a postcard from Sequoia National Forest in the rain

SLC to Visalia

SLC I-80 to Wendover, Nevada

 Route 93 to Ely

 Route 6 to Tonopah

 Tonopah to Bishop, California

Route 395 down the Owen's Valley

Through Coco Junction & Little Lake

Route 14/178 via Isabella Walker Pass

To Lake Isabella

Route 178 along the Kern River

178 to Bakersfield

Highway 99 to Route 198 Visalia

books on the bedside table

us, before we were them

The woods there are different now.
Like us it has shed a thousand skins. 
The trees they don't remember us.

I cannot forgot.

I knew you there.

I saw us.

Through the trees we saw each other.

I have circled back a hundred times.

I find nothing that tells me we were ever there.

No rock that holds my footprint.

No path your weight.

But us- we were once.

I remember that moment beneath your shelter when all the world stopped.

You steadied yourself against an aspen and looked up into the falling rain.

We have to go, I whispered, we cannot stay here any longer...

I have never been more wrong. 

It has been decades.

The woods are different now.

I have sat in silence on the edge listening.

The trees have thinned and the cabins push in all around.

My kids have walked here. 

Run under the naked sun.

Splash their toes in the mountain water.

I still look for you between the trees- but there is nothing left.

We stay us there forever and forever is gone.

I remember us, before we were them.

mlb  4/2017

now reading: The Journal of Ben Uchido

Saturday night

It's near 11PM and I am standing in my kitchen with the 2 nearly-growns.  Conner leaning in from the porch through the sliders.  When he shifts his weight he eclipses the light falling from the street lamp.  His sister sits.  Leaning over the table top delicately picking grapes one by one and eating them slowly. 

He has come to say good-bye to his mother.  He moved his family last week to Sebastian, Florida and has returned to make the drive one more time with the last of their stuff.

I can't help but to wonder if among the boxes are the children's books I gave them for Baby J.  The books that once belonged to Alex and Conner- some that even once belong to me and my sisters. I wonder if they made the final cut or not.

But stuff is only stuff.

I had spent most of the day in bed sick. Stayed up late to get to be in this moment with them. The night pressed in as Conner talked.  They had a house, a large one with plenty of room and a long lawn for Baby J.  He said he could smell the ocean from there.  He had a job making good money.

He promised us pictures.  I told him I had thought about buying them a camera and sending it but then I remembered he made more money than I did.  Alex and Conner laughed in the way only children can together about their parents.

They smiled, they talked and I was glad the rest of the house was sleeping.  Glad to have this moment just for us.

Then Alex turned to her little brother, the man towering over her and said, "Dad is so sad that we are all going away... in a few months I will be in Europe and you are in Florida..."  She was still talking about how her adventure was only a trip but when she got back she was going to apply to schools abroad.  And he was saying how much we would all love Florida but that he would be in Utah in July to visit. 

When they both fell quiet I said, "Yeah, I have done something right."

around here