We took our breakfast to go, and ate in the woods, among the birds and deer.
It was as lovely a way to say goodbye as there is.
Some sunflowers to cheer me up. I'm mesmerized by their spiral centers.
A clean house, a full pantry, wonderful friends, and a head full of ideas and patterns.
I think these next few months will go by quickly.
And happily.
3 comments:
I'm going to be on my own too. I'm moving back to Toronto at the beginning of September, and Keith won't be joining me for two months.
I will be thinking of you :)
Dearest K, on this, your next in an ongoing series of prime-numbered birthdays, a waxing on indivisibility.
Happy birthday, and much love.
(n.)
...
Four slices of Real Swiss Flavor Meltable Vegetarian Slices – expiration date November 2007; a coffee stained white t-shirt; two $20 bills in a torn envelope and some loose change; a giant pink-striped woman with pink top-hat clutching a terrified pink-bowed poodle to her face, both looking like the woman just might eat the poodle; 85 degrees and mostly cloudy: unlikely edges bolstering the eternal moment of now, on her 31st birthday.
On the day before her 31st birthday, she took her breakfast to go and ate it in The Woods, a 6-foot by 12-foot asphalt-sheeted landing out back where sunflowers grow. Not a woods in the traditional sense, of course, The Woods sits at the bottom of a canyon whose existence is owed to forces far more ingenious than gravity and water – there is no water at the bottom of the canyon. One part tar and cement, four parts brick, and one part 85 degrees and mostly cloudy, and yet sunflowers grow – impossibly straight out of the brick. The Woods: an almost verdant patch of negative space built by the building of positive spaces around it – a negative space offering refuge from the austerely positive spaces around it. Not quite alone with her breakfast in this accidentally fashioned negative space, she sees clearly the patterns at the edge of the eternal moment of now reflected in the lines of a few intrepid sunflowers growing impossibly from the sheerest, most adroitly fashioned right-angle canyons. The Woods offers some bits of happiness.
Here, on the day before her 31st birthday, are the bizarre edges of the eternal moment of now. Here, on the day before her 31st birthday, the sunflowers were not looking nearly as good as she was, this late-summer youngest child. Here, on the day before her 31st birthday, she listened to the quiet of The Woods and the unquiet of the positive space around it, imagining a place where the desert and the sea sit down for a long evening of reminiscing. Perhaps on her 32nd birthday she would reminisce with them.
And then, on her actual 31st birthday – despite the Real Swiss Flavor Meltable Vegetarian Slices seeming not to unpass expiration, despite the coffee seeming not to undrip from the white t-shirt, despite the two $20 bills and the small pile of spare change, despite the woman seeming not to actually eat the poodle, and the poodle seeming still not to know if it is in fact about to be eaten – on her actual 31st birthday, she glanced a tiny moment out into The Woods, down into the canyon where she took her breakfast, not quite alone among sunflowers the day before and saw clearly the patterns of the ephemeral edges – in that flash of a moment on her actual 31st birthday, and not a moment before, her indivisible soul turned lucent.
Lori, I'm sorry that you'll be going through this, too. It's not too fun. But I think after a short while, it gets better.
(n.), my dear friend, thank you for twice now leaving me speechless.
Post a Comment