Sometimes I see or hear or experience things and put words to them as the day goes by, but they don't really fit anywhere. Occasionally I write them down in a notebook somewhere, but that notebook gets lost or shelved or forgotten about. And the notebook can't hold the images I see during the day that help frame or ground my thoughts.
I'd like to be better about keeping track of them, and this seems like a good place to put them until I can do something more substantive with them. Anyway, this was today:
I took this on my way to work this morning:
Morning sun filtered through the clouds.
2 a.m. insomnia was followed by a couple hours of unbroken nightmares and stress dreams. It created an exhausting, disorienting morning. But things level out as the day goes on, and these are usually some of my most productive days. That ended up being the case today.
I didn't forget the nightmares, though. They're still rattling around up there, glaring from the shadows.
We went from 0° up to 60° and back to 40° in the span of a week. I took these a week ago today:
A crumpled arm chair was lying in the median on the side of the highway the first few days this week. A dead deer has been lying in the median a few hundred feet down the road. Today the armchair was gone, but the deer was still there.
Drivers who seem to be allergic to their gas pedals love the left lane.
I stopped at Walmart to look for something on the way to work. As I was walking out, I saw an elderly man on his knees cleaning the sliding exit doors. I stopped before he noticed me, because I didn't want him to feel like he had to rush to let me out. I don't know if he had been asked to do this or if it was something he'd decided he wanted or needed to do himself. But as he finished wiping the glass and grunted as he stood up, I thought of my grandfather, and I felt a surge of sadness.
I miss the hands that helped me learn to put a worm on a fish hook. I miss the man who poured ketchup on his eggs and who puttered around his garden while my brother and I played in the yard. I'd like to talk to him now that I've lived some.
The ice sheet covering lake Jacomo thinned out more today, cracks forming along the top in a stained glass pattern. If the cracks and fragments can hold together in beautiful, fleeting arrangements, then maybe we can do the same on days that begin in disarray.
I took this at a marsh across from Jacomo this morning, and I like it, too:
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