Desert Dreams

My feelings about the desert can be summed up in these pictures. The heat coming off the sandstone. The cool shade of the canyons. The dead and live pinions twisted by the wind. At sunset, a soft ponderous silence settles over everything and you can sit there on the edge of the esplanade, awash in light holding every color of the spectrum.

Around about November, I can't help thinking about the desert now and then—wishin it was a little closer, maybe an eight-hour drive away? If it were, I'd be there right now, typing this from a picnic table on the rim of a rincon. However, such places are many days traveling away, so I'll settle for the kind of pictures (and dreams!) that—on a deeply soggy morning like this one—give tired men hope.

Luck Would Have It

Today I'm feeling very lucky about the bright fall weekend I had—all the hours spent outside letting the incandescent autumn light shine on me. The afternoon I read four chapters of a new book with the sun like a heater on my back. The short sleeves I was able to wear while skating with a bunch of friends—and then having to snatch a warm flannel out of the car when shadows crept in. The homemade mac and cheese I ate right out of the oven, "brown and bubbly" just like the recipe detailed. The drive north along the Columbia River through tree-lined fields—Mt. St. Helens shining with snow across the water. The acceptance that longer, darker nights are restorative—that "rest" is allowable, that sitting on the couch under a blanket under a cat is a more-than-fine way to pass an evening, that all the "going" and "doing" you did this summer is somehow JUST NOW catching up with you and maybe that's why you are suddenly so FUCKING EXHAUSTED every night at 6 o'clock ...

Weekend Report

The first weekend of October, gone.

Spent all day skating tiny concrete quarterpipe with pals. Ran over fallen leaves. Got barked at and (once) nipped.

Converted skate gang to bike gang, rode tipsily around town under dark starry skies.

Took slow-moving Sunday walk through Cathedral Park, let dog run wild in peaked shadows of St. John Bridge.

Sat at picnic table along Burnside Street in very good company, drank glass of cold pink wine, felt warm sun on back.

Cooked big soup out of tomatoes and potatoes and sage. Dipped toasty bread in. Thought about all life things that need doing before 2014 comes barreling through.

To October

To the year turning toward darkness—and the quietness that that brings.

To a month of zero holidays—except Halloween (which isn't for family, it's for me and for you).

To all the food from the harvest—alien squash with bulges and warts, tomatoes of red, yellow and orange, potatoes still shrouded in the dirt they grew in ...

To backlit clouds and brilliant-blue days with the sun in your eyes.

To wild storms that whip the trees and then depart quietly in the night.

To new serial TV shows and the rainy Sundays for watching them.

To hard cider.

To change.

Renewed Subscription

October, guys! And my birthday weekend passed in a blur of cake and candles—candles on the cake, and candles for the darkness of a 9-hour power outage in SE Portland on the very eve of my birthday fete. It's okay to sit there in the dark drinking with your friends, though. Candle light licking the walls. Dogs lying around licking themselves. I see nothing wrong with any of it. When the lights did finally come on, it was like a gift! Don't take anything for granted ...

Anyhow, it's nice that your peeps come together to celebrate, but I tend to believe that a birthday doesn't really mean anything to anyone but you. There's a filing away of the past hours and days—documents rolled back into heavy mental drawers. Was there something you were supposed to have done by now? Did something vital fall away from your life? Did you grab something new, like a feather on the wind?

See, it's pretty private stuff—the unspoken renewal that comes with an anniversary of something like the day you were born.