On the way to the airport on Monday, I saw the black trees fingering out of the back of a green, green field; on my way home from the airport on Wednesday, I decided to try to catch it. While I'm on the move, horizons are not my strong suit.
Here we are wet; we are underwater; we are swimming over. My favorite part of a day that began with a dawn run to an airport? The stolen hour of day-dusk no-sun paddling through Dickinson: three poems, one at a time. The perennial questions never tire, even when they do. What do you see? And why does it matter? What is strange? And why do you care? We could have sat with those poems for hours more, had I not had to leave for a meeting.
Tomorrow I will close the Valves of my attention / Like Stone. Each and every time the wrong distraction confronts me.
And then some days you'll find yourself at the end of a long day that you worked harder than you realize to pull off, and you'll be so exhausted and happy and relieved that you'll burst into tears nearly the second you walk in the door. And you'll be crying because the day is over, and you'll be crying because you're still overjoyed by the supremely excellent news that came down fortuitously on your birthday, and you'll be crying because tomorrow you'll get up and start all over again and you're not quite ready yet. Because life is just that thick. Because you wouldn't have it any other way. Because you could use about five extra hours, or maybe five extra lives, right now, right this minute.
And now? Now I am thirty-three. "You've got some greys back here, you know?" said the woman who cuts my hair, as she finished up with trimming my neck. And indeed, I stand in front of the mirror, holding another mirror in my hand so that I can see the back of my head, and I see how inescapable they're becoming. "How terribly strange to be seventy," sang Simon and Garfunkel. I change it up: "How terribly strange to be thirty-three."
A postscript to last night: mornings, even the window curtains play along with my desire for unexpected beauty. At some point this morning, my bed became an island of cameras; between the medium format I'm still getting to know, and the through the viewfinder contraption, and my beloved Canon, I was all aswim in my equipment.