you might get the wrong idea
the last of book tour, a bit of spring
I’m home now, at the end of a month-ish touring for Here After. I am officially no longer washing my socks in fancy sinks at hotels where I can never figure out how to turn off all the lights. (Most memorably defeated by a strip of LEDs around a mini fridge, a piercing glow against which I built an elaborate pillow wall that was incredibly ineffectual, almost as if pillows lack a stackable nature).
At home, it is the stick season: the snow nearly melted and the trees dusty brown sticks, the ground flat and dirty, almost indistinguishable from the surface of the road which is worn pale by salt left behind as the snow vanished.
There is one evergreen tree that I can see from my window in my studio, it is across the river that runs, so shallow right now that the bed of brown stones is eerily visible—as if the river is naked and I shouldn’t be looking. When I look more closely, peering left and right out of the window, there isn’t a single other evergreen this close to the river’s bank. This tree is the only one of its kind among a towering forest of bare branches.
Adrenaline is something else. I never feel on it until I am not on it. Until I am trying to lift my head through what feels like the sludge of wet cement.