Sometimes early in the morning, just upon waking, I catch my thoughts saying things to me like: “I’m thankful for the wind today. Be sure to be thankful for the wind, Ash… “
In the moments that follow, the possibility of so much more arises. As my eyes adjust to the wakefulness, I find great comfort in knowing the first things I get to look at are sites of my dogs anticipatory faces, hinting in their expressions that I’m the creator of their next great adventure; or at the great snowscapes that will inevitably blanket this little farmstead without anyone’s permission for the next 3-5 months - no matter which window I glance beyond; The forgotten little farm that only the trees remember. Here I am inside of today.
The yard beyond my bedroom window holds a sleeping apple tree & I remember softer months - like April with its momentous greens in waves of nostalgia that stick like pits in my stomach, churning memories of when she bore bright red blooms that have long since blown away. Many other things have blown away, but this symbolizes all of them. I’ve got all of their pits in my stomach; big apples and little apples; And that’s just the red bloom tree. I haven’t even seen the white bloom tree. I’m not at that window.
I find slow breaths from deep inside that linger within these moments as I wake, warm beneath a netted canopy, under temples of antique quilts in this giant room painted in palettes of ivory white and eggplant- colors I painted years ago when the fashion in my heart was to be very sad. I am quieter now, but that eggplant is hard to wash off.
I stand from my bed in the ambient winter light and notice the radiating warmth my skin carries with it in the morning hours. Everything on me is spun of heated silk. Nothing bears marks of the season. I’ve always called this ‘the side of effect of dreaming’.
I’m three days home from 30 days on the road, again. All my clothes reside on chairs as reminders that this is temporary; this whole thing. They seep from suitcases whose origin will never be remembered. “Where did you get that old suitcase, ash?” “The closet gave it to me, and before that, the barn” “and before that, I wasn’t born”.
I grab from the top pile, the first thing that looks beautiful: solid antique white; a combed cotton shirt that billows so freely when I walk and falls so sheer and tattered across my frame that I feel inspired and intent and alive when I wear it. I only wear things that could mean nothing anymore; things that don’t wear me. Simple linens & sun bleached colors that could mean here or there. My eyes can tell the rest and they usually do.
I know a storm is coming. The leaves are clapping their warnings – from as far out as the aspen grove; this plot of land invisibly stitched to greater fields and a stretch of country that leads on to forever. Fields that blew 100 acres of sun-spun golden wheat; I remember the site of it at sunset from my oak tree– my god; Or the faithful plots of green soybeans that blew beyond the red cedars that somebody planted before this time; And over there, fields of endless corn cathedrals led me in with soils so soft I didn’t wear shoes that whole season.
I wait for the snow to come, heavy like December, from the big bay window as I trace my toes with one of the stray eagle feathers that hide about this house. I prop the window open to hear the sound of nothing with its intermittent crackle. It gasps across me eating my skin of warm silks until I quake, and then nothing. I live for this moment; the storms that sound like nothing. I might just do this always.
"summer spun"
