{my topography}

“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’ll be back soon. I have so many stories to share…. Just trying to get back in the routine of things… (First day back to school for Bean was yesterday.)

+++
What are you doing, reading, wishing for, and eating this week?

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.