Tuesday
Nov162010
Sitting And Remembering And Waiting For The Heat To Kick In From The Boiler Below
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
1. I am sitting at the kitchen table and listening to my Blip.fm station and thinking about what a nice visit the Palinode and I had with his parents when they stayed over last night,
taken with iPhone's QuadCamera app, exposure adjusted in PS Express
2. and something about the quality of the light has me casting back to a time when three friends and I drove up to a northern lake together, and I sat in the back seat with my hand out the window pushing back the wind and my head pressed into the back of the seat in front of me so that I could only see the farmland whipping by with one eye,
3. and I am amazed now at how comfortable I was to slip into my own spot in time, to disjoint myself from the rest of the car and exist in bits and pieces against the seat and out the window in the fields running past,
4. taking notes in my mind about how the seat felt against my forehead and the wind between my thumb and forefinger,
5. which was a favourite pasttime, at the time, this notetaking, a running narration of my small points of contact with the outside world,
6. and some of those stories are still so vivid that I can recall them on a cold winter afternoon twenty year later –
7. I can still remember how icy even a summer wind could feel at the right velocity in 1990 –
8. and I wonder where all the skin went that once layered that hand and the water that I drank to feed that skin and the clothing that I wore to cover it and the seat that I leaned it against and all the grain that we raced past,
9. because it's a wonder that we haven't buried the world under with all the things we make and shed, the things that lead us down another twenty years to a kitchen table where I look out the window at early winter snow in the middle of the afternoon,
10. and I am contemplating supper and maybe a hot bath to wash some of the grey from me while I wait for the heat to kick in from the boiler below.
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PS. In case you haven't yet noticed, I have sprouted a new iPhoneography weblog in these here parts to celebrate the replacement of my sweet, sweet iPhone. Check it out.
taken with iPhone's QuadCamera app, exposure adjusted in PS Express
2. and something about the quality of the light has me casting back to a time when three friends and I drove up to a northern lake together, and I sat in the back seat with my hand out the window pushing back the wind and my head pressed into the back of the seat in front of me so that I could only see the farmland whipping by with one eye,
3. and I am amazed now at how comfortable I was to slip into my own spot in time, to disjoint myself from the rest of the car and exist in bits and pieces against the seat and out the window in the fields running past,
4. taking notes in my mind about how the seat felt against my forehead and the wind between my thumb and forefinger,
5. which was a favourite pasttime, at the time, this notetaking, a running narration of my small points of contact with the outside world,
6. and some of those stories are still so vivid that I can recall them on a cold winter afternoon twenty year later –
7. I can still remember how icy even a summer wind could feel at the right velocity in 1990 –
8. and I wonder where all the skin went that once layered that hand and the water that I drank to feed that skin and the clothing that I wore to cover it and the seat that I leaned it against and all the grain that we raced past,
9. because it's a wonder that we haven't buried the world under with all the things we make and shed, the things that lead us down another twenty years to a kitchen table where I look out the window at early winter snow in the middle of the afternoon,
10. and I am contemplating supper and maybe a hot bath to wash some of the grey from me while I wait for the heat to kick in from the boiler below.
----------------------------
PS. In case you haven't yet noticed, I have sprouted a new iPhoneography weblog in these here parts to celebrate the replacement of my sweet, sweet iPhone. Check it out.
Reader Comments (3)
You deserve a medal for great writery.
what he said (palinode that is).
Poetry.