Smoke

 March 27, 2025

As I was about to leave to get out of the way of the cleaning lady, Ben the Pool Guy pulled up with my new motor, the thrice longed-for. The wait extended from January. It was installed in three minutes, and the water moved in my pond once again. I cold hear the fish taking a deep breath. Ben mocked the filthiness of my pool, so I spent time scraping truly monumental masses of muck out of it with a hoe. Drove on (the cleaning lady still hadn’t arrived) to High 5, where I sat at a table, sipped chai, and wrote, as I had not done since the beginning of COVID. The people at the table behind me gossiped about Minneapolis politics. I was able to tell them I had been there last summer. The old gents across from me caught each other up on grandchildren and gardens. At my table I began a play, my first return to theatrical writing since The Review. You don’t expect to shrink from criticism like some callow Keats, but it happens whether you approve of it or not. Drove to Reems Creek and spent $700 on mulch and dirt and plants. Frantic to be writing and gardening and painting and going to rehearsal all at once. Sky clouding before night.

From the Nursery road you see plumes of smoke rising from the mountains. Helene piled up stacks of kindling for fire to be born from and consume what was not drowned. 

A red-shouldered hawk flew low over my yard, pursued by blue jays. I stood at the door a long time, wanting her to return.

Evening: Drove to rehearsal up Sweeten Creek with the smoke of forest fires heavy around me. The smell was sweet, all that burning wood. The dimness of the air–

R led us through a rehearsal without hysteria, tangents, wasteful undirected energy.

My pair of brown thrashers has returned.