On Sunday

On Sunday we walk in the fog, through the forested spaces between here and there. The way is quiet and the lateness of summer whispers in tones of goldenrod, saint john’s wort and aster. We’ve come to the forest because the swallows have gone, leaving the barn oddly quiet with an emptiness that fills our insides. It feels hollow and sad. I close my eyes for a moment and wonder about where they are now in their journey. Maybe they long for their destination like I long to see the ocean again. The mountains are my home, but I’ve been too far away from that rhythmic tide for too many years. There is that piece of me…a mermaid, interrupted. She craves sand and the threshold of where it meets water. She thought the other day that she could actually barely smell and taste the salt of the earth’s womb, carried to her on a breeze that surely started on some southern shore and weaved its way to her knowingly. I brush her away and open my eyes. A doe regards me from the forgotten forest, and I cluck quietly to the dog so that he will move on before noticing her. Crows mock me from a nearby field, like they know my secrets, my burdens, my unexplored dreams. Soon the trees will be painted with the colors of autumn, and the darkness will be heard. Then everything alive will yield to the great equalizer that we call winter.

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