172 mornings.
Today, 5:50 a.m., that’s 173.
Home to Cove Island Park, and back. Five mile loop.
Wallace Stegner (via Audible) has been keeping me company. The Spectactor Bird. Angle of Repose. Crossing to Safety. Remembering Laughter. All the Little Live Things.
And now, Stegner’s Recapitulation.
“Remembered habit created remembered reality. His needle ran in a groove.” (WS-R)
173 consecutive mornings. ~1,700,000 steps. I’d say that’s a groove.
As my feet pat the shoulder of the road, helicopters come whirling down from the red maples, illuminated against the street lamps. My mind lets go of the narration, I stop, and I watch, in silence. A warm gust of wind sends another troop of helicopters whirring down on me. Raining helicopters!
“That intense obsessed involvement, and then absence, silence.” (WS-R)
And then back to Stegner…and Recapitulation.
“Listen to those cottonwoods talking..Doesn’t that sound tell you, as much as any single signal in your life, who you are? Doesn’t it smell of sage and rabbit brush and shad scale? Doesn’t it have the feel of wet red ditch-bank sand in it, and the stir of a thunderstorm coming up over one of the little Mormon towns down in the plateaus? Just now, for a half second, it drowned me in associations and sensations. It brought back whole two people I used to love. When cottonwoods have been rattling at you all through your childhood, they mean home. I could have spent fifty years listening to the shamal thresh the palms in the date gardens of Hofuf, and never felt anything but out of place. But one puff of wind through those trees in the gully is enough to tell me, not that I have come home, but that I never left. Having let it surge through his head like the wind through the branches, he takes it back.” (WS-R)
And then, the aha moment.
My mind swimming in Stegner’s words for weeks.
Why so uninspired to write DK?
Try to follow behind that!
Forgettaboutit.
Notes:
- WS-R = Wallace Stegner, Recapitulation (Penguin Books, November 1, 1997)
- Photo: DK, Weed Ave, Stamford, CT. October 24, 2020. 6:26 am. 61° F. Wind gusts: up to 13 mph.
