August 31

A year to the day since we emptied the house on Cherokee. A year ago at this hour I was driving west along the interstate for Georgetown, for a month in the mountains, well beyond the hazed brown fog clinging to the huddled buildings in Denver. A year ago, the stopper loosed, the shift from that familiar life to this, its curious facsimile, meandering, wayward, or even-coursed. & this document, now, celebrating, too, its anniversary. Of all of my years perhaps no one more precipitous, no one more daunting in its recollection, more generative in its violent torsions, more fully striated with deep-felt sorrows & swift jubilations. A milestone, now, to sit here & write of it with an unfractured consciousness, a stable enough fulcrum of self to permit of a brief glance behind. No Orphic loss in it anymore.

I think of the logic that compelled us to these farflung points, the compulsion towards self-discovery, towards an earnest evaluation of the first-terms of my own living. That leaning initially towards a thrumming dream, the verdant pastoral of the northwest, that island horseshoed in the tumbling sea. Of Orcas I recall now most clearly its unflagging gift of simple beauty, between us, between ourselves & the land, between ourselves & our burgeoning notions of how we wanted to live. There was dissolution there, perhaps, but wrought of the finest & most insightfully honest circumstances I’ve yet abided. These separate lives a gift given.

That stunned & ghosting drive up the Alcan, fifteen hour days in the truck, the snow mounting, the sense of isolation the more palpable by the second. & then Alaska. That auroral welcome east of Tok in the crisp winter night. Homer. My cabin. My beach along the bay. Good god, a lifetime ago already.

The details I harbor silent within, the ebb & flow of my well-being, the recursions of grief & wonder in balanced presentation. But I am here, in the simple dream of my youth, my heart in me yet, my breath billowing the air my lungs have sought since my earliest remembrance. I am alive to behold it all, to grasp after it or let its beauty settle & lay how it will. No small wonder.

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