shadow

It is the time of year when the sun loses its crisp starch on things which draw themselves out far from their seat on the earth, leaning at an awkward angle toward evening. It is a time when you might see a woman walking alone along a cold trail, shrouded in the shadows of barren trees. The bridge casts a dark stain across the water and a grey heron calmly glides overhead, its ghostlike other skimming the ground.

There is an emptiness to winter, as if all the sand of time had drained away, and the glass jar aches to break, as if breaking might lead to relief at the end of a year painfully distended with days. A woman walking on a cold trail is an empty hour glass aching to break, a fleeting shadow, a ghost.

The sun illuminates the water and in the glow the fish and turtles appear. There is nothing more than this but a child sleeping in a warm bed on a cold night, or the vastness of an early morning solitude, or the shattering glass of an abrupt freedom that calls a woman to walk alone in winter on a trail filled with shadows.

burning

Winter came and went, and before long I was nestled in a tiny cabin in the piny woods 13 miles outside of Bastrop, Texas. There was considerable downsizing involved--going from a 3-bedroom house in Austin to a 400 square foot cabin required selectivity. Among the first things to be abandoned were plastics. Anything plastic: tupperware, kitchen utensils, toys. It all went to a good home somewhere in Austin, while we rebuilt a tiny life in the woods where room could only be spared for natural materials, heirlooms, ceramics,glass, and hand-crafted furniture. This is what life was like: I (or my daughter and I) would arrive home before dusk, make dinner, then sit on the porch until night, watching first the pileated woodpeckers and finches at the bird feeder, the lizards and possums and endangered toads who (finally) had discovered our little pond. Later the tall pines would grow dark, and the owls would begin to call to one another far and near. I imagine the life of a river stone, tumbling downstream toward it knows not where. Maybe this is the best way to describe how it has been since the fire. The fire took everything, left nothing but ash, and sifting through that ash for remnants of who I might have been did not help recreate that being, not yet anyway. Still tumbling. But I have an unusual, lingering fascination with fire. I watch the heat rise and wonder: Was that what it was like? Did it hiss, was it fast? How long did my animals suffer? Tonight as I watch the dying embers of the chiminea, I am alone, and I am thinking of books lost: Annie Dillard, Adrianne Rich, and I think of this fragment of Song:

If I'm lonely it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it's neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning.