The storm approaches, the first since this new life started. It gathers slowly offshore, almost stationary. Winds circle within winds. An odd silence fills me: the lee, the calm before.
I recognize its approach. It is an ache, almost a longing. Thirsting for the front’s howling periphery, I wait, I watch, eyes closed.
Old willows whip in wind unharmed where a brittle young tree will shatter. Many of these storms have come to cover me. They then blow themselves away, and I am changed, though sometimes only a little. A storm once picked me up and threw me across the west until I did not know which way was home. Others have done nothing but leave pretty wrack around me. From five days out they look the same. I was a leaf driven on a westward wind, now thrown roughly to the ground, now hoisted skyward on an updraft.
In the lee comes the urge to bolt, to leave the keys and take just enough to buy a bus ticket to Rawlins or to Tucumcari. I have started over once before, though my old life caught up with me eventually. It now howls at me angrily to forgive it, which will not happen. I am rooted now, and thus the urge is all the more compelling. The writing, the tepid measure of renown, the hearth-contentment itself: all of it a weight before the storm. All this work you see before you: dead leaves and ashes for the wind to scatter, cheese-paper left at the curb from someone else’s feeding.
Note:Many old comments were lost in a database crash in 2008. Some conversations may seem to make less sense than they would have. A few will make more sense now.
5 comments on "The front"“... the tepid measure of renown ...”
Not all of it, not even most of it, has to be for THEM.
“... dead leaves and ashes ...”
Maybe true, maybe not. But also irrelevant.
“From now on, I’m going to laugh more, love more, be less afraid.” - Queen Latifah (paraphrased)
Some of your desert writing reminds me of the Woodwife by Teri Windling. It’s a fantasy novel, but the stuff about the Sonoran desert should be right up your alley. Or dirt road. Possibly gravel driveway.
Don’t bolt.
Yeah. I know the feeling. It would be worse, I think, not to feel it.
What is there, in any of our lives, that does not leave us with occasional (or more frequent) urges to flee? Who of us does not have senses of foreboding that the suppressed turmoil in our lives, that we’ve veneered over with routine and comfort and duty, “satisficing” if you will, will not come boiling out and sweep us away if the scabs are worried at? And who among us has not known peace and relief once the storm has swept us where it will, or once we have stood our ground and remain with either the tatters if what we thought we had, or a freshened landscape that miraculously still has us standing in it, with our loved ones close by and with some new understanding of where we are and why? Hang in there Chris - it may not be easy but I’m guessing it’s worth it. And peace be with you however you find it.