On waking

This morning I woke with a stomach ache, an ache that pushed into and from my back, to the sweet morning voices of NPR. They were raising money, I heard, and tried to break through to consciousness and press down into the mattress to exchange my ache for comfort. I heard that Tony Curtis had died, though I can't recall seeing him in any film other than the few minutes of Some Like it Hot that Jedsen showed me years ago. I woke to pain, fundraising, and death, and slanted my body toward the open window and the breeze, warmer now at dawn than it had been the night before.

Watching the sky change in the background of the BB&T skyscraper has become my favorite time of day. The few lights still glowing in the tower, and the pale beige of its stone, high, are transformed into this beautiful reflection or contrast or complement to the dawn. I cannot explain how it looks, only how it feels. It feels like this is the earth, new. There is this thing built by man first illuminated and changed, pulled out of the darkness through my bedroom window, each morning. It is in relief. It is surreal. It is the only living thing.

I want to stay in this moment all morning, swallow the image to keep it. But the sun comes, the blue lightens, and the tower becomes a mere tall building, its lights fading into the everything around it. It now longer glows, is distinct--beyond its height and still blinking red signals.

Snickers claws at my nose. Eats my hair. Stares. She has taken to licking me in the biting sort of way she does when she cleans herself. She leans down to my arm and pretends I am a kitten; I can feel the fronts of her teeth, her tongue pressed up against it and through for the more forceful cleaning. Perhaps this is a sign I should adopt another cat. Or a kitten. I would. And a dog, especially, if I could.

And this adoption thing, though it's been on my mind for some time now (again), is now forefront. I have just begun volunteering at the Spartanburg Humane Society, and last weekend was the orientation where we were told all of the statistics--incoming, outgoing, process, staff. I'm going to start out as a dog-walker, and training should be in a couple of weeks. I'm going to be a dog-walker for a couple of hours a week, though I don't know how I will stand to leave, how I will not have to compulsively walk every dog, how I will not, as I already have just by looking, fall in love with every dog that I walk.

I wake thinking of a morning walk with a dog, my dog. Up at dawn, at that best hour, walking for exercise, walking for happiness, walking for health and companionship. I would do it. But I already brush Snickers away at 6:30 when I should be getting up and ready for the gym. I already let NPR talk on and on without letting them complete, quickly, the job of waking they were sent to do. I already fail at going to the gym every morning now, and, mostly, making it by 7. I already lack the face of the man I love in the orange cast of morning, in the humid afternoon, in the shadowed clouds of sunset.

But I don't wake thinking alone. I wake smiling at dawn and its magic on the tower, the tower I have claimed, and grip the covers back under my neck, my head stretched up to catch the light.

We bring home

It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from. We bring home with us when we leave.

--Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Latte, White Mocha, White Mocha

My hands still smell like lattes. They smell like the waxy cups, like frappachino roast, like matcha. My hands just move and make and the fingers remember the grip of a cup, the heat of the steamed pitcher, the splashes of syrups.

Solitaire

Most of my wandering in the desert I've done alone. Not so much from choice as from necessity--I generally prefer to go into places where no one else wants to go. I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time. However, there are special hazards in traveling alone. Your chances of dying, in case of sickness or accident, are much improved, simply because there is no one around to go for help.

--from Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

You'll be hearing from him again soon, here, for he resonates with me and what I'm doing out here.

In time he understood

In time he understood that nature was not something outside the human world. The reverse is true. Nature is the real world, and humanity exists on islands within it.

-from Anthill by EO Wilson

Literally

I can tell you that, in the last week, I've been to Kansas and back. Just like that. And it feels like it, too. Like just five minutes ago I was walking from the economy parking lot down the sidewalk to the entrance of the tiny and wonderful (though suspiciously lacking in water fountains) Greenville-Spartanburg Airport. A few seconds later I was in descent to Kansas City International Airport, watching the clouds thicken and thin from my window seat. I had been watching the clouds all afternoon, the texture of the upper surface, some tall, some fast, some grey, and the way the sun hit and colored. I had been thinking about the difference of below, how the earth below would be in shadow, under white and lacking sun, while, geographically, I was in the same place yet in an entirely different place. There was sun, blue sky, white only below. I had also been thinking about how wonderful it is that on a plane ride your only job is to gaze at clouds and ponder the earth.

It was in this mindset that I looked for the familiarity of Kansas. As I studied the clouds, we passed through them and, just below, they parted. I fixed on a football stadium below and tried to match the layout with stadiums I have known. First I thought Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, but it wasn't large enough. Then I thought a high school, but it seemed too large. I picked up on the southside building, bright sand, without stands and surveyed its surroundings. Green with more buildings of the same hue. Red roofs on some. Scattered yet close. And then I realized. It was Lawrence.

I searched East for Massachusetts street and found a clustered, lined road. Then North to where the Kansas River should be, flowing East, and found the seemingly still brown mass curving above the town. Just above the Kaw, I followed I-70 from Lawrence to the service station in the middle of lanes to the toll booth farther down yet before Exit 410 and the Speedway. The young UMKC student sitting next to me had been shifting restlessly throughout the short flight from Dallas, occasionally peering forward to see out our window. As we passed over my former home, I pointed down with my left thumb, grinning.

"That was Lawrence," I said, and he nodded, for we had already shared our brief back stories. I smiled and followed the lines of fields and farms, highways and rays of light from the scattered clouds as we closed in on the airport. Kansas only gained this beauty, to me, when I knew I was leaving. And now I was setting down again on this ground that I had left nearly three months before, relieved in the simple curve of the earth and the plotted paths of trees, if only because I missed it and what it still held for me.

Taxiing up to the gate, I texted Jedsen, "I'm here! I'm here! I'm here!" and looked out the window once more to trace the sun down to the ground. A rainbow had formed in the few minutes since we had landed. The right side touched down, centered in my window.

"There's a rainbow," I said to the boy next to me, pointing out again that which I loved.

"There must be a pot of gold down there," he said, shifting his backpack on his shoulders, ready to be on his home ground after three months in Mexico.

I nodded and wanted to walk with him out the terminal to where I hoped to find Jedsen waiting and point to him and say, "There's the man I love."

Blown: Kansas