I reach up, touching the top of the laptop screen to console; to assure any person I can actually touch, to reassure them that we all feel the same way. The multiple squares, the rectangles of faces, all looking up, around at each other, everyone stressed, puzzled, anxious…it’s the end of a staff meeting and most of those attending leave the screen quickly. Red light, click, gone. ‘Everyone enjoy what’s left of the summer’…her voice echoes. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know’…we hear this throughout the meeting. No one knows much. Maybe by next week, we will know more. Possibly.

I am living in fiction. What I write will be perceived as fiction and what I write could also be understood to have been at one time or another, truth or something else. You have to decide. What are we doing?

I enter the store front and it smells like cinnamon. There are string bags of large scented pine cones…across from which sit leftover summer plants, all on sale. The seasons stare at each other. It’s still hot and I cough into my mask. My glasses steam up. I wipe the handle of my cart. I apply the hand sanitizer. A boy and his mother push their cart around me and ahead of me. He looks back at me. I can’t tell what he is thinking.

I have not learned to read a person by their eyes only.

This is similar to starting out with Braille, years after having used my eyes to read. Let me feel the face under the mask. None of this feels right.

It’s been a round about day. I move from room to room, picking things up, looking at what I should do, sitting down to look out the window again. I can’t pick my rhythm out this afternoon.

All I see are the many squares with many faces looking into my house as I stare into theirs; into their personal spaces. Someone’s wall pictures are hanging crookedly and I can’t straighten them. This whole Covid season is crooked and I can’t fix it.

I like the choice of paint color for their walls.

I wonder if he knows only the top half of his head shows on the screen? The speaker addresses his hair line; the man in the rectangle with half a head.

It doesn’t matter. It’s all crooked and I know I am going to have a headache for the rest of the day.

I wanted to sit. To read. To observe. He…love of my life…suddenly wanted to dig up the front of the lawn. To purchase ten more hedges. To purchase two dwarf arborvitae. To purchase ten bags of soil and even more. Suddenly.

So…that’s all been done…and a neighborhood boy hired to water the trees at a later date when we’re on vacation.

Lesson learned. When he…love of my life…yells…’Hey, come down here a minute. I want to show you something…’ I will always end up driving a car filled with a forest and dealing with a cashier named Dominic who rings my receipt incorrectly.

I’m staying upstairs…

Shuffling along the length and width of Chili Avenue…the scarcely blue truck…rusted over and through and under. Almost transparent in patches. Tied together with twine and scrap metal. And…I…am…behind…you…waiting, waiting, straining to pass on the left.

The sign states 30 Miles Per Hour and this…this blue heap of a tin pan alley is frudging along at a miserly 29 miles Miles Per Hour. I feel my hands squeezing the steering wheel…I have been behind him before on this street…this slow man. Trapped between the intersection of Saint Mary’s and King Street…slow traffic and a school bus and it is all…backed…up. At the head of the irritated pack…this blue swaying dust heap. I feel my teeth grind…I have things to do, places to be, speed to pick up.

Milagro! Miracle of hard wishing and head pounding…the left lane opens up and I pass…I pass…I pass! A quick glance to the right at this…this…this man who has dared to put this blue danger on the road in front of me. Slumped profile…very old. Very old, staring straight ahead…lined face…a few teeth…a sharecropper’s son. Burnt by the Southern sun for years and years until making a painfully slow journey North where there might not be as much racism but there will be no real wealth for this man in the dilapidated blue truck.

The tires are riding on hope…back end dragging along the length and width of Chili Avenue cement…grimy greasy twine and a box of tools rusted on to the back end of the dragging, dragging, dragging and sagging tail pipe…but he owns it…this sharecropper’s son…and I am silent.

No doubt someone was teaching nonsense when this man did not yet know his alphabet and the past is the past now…done. I think about it; as if I could ever do a day’s work as a sharecropper’s daughter…the heat would kill me dead…the slow pace grind me down…down to Chili Avenue at the head of the irritated pack.

Ground beans and heat and hazelnut…the edge of the thick mug with steam and cream and sunbeam. Creature comforts.

The morning’s first sip…as lips, nostrils and mug meet…it is grand and simply glorious…

Household tips for dummies…also known as adults who know things at a cognitive level and yet refuse to respond appropriately. Also known as adults who still want to believe that leprechauns will clean the house at night.

Changing the vacuum cleaner bag makes all the difference in the world. All the difference…

Nose pressed up against the glass of summer’s edge…in love with ghosts from the past. The wagon wheels are heading west, the blue moon ice cream melts as I scrape my bare feet against the roughened edge of the car rug; gritty toes and sticky fingers and smudged windows; snarled hair blowing wildly in the wind.

The sweeping wheat winds of these glorious prairie lands…stretching out…burnt brown; drought’s threat edged with the vibrant periwinkle blue of the flax fields and the cold smell of waters flowing deeply, undiscovered below the rumbling bison.

I am ten years old again…feeling the cement of the tired school building leaving the soles of my feet as each step carries me closer to the slamming door…

She was brilliant. Truly. She was a marvel at getting people to pretend to like her. The amazing thing was that they agreed to the pretense without a word spoken.

They didn’t like her. She knew it. They knew it. They knew she knew it.

It was a marvelous game and she played it with gusto, weaving in and through and around the crowd, nodding here, gently clasping an elbow there.

To watch her required inner balance; a waving line between being utterly appalled at the dishonesty and deeply satisfied with the subterfuge…

Everyone into the pool! Hot thick air…swirling and twirling around the edges of the pool…and everyone can’t wait to get in, jump in, dive in! Simmering heated broth on this blistering June afternoon…one potato, two potatoes, three potatoes…hmmm. Children in the sunshine soup…must be eating a lot of potatoes out there…plop! No hitter, no hitter, no hitter…swing!

Flop! Blurp! Slop…sloppy, slippery, ploppery…one chunk, two chunks, three chunks…four. Childhood obesity right in front of my weary eyes…every imaginable ethnicity and demographic…all wet and chubby bubby and rolling all around…swimming all around in the cooking pool water…all the statistics, all the news charts, all the warnings…and everyone can’t wait to get into the pool…into the water…into the potato salad, the hot dogs, the chips…corn syrup for everyone, my friends!

And everyone can’t wait to dive in…sludgy, budgy, pudgy…summer sugar babies…swimming around, floating around, rolling around in the frothy cooling broth. Bubbling up from the bottom…troubling up from the bottom…and everyone into the pool!

To remember the specific detail, the forgotten temperament, the smaller person, the subtle color…that was everything. Drowning in the bigger picture, the never ending noise…the busy world which would not cease talking and posting. It was time for the single petal, the nuanced emotion of a child’s face, vanished in a split second.

To miss these details, in the end meant missing absolutely everything important.

She was desperate to paint, to breathe, to touch the lost second, the unheard words…the skin’s touch…the truth.

In the waning hours of summer and in the newness and damp of autumn, we built a house. We planted a tree. The foundation settled and we painted walls. The front yard wound around grassy clumps, sprouting fresh, surprised weeds and we walked around and around together deciding where lilacs and hydrangeas and trees might settle.

Then…it was a long, deathful winter; desolate and grey and flat with each new morning dawning early and cold. Waking with hot coffee, a book or two and the resolve to see the sunrise, I pursued nothing with any interest. My mind thinned.

And then in April, I looked up and noticed a bird chirping wildly outside my home. He sang out brilliantly and I rose up and I looked for this bird, this feathered fluttering ball perched outside on the thinnest reed, a mere willow wisped branch of the tree we planted when we built the house.

Nestled on the barest edge of eternity, cocking his head on a greening limb, every chirp and warble wiggled the leaves and shook the infant tree as it struggled to sustain the bird’s chubby plump enthusiasm.

The branch stretched, just thick enough to hold him; barely. He sang his heart out as I peeked around the curtain. In time I returned to my book and listened for a while longer. He vanished around 6:20am.

What kept me from him so long as I sat in thin places? I nestled at length in clouds, waiting for a thicker branch to grow; hoping for a thicker branch to grow.