labor day

A weekend tightened with awe.

 

Getting lost between Doctor's Lake & Little Doctor's Lake.

 

Pheasants loudly scared out of the dry wild grass along the road.

 

Not knowing the right questions and getting uncertain answers from a man who looked like he'd soaked his face in whisky and beaten his cheeks with a whip. He called out to his wife, "Woman! Come here, woman." She looked either 12 or 40, eyes weirdly-spaced and absent. The result of bad breeding that comes from liquor or/or intertwined genetics.

 

Dogs, many of them. They'd run out after me, barking. I'd ignore them. Their hackles would let up, and they'd follow me a bit without making a noise, then wander off.

 

Later, a group of Native kids threw a football to me. "Nice catch!" they said. I apologized as I threw it back and it flopped around like it had a sickness in its gut. The kids were nice and gave me good, accurate directions back. I later found out there'd been a stabbing in their house a few years back. Friend-to-friend, I think.

 

A woman in a neck brace, smoking a cigarette locked in her talon. She looked not quite at us as we breezed over the grimy junk she was trying to unload from her garage. "Skinny," she said to Olive when it was time to pay. Nothing more. Skinny.

 

Two sheltie dogs barky on land, but tamping down to total calm once they jumped onto the canoe and propped themselves on the throne of water-resistant luggage.

 

A black bear up on a ridge, behind just a flimsy prison of trees and an untested trust in the safeness of distance. Bad sleep after that, ears awake for what I knew the next second would bring.

 

Baby moles, slick and wormy, nested next to the apple tree stump in our back yard when we got home. The dog had licked on to death, I think.

 

Others were still alive, wriggling.