a Thanksgiving endeavor

(Trying new things.)

I hope you have the happiest holiday, full of laughter and kindness and fancy china (or paper plates).
Love.

Sunset, 5pm, 11/23/13

Between 4:52 and 5:13 pm.

I still sing for you

This is a song that makes me a little bit sorry. It's four thirty and the sun is setting and the two gold, sad feelings match.

A Part of Me by Neck Deep

the dividing line

"I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon."

—from On The Road by Jack Kerouac

a grayer beard than last year

I'm sitting at the bar in our kitchen watching my dad make beer. He siphons the dark malty mixture out of the metal pot on the counter, and it rushes through a clear hose into a glass bottle the size of my sister. He dips a bit of the liquid out into a beaker, and then floats a weird bubbly measurey thing in it. He mutters numbers to himself. I don't say anything, and he doesn't say anything.

 I like watching my dad do things he's good at and knows a lot about. It's the same feeling as when we're in the car together, and he starts explaining middle eastern politics for half-hours at a time.

"Look at it clarify already," he says without glancing at me. "If the whole batch ends up that clear, it will be good."

"I was noticing that," I said. Even though we're speaking, the silence isn't broken.

November Fourth

It's forty-five degrees today. Monday afternoon. I wasn't late for class, and I'm wearing the scarf my best friend made me last Christmas. It's my half birthday.

I can't make you understand how much better things are now unless I tell you about the hills, which have turned orange and yellow and red in the last two weeks, as far as you can drive. The setting sunlight hits them, gilding them brilliantly against the heavy clouds on the horizon, and I can almost hear the world singing.

Everything is rejoicing. I've joined it.