I walked out of work at the end of the day and the sun shone in my eyes, blinding me before I remembered that it's winter and the sun a miracle instead of a burden. I basked in it for a minute, and then I turned around to look for the moon, right where I knew it would be at this time of the month, sharp and bonewhite against the bright blue sky. It never stops feeling miraculous and awesome, awesome in the sense of equal parts exciting and terrifying, that I can see outside this bubble of a planet into space, and see how the moon is turning its face toward the sun in their boundless, endless dance, so massive that I'm not even a speck of dust in comparison, but I am also an infinity.
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Today I planted poppy seeds. I was tired and cranky and I didn't have any compost, but I scratched up the dirt with my fingers and sowed them and covered them up, two little patches in the front yard and two in the back. I hope some of them grow.
I looked up from the computer screen, and the snow was starting to stick to the roof of the neighbor's garage. It was coming down hard, in fluffy clumps of a thousand snowflakes, more like feathers from a burst pillow than snow. I had never seen snowflakes so big. And then I looked up, and the sky was full, just full, of a thousand thousand thousand fluffy clumps of a thousand snowflakes, like bats or insects or birds swarming, but over the whole sky, forever. It was dizzying. And then I realized what the frozen fluff reminded me of: the dried heads of cow parsnip, flat oval galaxies of white flowers that curl up, brown and crisp, into loose fists for the winter. Like all of those ghost flower galaxies were falling from the sky, the infinity of them, summer into fall into winter.
I was waiting for the bus and I looked up and saw the moon! The gracefulest sliver of gold, hanging in slate blue twilight, and I imagined that I could see the ghost of the rest of her, lit up by the mirror of earth. My eyes were caught in all that perfect roundness until dark clouds slid in from the west and covered the sky.
I was walking home at the end of a too-long day and everything was terrible and then I smelled daphne! The air was suddenly pure and cold and sweet and it was so, so good.
It was cold, cold, cold, and I kept trying to get into a patch of sunlight as I walked to the bus stop, but it was too early and the sidewalk was all building shadows. I shivered and waited and then right before the bus came the sun crested the building across the street and I was suddenly warm and full of light, and I remembered that the corona of the sun is hotter than its surface, and the world felt bright and magical again.
As I was paying the parking meter, I noticed that there was a line on the grass where the sun met the shadow; in the sun the grass was covered in a million sparkles of dew, and in the shadow it was grey with delicate frost-fur.
This fancy red dog was prancing down the street with great determination, lovingly holding a big chunk of basalt in her mouth.
At the end of the night everyone went home, and it was just me in the suddenly quiet house, in a puddle of warm yellow light over the the warm yellow table. A wave of fatigue washed over me as I blew out the candles and stacked up the box full of cups and the wine bottle and all the other bits and pieces on the challah tray so I'd only have to make one trip up the stairs on my cranky knee. As I reached for the candlesticks, I glanced up at the light and realized the air over the table was full of honey-scented smoke. It swirled with this delicate, perfect slowness, like the place in a dance where you stretch out each movement because the tension and motion are so beautiful it makes your chest hurt and it stretches and stretches and stretches... and then you finish the movement and flow into the next one and it all starts again. And I was just watching and breathing and it was so quiet.
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AuthorBitter Water
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Archives
June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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