4 a.m. Musings

So, it's not four in the morning, but, it is raining.

When I went on a long walk in the woods this afternoon, everything smelled green and ripe. The air and the earth were all sweetness, packed atom by atom with dampness. It's been a hot and humid week here in the western half of Massachusetts. Halfway down the trail, movement happened out of the corner of my eye, and I turned in time to see a giant crane, lifting off from the river. We played a game of catch-up for another mile--the crane would stand in the water, moving the muscles in its cheeks rapidly, inflating and deflating, while I'd walk forward. When I was about fifteen feet away, it would take off into the air again, until I lost it around a bend.

The rocks were a jumble down by the sharpest curve, still flood-disordered. I am here surrounded by tumbling small rocks, whose roundnesses are of different sizes, their colors soft but separate. And Phoebe is in India, buffeted about by traffic, riding rickshaws through the night. Awash in new scents.

My four a.m. thoughts these days are all about memory. Things steal in through the open window at night, and become other times, other places, other sleepless beds I've lain in. I think about how something coming to me on the dark air will translate itself into a trigger, and how, on some future early summer night, I might recall this particular pause that I had when I was twenty-six. These places where our thoughts snag, the small back-currents, when we share them, knit themselves into some greater sense. I hear about the scents of a distant city, and those things fold themselves over into the wild honeysuckle in the woods this afternoon, and are carried off into the future on the silent wings of a large white bird. Off around a bend, where they disappear.

I know we'll find them later, when we least expect it.