windows

the neighbor's kitchen window hangs mere feet from our bicycle shed door. at night, it is a lit rectangular portal into a tidy, dated room with sunny yellow wallpaper and a hanging calendar that always shows the proper month. during the days, when the sun can bounce just enough of its rays to reach the sill, toy potted plants dance to signal that their solar panels have been activated.

sometimes, i see the old lady who lives there, always in a comfortable gown, hunched with her head at a painful angle, shuffling towards the sink. her aides are never far, but they leave her the space to maintain her dignity.

sometimes, an aide comes out to sweep the walkway. once, i left the shed at the same time, and she jumped, yelped, and then said hello out of embarrassment.

i always wave to them; they look happy, and that makes me happy.

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25 August 2018 21:36

yelling

"i just walked up to her and said, 'i wanna give you a biiig hug,' she looked so bad," the extremely friendly lady told me as we huddled under the sushi restaurant awning. water jumped the curb and lapped at our feet, shin-deep in the streets already. a stressed out mother was screaming at her screaming toddler.

"she was just having a rough day," i agreed. moments earlier, my awning-buddy chased someone off who was trying to call the police on the mother. "i saw it, too. the kid was okay, everyone was just stressed out. it happens."

in a moment, a car started backing in tentatively to the spot the mother vacated. "you've got room!" yelled my awning-buddy. "you've got room!"

she jumped into the street again, umbrella doing little to keep her dry, and enthusiastically waved the new car into its spot. "you know a place to get pizza around here that's not mercurio's?" she asked me once she returned.

"honestly, i don't get pizza this side of town often."

we exchanged names, at her prompting, shook hands, and then she strolled back into the deepening stream in the street towards a bar on the other side.

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03 July 2018 23:33

drawls

i miss the way southerners say certain words.

when i was getting a backcountry permit, the ranger asked me what kind of vehicle to register for trailhead parking.

'it's, uh, a honda cb500...'

he paused and looked up at me from the computer, an eyebrow raised. 'you rode your mow-der-sah-kull here? from pittsburgh?'

'yep.'

'what an edvaynchur,' he said, laughing as he punched in my license plate.

i once asked someone where he was from, and he said, 'booooone, nath kehlahnuh.'

it's a soft drawl i'll slip back into in certain contexts, like i'm pretending that the three years i spent after i was born in north georgia had any effect on my linguistic habits.

but i always say, 'hey, y'all,' when i'm addressing a room of people i hardly know.

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19 June 2018 01:14

puzzles

the local library branches lay out jigsaw puzzles for the general public. i hover over them, anxiously, at times; they are a heatsink for extraneous energy that needs to be rapidly dumped. sometimes, people stop and chat at me while i'm quietly sorting pieces, and i rarely want to chat back. sometimes, another silent pair of hands join me, and we each stake out our quadrant of the mat.

it irritates me greatly when i arrive at a partially-completed puzzle and prior participants have clearly haphazardly assembled pieces far out of position. the pieces align in a grid; my intuitive extrapolation of the image onto the grid is clearly not shared by all. but, i talk myself down from this, because the puzzle is a shared resource. the puzzle is not mine alone to complete.

sometimes i arrive at a bare mat, and instead of assembling pieces, i start sorting them and grouping pieces that will obviously join, leaving the satisfaction of clicking together the protrusions to the next person. their delight at having so many easy connections to make is contagious, and i feed on the sense that collectively we have done something good.

sometimes, i want to stay and finish the puzzle. sometimes, i cannot bear to walk away and leave gaps. sometimes, the notion of completing it breaks my heart, because i know that until a new puzzle arrives, subsequent contributors will have nothing to do.

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12 June 2018 22:06

running

slog uphill, because that's how you earn the downhill flight. there's been inches and inches of rain; mud splashes up to my thighs. i pass a trail crew, taking a break from cutting ditches for fresh logs, holding their hands up while standing in a circle.

'run through, run through!' one of them shouts to me; i hold my hands up in the same positions, skipping through their circle, spinning in circles, laughing while i almost slip in the gravel.

'be careful,' the crew leader at the next worksite shouts, as i skip over mud pits and vault past tape they've tied across the trail between trees to mark off the next drainage ditch they want to carve. 'go through, be careful.'

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11 June 2018 23:00