sunday until noon

wake up just a bit after sunrise. wonder how it is that every other day of the week your brain or your bladder or your dog wakes you in the predawn confusion of before the alarm, before 5am but then on sundays everybody just stays still. assume it is the heavy wool blanket and the coldness of the outside world. you can't feel it but your body must know about it anyway. it's out there. get up and take out the dog or tend to the fire or simply stand in the middle of the living room, confused that the sweetie you can't get out of bed with a bagpipe or crowbar most days is up before you and has done both these things. pour water in the iron kettle on the woodstove. add a bit of cinnamon and some vanilla until the room smells like a very good pipe. feel smug.

open the door to the stove while the sweetie is upstairs. stoke the fire. get it roaring. realize you cannot stand up. grumble to yourself about how 41 is far to young for a person to be having back problems. call up to the sweetie or the dog, whoever will help you. feel your left leg begin to fall asleep in your precarious hunched position while you wait for rescue. consider leaning against the stove. read the temperature gauge. it is above 450 degrees. reconsider leaning. whimper for your rescuer(s) to hurry. with help, get to your feet but hunch yourself over because you cannot stand up without some horrible claw inside your spine grabbing at your insides. be dramatic. whimper again. consider who might possibly be to blame for this. maybe the dog, because he is small and you have stooped to carry him in the past. also, you have carried him in the past. but he is small and his blame is measured likewise. determine the rest of the blame, a substantial part, should rest on the shoulders of the sweetie. while he is mocking your inability to stand, hope this blame has some pointy edges that will stick into his neck and shoulders with some degree of discomfort. determine to punish him for his part in your suffering.

tell him he will have to carry both bags of laundry to the laundromat. say this with a smile. explain that you are doing all you can by burdening yourself with the coins in your pocket and the nearly empty bottle of detergent. tell him you are suffering. be dramatic in the car. if your back wasn't broken, you might have walked to the laundromat, but writhe and howl in your seat. find it difficult to haul the awful laundry from the bag on the floor up and over and into the hateful machines. consider how to make the sweetie, who bends and lifts and drops the laundry effortlessly, suffer for his gracefulness and skill. realize part of your cruelty might be due to the fact that you haven't had food yet. in your weakened state, blame this on the sweetie, too. it is so clearly his fault. think about whether, in your weakened state, you could dump him into one of the open washers. realize that even in full health it's not likely.

when everything you own that was dirty is now swirling in pretty blue water scented to match the mountains outside, walk with the sweetie, who you are by now glad you spared, around the corner to the back of the building. walk up the small steps to the railroad caboose. stand inside where the smell of food hugs you and kisses you and promises you everything will be just fine. although you are not quite sure, maybe you hear a whisper from the eggs sizzling on the grill, some quiet breakfast voice asking how your back feels, asking what you need. while the sweetie orders, walk through a crazy, zigzagging hallway to what is aspiring to be a dining room. you have eaten at the caboose before, but only on the porch, wooden, its tables shaded by umbrellas. it is cold now and it is clear the place with the beautiful smells wasn't prepared for indoor guests and is making do. stand in the middle of the room with your cup of tea and the sweetie's coffee. they are steaming and make the room smell like it is connected to the caboose you left behind past that crooked hallway, but you are in another world.

off the hallway is a tiny room with a window out into the world and a window into the larger room. just like in your apartment, you think. there is a desk there, one of those real live wooden ones, the kind teachers used to have long ago. on another corner of the larger room (there are several and you can't quite manage to explain the shape) is a bathroom but it is the room you stand in that defies explanation. there are tables scattered about. most of the chairs are wooden, the kind your grandparents had to go with their round and wooden dining room table before you were ever born. a few are plastic, patio chairs. part of one wall is torn loose from itself, with fat insulation wedged between planks. there are large sheets of something like gypsum board or plaster board, five or six of them, leaning against one wall. there are windows and a door out onto another porch. someone told you this building used to be a warehouse, part of the railroad, and the big sliding doors you see on places like that are still hanging on a wall or two. sit down, sip your tea and gaze into the corner. there's a print of miles davis, not a particularly good one, not one you like, but something that somehow goes with everything else. miles davis was a mess and a half during parts of his life but he is, simply, just better than most folks out there at things that are important to you. jazz when the word meant something specific. and this is where you are. breakfast in its purest state. let your eye wander a bit and notice that under a pile of clutter sits a pale upright piano, the kind you've seen in countless churches, the kind that tend to be in baptist churches. you know without going near it that it smells powdery and far away like a hymnal. when the sweetie brings your food, sits down to the disconnectedness and undoneness, let the bacon and eggs and potatoes, the words that mean breakfast, mend, if not your body, at least your snarling mind.

after breakfast, renewed, drive to the dump. the transfer station. marvel, as you do every time, that your dump has the prettiest view anywhere. make the sweetie pull over at the side of the road so you can take pictures of your mountains from the road beside the dump. feel smug. the dump photos put a bee in your bonnet and you walk down toward the highway with your camera, promising you'll meet the sweetie at the laundromat later to rescue your clothes. walk past the coffee place with an auction in back. walk past the laundromat/pizza place with the caboose full of scrambled eggs in back. walk past two places advertising pizza, side by side, and then the fish place that always looks, through the open kitchen door, like a dorm room. walk to the bridge. it is a good place to take photos of the way the season is moving through the mountains. kneel against the railing on the low side of the bridge. stand up when you realize the owner of the trans am, the one that's been for sale the past year or so, panics as he drives by you because he thinks you are hurt. walk back to the laundromat. sit on the bench outside. knit a while. take another photo. go in and start to pull the warm clothes out of the dryer and into the wire basket. when the sweetie walks in the door, explain your adventure over the folding of towels and shirts.