i am home

the great red tilting boat is no longer teetering on the sidewalk, slumping in the mist.

it must have floated away, or rolled down the street, or been bought, maybe even renamed, even if that is bad luck?

at dusk the light is so blue, blue cellophane wrapped sun, or sky, or eyeballs. inside our yellow kitchen the big window is a big blue square that I can see my face in.

while it snowed all day long, while this event took place i was wrapped up in the smell of caramel and orange peel and chocolate and butter. Right when the snow began I was outside picking up sticks--for kindling--for my dad to make fires. one summer I conned my parents into paying me a dollar for every basket of twigs I picked up--and did nothing but that for a week and they owed me over 100 dollars. then another year, after all those sticks has finally all been made into the beginnings of fires, I gave my dad a little card promising to pick up tons and tons of kindling--FOR FREE and I drew flames on it. after he made his fire today he went outside to admire the snow before the sand trucks came around and turned the snow from some sort of perfect, glittering event into somesort of nuisance. He wanted to smell the fire in the air also, the smell of wood burning that sits heavily in the clean cut cold air--musky--warm--metallic--ashy.

outside my window there is one little light that sticks in the ground on the path up to the porch. it is lit up and under a cap of snow, a little mound higher than the rest that is illuminates, like a beacon, or an egg. a little moon that does not move.

when I shut out my lights the ice creeping up my window sparkles. (I cannot help that I think sparkly things are so beautiful). A little colony growing, sliding, building up ever so slowly .

it is very quiet and I am thankful for that, no one banging on doors or walls. snow makes things seems more quiet. I know tomorrow there will be deer tracks and little bird feet scattered, out there they are silently moving, navigating the slippery/soft/glittery ground that is softened and curved by the thick falling of snow. Everything is paired down, every slope is more gentle, everything a rolling singular plane. except for the trees that seem very steady the way they do not in the summer.

run with it

I realized today that all my dissatisfaction is because I am not making things, and haven't been since I began fretting about this winter.