Category: Writing

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.

A soft rain mutes the morning. No warbles or tweets, no traffic, just patters and burbles as if the gutters were talkative rainforest brooks. I can’t write today’s date without saying it in my head – where the two numbers hang slow and heavy. I wonder if it’s quiet and raining in Shanksville.

The marching band warms up at seven-fifteen. This is the first home football game of the year. The morning air is crisp and the sky is a swirl of gray-white wispy clouds. This is fall in a university town. I hear the horns. I hear the drums. Mostly, I hear the drums.

Night lifts. The trees and roof-lines are shrouded in fog. The world feels far through this cotton glass. The lattice pattern on the black, faux wrought iron table, shines glazed in dew. Traffic hums but only when I listen. A single chirp counts the slow beat of time – maybe it’s a chickadee.