Not only does leather come to me on the cusp of a change of season, but it comes to me in a time when I’ve been in dire need of a fresh horizon view. I’ve been leaning into the hides as one would a fence post or the shoulder of another. I’ve found myself surprised by the supple quality of the material and by the way it falls away beneath my tools as though it’s time or an object under the spell of gravity. It comes easy. It comes quick. I wrestle with the shears. My hands and back know a new and foreign fatigue.

The heights and depths of tooling come lightly beneath my hands; the beastie scent of hides and the two-faced texture between my fingertips draws new ideas and possibility in the realm of relief — forms clearly visible, highly accentuated, brought into existence blow by blow. Already, I’m crossing back over into metal and applying new ideas to my sketchbook in layers of black ink: scribbled and faded lines that tip off the edges of pages, shrinking as they creep in minuscule loops towards a table top or fall into the pit of my sketchbook spine. There’s never enough space when my pen grows greedy in the domain of record making.

As I type,

Farley barks in his sleep.

All four paws twitch and his body shudders

as he prowls the wheat fields of his dream scape

in pursuit of the winged things.

The window is open.

To let the cold in.

I hear the city and the push of wind in the redwood outside.

The Bay is glittering below us

in the distance

under night

and the constant clatter of streetlights

between here

and there.

The world hasn’t ever seemed so big.

My heart holds the memory of sagebrush.

It fans the scent in the face of my soul,

recalls the space of Idaho and

the reckoning and beckoning of that big sky.

Something has started calling me North once more.

I’m losing track of everything I had to say.

There are crescendos, here and there,

but the details I needed to tell you have been cut adrift.

I speak out loud, type with my tongue,

roll my eyes to the ceiling and then shut them light tight.

I lay on my back with the warmth of interwebular connectivity across my stomach; a sure glow beaming out in pixelated uniformity in the eveningsilence

of this room.

And still, those roaming thoughts I have been meaning to share about taking friendships to the next level, trusting others implicitly, admitting insecurities and watching things that are meant to take flight rise up on wings in the moment of their first flight.

First flight.

First flight.

Those roaming thoughts: thick as bison, pesky and fleeting,

gorgeous and new.

Roses in the cheeks of children.

Fiddleheads.

It’s late here, again.

Something scampered by, a brief moment ago, and tossed a handful of

sand in my eyes.

The grit of weariness is hard to see through and I give in.

I

tuck my head

under

my wing

and all the rest,

the good and the wonderful,

fall away.