a first friday

I work retail in town, in books, shelving words and building brief homes before realizing it’s not time to be home yet, it’s time to be working, and so I revive, a person underwater up for air.

I’d hoped to write these blogs without any I or me or us or we in them. Nothing of myself but the put-together of letters. Now I’m here and the place is a yard of personal pronouns, like a yard of old cars or a yard of rusting machinery but never so cool as either of those. Those are the places I drive by and want to stop, to poke around, to find a perfect hubcap or rake or to photograph the dying blue or green or orange paint of the contraption that so slowly, leisurely, decomposes.

The covered bridge crosses now ragey thick water, a wooden and white structure good for bouncing sound year round and in the summer a dim and cool break and in the winter a good close vantage point to all the action in the river near beneath it.

Yesterday for a while we planted tulip bulbs in borders. This is what I’ve missed: the abundance of visible life through winter – not so much people life or wildlife or pets that’ve grown their furs a little thicker, but the plants that take the dishing of rain and do something with it already in February. February! It’s unbelievable, but I’m ready to be convinced again. The colors will be pinks and reds and purple stripes and orange and there will be fluff and best of all, first of all, the leaves spearing through soil to show us that they did as we’d hoped – took root, advantage of the climate. Tulips are my favorite.

Last week we found the Chandler & Price in Hillsboro and then went to a Wonderland where we saw a little hitched white horse in the street. The end of the year is near. Have you found your theme yet? You might choose from these: monsters, mustaches, squids, octopuses, owls, and pretty or cool, or pretty and cool, baubles. Did you know that octopuses will eat their own legs to survive while guarding strings of young? If I’ve been had by this fact – as in if this is not so much a fact as a fiction – then I might prefer to remain in the dark, because it’s pretty beautiful, that devotion.