Vignettes

In the kitchen, beside the medicine I take each and every morning, beside the jumble of elk ivories, beside the bamboo whisk, beside a tube of lip balm, beside the stray button that fell from my red moleskin shirt, beside the obsidian arrowhead I found in the garden dirt is the big question I ask myself each morning:

“What good shall I do this day?”

It snowed in the night and the world is luminous and fresh. The scent of damp sage laps at the front door like water on the edge of a high country lake and before I do anything at all, I will go outside and breathe in the damp and fog and winter and make tracks like one more animal in the snow. The hawks are hunting from the fenceposts, the cats look annoyed by their paws (which won’t stay clean), the horses are eating the sunshine we cut and baled for them in the summertime and the dogs are anxious to blow off steam. Down on the river, I know the rapids are making their thunder, scrubbing lava stone smooth, and in the eddies and pockets of flat water there are geese, ducks, and swans taking their rest in the glow of daybreak.