50° in Suburbia

It’s about 50° outside today, here in suburbia of Austin Texas. The skeletons of the trees declare themselves steady against the silver-gray sky, as if we are in the center of a cloud. No blue. No yellow. Just smoke and siren heard faintly in the distance. A plane makes it’s way, invisible and overhead. My neighbor starts his engine and pulls out of the parking lot. Only screen and metal frame stands between my skin against the air conditioned breeze. Black coffee goes from hot to lukewarm. For two days now it has been raining, a light drizzle then a steady rhythm, then it ceases. Although my head sleeps right up against my bedroom window, I barely hear it’s performance.

My apartment has some ants, but never have I encountered any other creatures. Not that they’d scare me. I remember flying B-52’s–roaches the size of your fingers, then cane spiders the size of my baby sister’s face, centipedes red and cobalt blue–their babies flooding out from the tub drain when we turned the water on after a long period of renovation–those renovations consisting of Jacks-of-all-trades attempting to repair utilities built in the 60s and 70s as we took showers outside with the hose for a few months beside my mother’s orchids.

I remember rain being not good enough of a word for the buckets of salt water tipped over our thin houses, the yard a river of floating fish and rats in the morning.

The sky has shifted from silver-white to pencil-lead in the short time of my reminiscing a place other than the place I am physically a part of in the here and now, and lately it has been like that–ash stains and air.

Birds are trying to get their words in and the thunder is all bass. Under manicured lawns and watched streets of suburbia, bones and scraps of shelters rest, swarmed by skins and furs of creatures I wouldn’t recognize.

I wonder where the deer go when it gets like this?

The wind moves my curtains a teasing dance–it’s “I am my own and I do what I please” aliveness always prevalent, provocative. Really I know I will write about all of it–the closet rooms and the king size beds, the bus stop and the red-velvet interior caravans, and about the way dirt is gold. Really I will praise this neighborhood in the way I praise the ocean in my chest. The separation is mostly invented in my mind–here vs. there. That time vs. this time.

Water of the sky is now heard dipping into puddles, and by the slush of tires on the road. The mud on a woman’s boots coming in from walking her labrador. A sweet carrying; a seamless returning.

Rain is never asking “may I fall right here?” “Is now a good time, or..?” “How much is too much?” “How would you like me to land?” And I think I’d like to be rain and wind and soot and clay.