Come Find Me

Open the front door

Photo by Giancarlo Corti on Unsplash

When you open the front door, cracked or shifted as it may be, you slice into the day. You enter the place where the universe offers questions.

I step onto the blue sidewalk. Away from this park. I need to get to the bridge. Feel the water below me. I’ve walked this way so many times. In the past year. I do not reach out for the trees here. Too many eyes in the windows.

I want something like solitude.

I do not like the way the city hums. Whenever I am driving, following the speed limit signs as if they were carved from great slabs of stone handed down from a god, people rush to get past. That noise. That sound of hurrying. I do not like it. The destination, home or work or wherever, is not better than the drive. They’re all merely places. I am in the car. Left hand on the wheel. Right hand resting on the shifter. I am in the car.

But I want to escape this sort of fuel.

I head to the river. See what bits of sun might hit me among tamaracks and oak. The elms. Always the elms. This city has the largest urban elm forest on this continent. So it breaks my heart when another is the victim of the arborist’s saw. Bugs, you know. The ash borer. Rotting them from the inside out.