Moon Shadows
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009
Beneath the moon, the sky lightened to a color too hopeful for gray and only a fraction yellow – the color that would take over when the sun came up. Treetops, the shape and hue of dead lightening scratched the empty sky. Through them the light from street lamps glowed blocks away, hovering in mid-air as spacecrafts might. When I was out late in the streets as a boy, the neighborhood light was sugar-colored, and it was intrusive to the houses nearest the poles. In the asphalt glowing electric white, we’d play tag around its edges, run and dive through it as though it were a swimming pool, or sit beneath it and read letters or photographs with handwriting scrawled on them by 13 year-old girl’s hands. We would stand and play with our giant shadows, moving as monsters would with high steps and slashing arms – both arms brought over the head slowly and then thrown toward the other person’s shadow (though the blow was never struck and and the receiving shape never jilted) and they facing you in the same fighting position. You could feel your arm move through their shadow and knew better than to expect it to connect, but felt strange that it missed. (more…)
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Tags: Morning
The Birds
Thursday, December 4th, 2008
Opposite the stained glass panel and beneath the dining room windows, two bushes full with dead leaves serve as an eary morning gathering place for 50 or so finches. Every morning, they come here to this small garden area against the house swooping and reseting themselves every few minutes in random sky-cluttering flutters before temporarily settling back on the bare branches. The main attraction for them is a birdfeeder that hangs on a sapling branch from a rope that has see-sawed the light bark away in a perfect strip. (more…)
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Tags: Birds, Morning
Brother and sister awaken in a semi-darkened bedroom at the same minute as the day before, when the window shade warms around the edges, aglow in a perfect box shape. Lying in beds side by side, they lazily study each other to see that the other’s eyes are open, wrestle with the covers a last time and in so doing realize they are awake to stay. Always the youngest – the little girl, Caroline – says the day’s first words in a hushed voice that she’s heard adults use while stooping to see that she’s covered by blankets and that her head lies on the pillow for the night. (more…)
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Tags: Kids, Morning
Shrouded in fog, the houses lit by porch lights draw together at dawn, turning the streets into alleys for the neighborhood pets to move through in misty apparitions.
This was the scenery the previous morning, too – visibility suddenly shrunken, houses down the long street hidden behind the clouds and the block suddenly ended. The windows in parked cars steamed as though by breath but in actuality a symptom of the cool glass against even cooler temperatures. Eventually, the clouded windows beaded as the morning deepened and then evaporated in direct sunlight. (more…)
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Tags: Morning, Suburbia
Good Morning
Saturday, October 25th, 2008
The house is generally open and awake before anyone leaves in the morning, but today I went out to the grocery without parting the curtains or stirring a soul.
I rose just as the outside was turning from purple to blue and, it was in this shade that I found the cupboards as empty as old Mother Hubbard’s. My disappointment, though, was secondary to the hunger the sleeping bodies upstairs would feel upon waking. Ten minutes later, I had already returned to the still-slumbered children and the dark, cool rooms. (more…)
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Tags: Morning
