{my topography}

The coffee shop is filled with light from the big south facing window, and every table is filled with people, all talking, all sipping things or eating, leaving crumbs on the wide wood boards of the vintage farm tables, and all I can think about is how they are not here.

They haven’t been for weeks, or at least not when I am. (I hold onto this small fact, wanting to believe that maybe they just come other times, but likely it’s not true.)

I could see it, last time.

The way the steps were longer. Watching him leave and her follow after made everything in me ache. There was still snow then; now the sun is supple and there’s plenty of it, and in a week we set our clocks forward and the chlorophyll will return to the trampled lawns and the maples are already being tapped. In sugarbushes sap is running, and in his veins a slow, reluctant blood. Likely Hospice comes now to change the sheets on his hospital issue bed, and she is there, spending nights beside him; mornings; days; watching the light move across his room and trying to be brave. Trying to smile when he looks around for her, disoriented (morphine will do this) in the maze of the present that is is life, and still he won’t want to let go.

I know because I could see the last time the way he shook her off with a little impatient flick of an elbow as he made his way towards the door. So she went first, opening the door, then letting it close so that he could open it again—a thing now so important; once something unconsidered, incidental. How many times we open doors, shut them, arrive effortlessly, leave. Now leaving is everything for him. Except now it’s not about wanting to go at all.

Spring is coming and by summer he’ll have lifted off and she’ll be left with her long graying hair and the soft curves of her body, and her round cheeks that beside his make her look ever so young. And right now it’s likely she isn’t listening for the sound of the first spring peepers with an eager fluttering heart the way I am.

And right now, sitting among this robust coffee crowd, I’m wondering where the frogs are now, before the spring. Deep, deep in the mud. What do they look like there?

What do you wonder today?

“Every day is a journey,
and the journey itself is home.”

–Matsuo Basho

(Check out the entire set on Flickr.)

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.

I don’t have words. I don’t know where they’ve gone, except maybe with the dark speckled starlings, lifting off all at once from the snow flocked trees, their calls filling the silent air with abrupt, heady sound before they are gone and the fat fluffy flakes fill the impressions in the snow where their feathered bodies fluttered, fighting for crumbs.

In a moment, nothing is left of them: no memory of their stark, dark wings except my own. The bird feeder swings empty. The snow falls. This might be how a year passes, or an afternoon. This is how moments add up now, recently, without words.

So I have begun to paint again.

In the absence of words, color looms large. A particular hue of blue finds its way into almost everything: like an undertow, or the drone of a bagpipe, like something I cannot name. I paint it everywhere, almost accidentally. I’m even thinking of painting it on my dining room chairs, this color that is my soul now, at the edge of a new year, after a year of limbo, of growing, of patience, of wondrous birth of my smallest boy.

Natalie Goldberg says to go, right now and write. She says to go and write as practice, and maybe it is time that I return to this, here. Maybe there is nothing more than this in the spaces between productivity as my novel consumes me, then falls silent like the snow, like the starlings, like the quiet surprise of winter making everything the most delicate hues of white imaginable, until I want to curl aroundthe almost-ache of my own wonder at it’s whiteness.

How can there be anything but this moment? This snow, this quiet throbbing of my own embering heart at the start of winter?

This is where I am now, looking to and fro and trying to remember. What has this year been? I have everything and nothing to show for it: the accomplishments that are mine are small and enormous, both. A baby boy, a 7 minute mile, the shambles of a novel, the wonderment that we’re still here, barely, after a doozy of a year financially.

Who are we, who are not great or famous? What is the sum of lives that go by unimaginably small, like the mark left by the starlings in the snow? Except for this: inside my mind now, the world expands like bellows by a smithy’s hearth. I hold wonder. I hold fire. I hold prayer, and promise.

Who are we, who are not great, but are blessed with snow and small boys and warm bread and starlings? Across the world, and also seven miles away, someone is hungry. There are boys who stay awake at night shooting phantom villains on video games they do not understand, then come to school tight-fisted, angry, saying: “I’ll shoot you,” and meaning it in the stark, hungry way that only they can. And there are people heading up the corporation that is stealing the seeds of a biodiverse world and making them limited, presice, ingenious, terminating, so that entire populations become destitute and indebted.

Who are we, who are not great, who touch softly the cheeks of our sleeping children, feed chickens corn, paint when words don’t come? Who are we if not everything at once?

In the coffee shop I watch, furtively, knowing what I know. The light is almost unbearably golden, slanting across the ecru walls, the burnished wood floor. They’re here again, at the table next to mine.

She fixes her long gray hair, wipes the crumbs from the table, leans back patiently.

After awhile she says, “Shall we?”

And he nods.

“Are you going to drink the rest of your coffee?” she asks, standing up, gathering the plates with croissant crumbs and the wooden stir stick, broken in two parts. The broken ends are sharp.

“Yeah I might,” he says, and reaches for his cup, holding it possessively as she clears. She smiles. She knows. She puts the dishes in the bin, walks back him. She puts her hand on the back of his neck. Waits.

He doesn’t want to leave. He avoids her eyes. Looks out the window.

She sits.

“Well.” He says, and then the word just hangs in the air, softly, like cat pacing back and forth between them.

Conversation is less important, now, for him. Just being here is something. Here in this room with people’s voices rising and falling, and the rush of cold air as people open the door, order warm drinks, sit, laugh. He is thinner. His ring—a thick band that matches hers—hangs loosely around his finger. He moves slowly, listens to her talking, turns his head to look out the window and the sun illuminates his face.

“Alright,” she says. “Two more minutes, and then we really do have to go.”

She points things out to him: the man who walks with heavy footsteps. The way the house across the street has reused cardboard boxes to gather up their leaves. They know people here. They say hello, and when he gives her a questioning look, she reminds him patiently, matter-of-factly, of who they are.

Then she says, “Ok” and puts her coat on.

“Alright, let’s go.”

She puts out a hand but he doesn’t take it. Instead he stands slowly, so slowly. His belt is too large now, and he clumsily beings to unbuckle it, his fingers stumbling.

And just like that she reaches to help him—right there in the middle of the room she unbuckles his belt and cinches it tighter. Then she tries to help him with his gloves but he takes them from her. Slowly he puts them on his hands.

It takes a long time for him to get down the stairs. There will come a time when the stairs are no longer possible. A time when they will stop coming. But it’s not today. Today she pulls her sunglasses on. Turns to him, smiles.

I can’t shake this feeling: we are always losing things. Loosing each other. Losing light. Losing the our memory of the way things are right now in this moment. We are frail without tenderness, without the fleeting golden light, without coffee, without the warmth of each other’s hands.