Home green home

John picked me up at the airport. He drove me home the back way, through explosions of green. Issaquah, Preston, Fall City, Carnation. Through the green belt, past the river, trees overarching the road. My eyes were pits of hotness. I would open them to glimpse green, then rub them shut again. He bought fries and a diet coke at the hot-dog stand in Preston. I ate six of his fries, eyes mostly shut.

Last night I slept 14 hours. I dreamt I had a conversation with Joseph Lavy where we were finally moving about the work instead of talking -- two kinesthetics. He would show his idea, I'd show my response, until the conversation had become the work, including a chorus of 12 I had introduced. "13," said Joseph. "12," I said, realizing we were 14. I shrugged, we stayed 14, singing. Jennifer had taught us all to sing. I woke, drank thera-flu, felt myself again.

It is raining. My favorite weather. Out my kitchen, I see green upon green, stretching past the pond to the far trees -- grass, licorise grass, sour-leaf weeds, white-pod grass, buttercups, drowned bent dandelions with half their skeedyweedies gone, giant ferns, fiddletop ferns, light-green-tipped firs, a great patch of Himalayan blackberry, alders, cedar, poplar. Leaves tremble. Water drips onto brown-black earth.

My house feels like the Odin. I walk barefoot on its gleaming floors, embraced by silence. Every window and door is open. Perhaps I love the Odin because it feels like my home.

...And on that thought, I went out to check my gutters. The one on the back deck was overflowing. I brought out the red high chair, and cleaned the gutter, a handful of mucky pine needles at a time. Rain and needles ran down onto my hair and shirt, off my bare feet. My jeans were soaked. A bird had built a nest of great strawy twigs between the outside lights and the eaves. I counted five slugs. I finished cleaning, swept the back deck, threw all the slugs out into the grass.

Then I walked in thigh-high grass around my whole house, slowly, still barefoot, checking the other eaves, the holly tree; seeing what had sprouted since last summer, pulling blackberries. I looked at the sacred grove of three cedars, leaned against one of them.

Finally I lay down in the back grass. I gazed up through cedars, alders, and vinemaple at the white sky. Laying on my own earth, in my own rain, I relaxed.

A hawk flew over. I closed my eyes and rested.

Flying home from Europe with a high fever, my sense of smell had burned out.