Washed

The sky today looked like cotton dipped in liquid coal. I walked home slowly as the smell of waiting rain gathered between the ground and sky. I sat in bed to work. There was a soft pitter patter, like horses in the distance. I opened my door and watched as the wood on my porch darkened under the weight of new water.

Dust turns to cement as rain plops down. You run your finger over a car, banister, or railing and you get a glue that you can use to cement your other rained out memories to the one you're making now. No one speaks. Birds only whisper. The water has the floor and it always says the say thing, only its volume changes. Soft, the little pitter-pat of drops wandering down to the ground, loud smacks as the rain is spit from the sky.

Water can sprinkle onto a bare forearm. It can sit, more welcome than sweat, reminding you that your skin is breathing. It can wander down your arm, past and through invisible hair, leaving a rumor of goosebumps in its cool trail. It can drift down to the ends of your empty hands, hanging onto lonely fingers, never wanting do crash down to the ground. This is the company nature gives.

The mist and clouds and fog and rain and dew wash the grass and roads. Why should your skin seek better? Congealing in the early morning on mailboxes and bicycle seats, reminding us in the quietest hours that we are not as lonely as we think. It is there. It is waiting. It will condense and clean our filthy skin.

A crisis of understanding

Snow freezes in its fall, lingering in the sky and above the ground. All sound gets sucked up, soaked up in the flakes as a hush settles down around your shoulders and nestles up behind your ears daring you to make a sound. I'm too scared to, I don't know about you.

I'm prone to wander. I'm prone to leave the God I love.

But I fight it and I push it back and I remember that the impossible is what makes my life worth living. Life is just the membrane, living is the fruit inside. But sometimes everything I want and feel is soaked up, sucked into the frozen snow. What I know to be true and lovely is broken into thousands of tiny pieces that fit nicely in the cracks of miniscule ice crystals and I wonder if it will ever be warm enough to get them out.

My breath clouds into the black space, light bouncing off the snow on the ground and the snow in the air to cut though my exhale. An elk fades into view. I wonder if he's symbolic. I don't move. He looks around. The stars begin to separate themselves from the snowflakes. The world is coming into view and I can feel love beginning to thaw under my frozen skin and the snow begins to move. It drifts down, leaving my hope and faith lingering in its ghostly shadow, hanging in the air between me and the animal. I breathe. It breathes. Everything is collected in the plumes and I feel my faith begin to take a beautiful, shapeless form. The deer turns and leaves me quickly. I feel the blood rush to my face as my heart begins to beat again.

A rambling clambering for summer to break

There's a smell in the early morning, you know. When you crouch down, just after dawn, when you lean into the grass and wait for the rest of the world to catch on that it's daytime, there's a smell in the dew of the grass that is getting your feet wet. All of your feet too, the bottom, the top, the little parts that are tucked away between your toes, the little spots you thought you hid so well. Surprise, the morning is hard to hide from.

Summer mornings. When you're up way before you have to be because the sun is lonely. When everything still feels free even though responsibilities are solidifying as the dew evaporates, but right now don't worry about it. Right now just feel it between your toes.

Something nostalgic. Some kind of English countryside where your mother or your aunt or a family friend read you Beatrix Potter stories and you assumed one day you would live that life. You assumed that one day you would buy a house, find a lover, build a chair that would always feel that way and keep you in a moment in time when the sun was only thinking about setting and only got around to it when the both of you agreed it was most appropriate.

I felt that way too. I feel that way too.

There is a taste in the evening. A certain type of sweetness that is thick in the wandering wind as it curls around your neck and around your face. You wonder if you're in the South, the North, the East or the West and you realize that really you're just in that moment and you better hold on to it and not think about it so darn much. Then you smell the air, and it creeps into your mouth and you taste it, you taste summer evenings and you forget what the winter even feels like and you thank God you're not somewhere like Southern California where you can take this kind of thing for granted.

This must be how people have always lived. With dew like silk settling on the ground, clothing the blades of grass in something you can't buy. With cool air soaking your skin, whispering to you how you'll regret getting that jacket you're thinking about. Don't block it out. This is how people must have always lived. Before ringing and buzzing and blinking and chiming. But with voices and intonation and whispers and laughs that don't need to be written out because you can see their head thrown back with their mouth open wide, and you're laughing too and never looking at your watch because there's a chance— a rather bold temptation— to live with the dew and see the morning. To keep the sun and moon company while others worry about themselves and the lives they wish they had, realizing that if they just opened their eyes— if they just stopped for a moment and opened their eyes they could have the same life as we do.