Creek Running North

How persistent, those memories. I cannot call up her face but in dreams, and in dreams each fold, each curve and lock are rendered so precise. Then I wake, and within hours she is gone again. It is better that way, so when will my mind’s back pasture let her go, blend her with a dozen other women I have loved?

The dog lagged behind yesterday, ten yards or so, and the squirrel was brazen. I have been carrying peanuts to the park and she knows me now, will approach and take the nut from my fingertips so gently, so gingerly my heart leaps. Yesterday I had nothing for her and yet she walked up to my boot, entreating me, asking why I did not respond.

For a time, each day I did not write was a victory hard-won. Before long that silence wore a groove in my heart. When will it ebb? A decade? Two? The solitude is comfort now and she is fossilized, the impression of her shape filled with the sediment of my sleeping thought, and it is better that way.

On Sunday Kat and I went to the mountain. She wanted rain and did not get it: the summit tore a bright blue hole in the cloud. We sat at its edge and ate, a massive fogcloud wall a hundred yards away, and headed back down, eight miles walked and two thousand feet climbed, about. Big-leaf maple burned clear yellow, grape leaves red at their tips, and two miles from the truck Coyote burst out onto the trail ten yards in front of us. She had not expected us. She made a quick wide turn, in her eyes a lupine yike. She crashed back through the brush uphill the way she’d come. For months I have thought of showing Kat that canyon, and now our sidelong gleeful smirk settles in among sharp memories, brief moments in a life of fog. She walked that path with us so short a time, but she walked that path with us.