I’m writing again

And I don’t know this character, but world building again feels like a homecoming.

There’s magic in those hills. When they dust up in glowing gold. The cliff faces shimmer at sunrise, brilliant cinnabar and salmon stripes. Ice hangs right behind my lungs, producing the only cloud in an empty, oceanic blue sky for miles. Pine needles and thin aspen leaves crunch under foot.

Its misty and threatening snow and I can’t find any reason to turn back yet. Tucking the sheerling liner of my coat collar up around my ears, I gulp in an early morning moon like a drunk finding the bottom of the bottle. The wolves howled all night. Lavendar shadows woke me to a frost lined window sill. All I want is up into the treeline to watch the eagles hang above the valley. I found my heart in those high desert mountains, and I can’t find the will to tear it up, roots and all, to move along to somewhere more fortunate.

The village is dying. More money in plywood for the empty window panes than goes around for the diner that also serves as the one gas station and trading post. And the backroom that acts like a church on Sundays. It’s all there, right next to the post office that has twenty boxes and a dusty birthday card carousel. It’s all gravel paths and one stop sign that’s rusted through with buckshot and a twist from a runaway tractor trailer from that one February when Old Man Blackbird had that stroke that landed him in the hundred person graveyard out behind the dunes not two months later.

Maybe we’ll all be buried under those wind swept sands one of these days. Sooner or later. For now though, it’ll have to wait. I want to catch a chance with my paints while the ground is still breathing. That one moment in a desert mountain dawn when a cold smoke rises in pockets to swirl rainbows around the loblollies.

Now to figure out who my character is, and why…