Snip-its

Here are a couple things. Really, just things. So often I have little snip-its of things that I want to write, even though they are small and have no path yet. 


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He always had a peculiar smell of oranges about him and it seemed his body was filled with sap. Combined with that and his ever-scruffy face and rough calloused hands, one could mistake him for a tree.

And perhaps he thought he was one as well.

He spent his days outside, growing from the sun as if he had leaves.You could find him anywhere that was blanketed with a silence woven by the tapestry of bird songs.


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That evening the sky burned the deepest orange- glowing like we were in the belly of the very oven itself turning glass into waves of molten lava. Behind me the mountains candied with pink frosted peaks. Below the sunset the silhouetted bones of winter trees reached up, scratching the surface and digging in- pulling the vibrance into the ground. Slowly, so slowly, causing red to shoot from its core, encircling the sky. How could something look so warm when it was zero degrees outside, the ground covered in ice and snow?

I drove on.
And when I got to the stop sign where I was suppose to turn Left- I hesitated. I suddenly took that red octagon as great advice.

STOP.

Surrounded in the final ribbon of colors from the sun I made up my mind.

And pressing the gas pedal I turned Right instead.

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There was something, always something about that day. Green grass ran straight into violent clouds. Maybe that day I somehow knew- knew that I would end up with him. Even though I wasn’t, at the time, with him. He was there, in every whispering blade, he was there.

Today I stood outside our little house. The wind started to come, rolling down the street. I heard it hit each musical tree on its way until it reached me. And as it hit, I felt something, or maybe I heard it. This ancient piece of air- I had felt it before. It was there that day. And somehow it had found me again. 

 

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I told him all of this as we sat there. I started to cut the bread that had been brought to us on an old wooden board. He slowly drank from his coffee cup. The room was brown and full of smoke. A diner stuck in some past decade, those past years clinging to its carpet and walls.

His reaction, I felt, was unfounded.

How slowly he left me there, alone with my soup and bread.
Yet.
How quick he was to go.