Tremors

There are dark rumblings in my world at the moment, a shifting of tectonic plates, a teetering on jag-edged cliffsides.

So much cannot be said.
So much wanting to say every last word of it.

And in other news, summer begins a dry crackle to its denouement, the days a yellow haze of thin cloudcover and puddingthick air. The five apples (variety: Chehalis) that my apple tree produced this year have begun to fall, pocked and shot through with mites. Useless, and yet oddly beautiful in their utter imperfection.

White flies.
Aphids.
Every morning the way out of the house crisscrossed with spiders' webs.

If I were ten years old again and wandering the yellow fields of my childhood, I'd go searching for a garter snake or an ant pile. Once, under a discarded piece of plywood in a far corner of a neighbor's one-acre yard, I found a mouse family all swirled together in a soft grass nest, the mother-mouse in full alarm when her roof was so rudely raised by the giant (me), the babies pink and helpless. I gently let the board back down — I recall that afternoon so clearly — and continued on my solitary hunt for the small trappings of wildlife my world allowed.

But not here, not now.