Waiting to Fall Apart

The days tick by. Snow melts, then it snows again. The sun comes and goes. The list of what’s important shrinks, a vanishing horizon of the shit we thought mattered. There is birdsong in the mornings. I don’t know what kind. We walk and walk some more. Rinse and repeat. High up on Silver Road I run into Dan on his four wheeler, and we talk across the width of the dirt road, twice the recommended six feet. No one’s buying logs, he says. Gas is a buck-fifty at Willey’s, he says. He speeds off. I amble on.

Back home, I split wood for fires that won’t burn for seven months or more. The boys are down in the orchard shooting clays, their guns booming over and over again. I hear their laughter between shots. I imagine how some years from now, they’ll look back on this time. And how will they regard it? How will any of us? It’s one of those questions with no answer, so I let it slide and set another round of wood on the block. It’s ash, and it splits so easy it’s almost as if it were waiting to fall apart.