Practice breathing in and then out and then in again with nothing else in your thought but your breath.
Practice walking down the road with your small boy, just looking. Bring your camera. See if you can see things differently, even though the road and each individual tree and rut have become familiar to you, now, finally after a little more than four years of living in this place.
Trespass onto the neighbor’s field and look back at the road you’ve been walking on. Notice how everything is different. From here, your house will look small and perched, like a storybook house up on a hill, white and gabled and distant, and for a moment allow yourself to be astounded by the way your legs have carried you all this way, down the road and out into this snowy field where the tracks of voles and fieldmice make fidgety paths between patches of dried grass.
Consider your legs and lungs and breath, and feel how together they have moved you to here: each capillary thundering in minute harmony; each muscle bunchy and sure beneath your jeans, beneath your skin.
Watch your son dash pell-mell ahead and then stop. Watch how your shadow overtakes him; swallow’s him. Hold your breath as you come up next to him and watch his breath rise in the air in a cloud. Together you will look to the tree line, one that you’ve never been to, on property that is not yours. Against the snow it will look abrupt and dark with a thick row of pines just visible over the slope of a snow covered knoll.
Look down. You’ve been standing on coyote tracks. In the dusk when you aren’t present they traverses this field, tongues lolling, breath rising in frothy clouds from their mouths. They’re close, even now. You can feel them. Just there, beyond the fields, somewhere in the woods, maybe asleep or maybe watching with yellow eyes, alerted by your footsteps and the sharp ringing sing-song of your son’s eager voice.
Remember how this is always the case: how the line between you and the wild is thin like the bit of thread you find coiled in your pocket. Your fingers tease it, wanting to know how it’s wound. This is always the way: you always want to know. The thread is yellow and snarled and comes from the windowsill in the room above the garage where you write. You picked it up in the morning meaning to throw it out, but kept it accidentally.
It was from this same window that you saw the foxes last week. The ruckus of the chickens alerted you, and when you looked out a fox was right there in the snowy driveway, so close you could see the way the fur on its chest was clumped with ice.
When you pounded your fist on the glass and began to yell, it looked up, right at you, but didn’t move a muscle until you ran down and out into the snow without your hat or gloves or jacket, boots unlaced, shrieking like a madwoman. Of course it ran then, though not far at first. Just to the top of the hill by the woods and when you followed after, another joined it—they’d staked the chicken house out for sure.
Remember how you felt your heart, hard and raw and pumping in your chest after running through the snow, hair flyaway, clapping your hands. Remember how their fur was rust colored and how when they ran, they became streaks of umber like twin contrails in a dream. Remember how they were so beautiful you started to cry.
Your eyes well up now too, as you bend down with your son to examine some marks where something struggled. Wing marks make fractal circles in the snow. The air is still. The sky is pale and filled with cirrus, and along the road starlings sit on telephone wires calling to one another and lifting and alighting in sudden unison.
Put the thread back into your pocket and take a breath. Take some steps towards the road over wind blown snow. Listen. Far away down the road two men are working on a silo. They have huge cranes and their tools make hard metallic sounds that travel to you in a certain rural morse code. Clink. Clink. Clink. Hold on to this.
In your fingertips you can feel your pulse as you take hold of your son’s mittened hand.
You’re so close to what you seek that I can feel it.
Wow. Such a powerful post. Amazing.
Gorgeous. Chills! Your passage and pictures gave me chills. You also carried me as if on an arrow to a simple poem I first read 30-odd years ago, on my birthday — White Field, by Daniel Halpern. Remarkably, I think I still have the yellowed text somewhere that I snipped out of the New Yorker as a young girl. Sitting in this chair today, your words flew in like a surprise continuation. Thanks, as always, for sharing.
I felt like I was walking with you.
Beautiful.
Beautifully written as always. The string metaphor was perfect. Thank you for sharing your field notes. I am moved.
your words amaze me.
Breathing deep. Fieldnotes to self, on your blog–a beautiful concept. Playing with words, images, places, feelings, parts of life… We are there with you, in the field.
I keep thinking this week how the windows and the red/brick/pink/white/cream/dark green buildings and awnings that frame them are so thoroughly a part of my experience of seeing these windows, as I look out my own window. Yet rarely, if ever, do I think about how there are colors, shapes, around my own window that all those people I see experience when they look across at me.
Thinking about perspective I guess. Going into the neighbor’s field, seeing a tree line from a different angle, made me think of it.
Last thought: the photos bring so much to the writing. Wonderful!
reminds me of Dillard or Oliver in subject and style. Nice.