? That it’s saturated and wet? Often, squishy underfoot?

Light on the horizon. Thin fog in the morning. Veils, covers, shrouds, blankets? This scene, hemmed in between my vocabulary and imagination.  Is it an overcoat on our neighborhood? Does it jacket the street or muffle the porchlight? We know this type of fog, eerie in its masking. Hard to grasp. Fog.  

Heavy cloud cover and steady rain shroud the morning in daemon darkness. The fires of the blacksmith’s house have been replaced by a Dunkin’ and its busy drive-thru. The marshy lane furrowed by tire tracks or hoof marks or wagon wheels glistens where the puddles run deepest. Today begins in medieval past.

Snowmelt tuns to fog. The recycling truck pulling its rickety wagon sorting bin bounces down the street dipping and rattling in winter’s potholes.  Men in neon yellow-green hoodies sort the cardboard from the cans from the plastic tubs and tubes. Wine bottles, beers bottles, pizza boxes – we ravenously consume and begin anew.