Repeat

The sun dangles slightly right of the backyard pine. In some sort of winter aberration, the temperature is not warm but it's not freezing, either. I step onto the back deck barefooted and short sleeved. Immediately steam rises from my coffee mug and the ends of my red-gold hair glow in my peripheral vision. My shoulders and chest curl inward at the sudden chill; it's much colder than it looks. The dog catches the scent of a large opossum crawling along the back fence line. The opossum has the chance to escape through a missing plank in the fence into the neighbor's yard, so I let the dog run after it. All she can do is bark; she fires off six yelps in a row and then looks back at me. Repeat. Repeat.

On my day off: roasted root vegetables, pot roast and swearing off coffee, again. Yesterday's shift at the greenhouse tested mind, soul and body. MAGA-mongers and halftime haters made conversations difficult. The last two hours of the day were excruciating on my body. The work isn't the problem; the disease is. Let's see how it goes. Let's build stamina. Let's decide later if it's possible. The body makes its own plea: Advil, icing, arnica, stretching, Epsom bath, roller massage, turmeric tea, CBD cream. Repeat. Repeat.

Clouds gather and pile like day-old ash. West Michigan falls back into her normal, tucking sunlight away for another day. With cold coffee and aching hips I think about it. This. And how all ideas can be affirmed and all ideas can be negated. We live in a world of relativities and cannot assert any thing or idea beyond a conclusion of subjectivity. Yet one keeps on trying to imagine this way or that. We ask questions that have projected answers and we fold and refold maps that only show estimations of where one could possibly be. Why do we allow our minds to hunt for that which life does not offer? One travels in these coils. Repeat. Repeat.

Moonlight and starlight remain at a distance. I miss how stars would fill the lake on a summer night; how I could swim to the moon in warm, black water; how crickets' perfect lullabies would even float out to the sedated raft. Longing for the beautiful things does not mean I don't remember how frightening those same times could be – imagining huge dead trees and stacked boulders under the water, giant muskies lurking in the seaweed forests, and the inability to see any thing or any one. But in the deepest, darkest February nights, the memory of water is a comfort. Checking for stars, swimming in sleeplessness, remembering you. Repeat. Repeat.

daylight opossum –
a lumbering gray
hesitates