Juniper and Sage

The long nights of cool air and the smell of woodsmoke and rotting leaves frees the brain of its summer torpor, every year, it is the same thing. Three months of oppressive heat and a holding pattern of slack-jawed mental atrophy broken after one solid night of sleep wrapped in blankets and waking to a cold nose, and the smell of coffee, and of apples.

I woke to the memory of February, and the bitter cold, and dad calling me early in the morning to help move the flesh and bones of a 165 pound dog; he had passed on in the night. We wrapped him in a sheet and struggled with him out the door and onto the truck bed and into the frosty morning and how we didn't say much, during the journey. We had coffee and each had on a Carhart jacket, and I felt like a little girl, happy for the time with him. Our hands were cracked and dry from the cold, from winter, and when the man opened the garage roll up door he was sad for us. And offered to help but we declined. We had to finish it, alone, together. A tender moment amidst so much harshness. This life. That in that moment, we could rely on each other beyond anything else.

And then, this morning, the house emptied itself and I looked out onto the shadowy outlines of the pine trees in the yard, and smelled their pitch and the dew, and still the woodsmoke, the lingering trace of a fire, somewhere. How violently I rebel against domesticity but will never, not ever, admit defeat. There are sacred moments in the predawn, they visit me as I sip my coffee, look out onto the world, and remember. Before the infinite loop of laundry, and vacuuming, and dishes, and making beds, and cooking and preparing for the next day begins. To squeeze in a little time for the self, for the grizzled lone-wolf clawing at my ribs. To sweat and to do nothing else but to improve the body, condition the mind.

And I find myself thinking that I cannot be the only one that holds us together.

My heart broke for her when she told me the story about hearing what was not meant for her. And how would I react? What would I do. I imagined an awkward confrontation, and my selfish desire that she be humiliated for her lack of couth. And how the second reaction would be to cut and run, to excoriate myself of any perceived weakness, to patch the holes in my armor. How that has always been a fault of mine, that the lone wolf is the most dominate of the personalities. I would fill my heart with hardness so that the sadness, or the disappointment, or the vulnerability, could not find a way in. And how lonely a realization to make about oneself.

Winter comes slowly, as always, and fall is dangerous for its rumination.