Gearing Up To Go

I stay at Wesley’s for the night to save driving time in the morning…The morning, which today was her little house on the ridge hugged by a dense, white cloud. At sunrise, the light filtered through and kissed the white with a hazy crimson. Within the hour, I heard a pair of startled mourning doves flapping and calling as they flew, unsettled, from their perch. And soon the day began, simple as that, with a lift of the clouds and the bowl of the mountains rising all around us.

“The winter sunlight here is like the everyday air back home in Oregon,” I say.

“How do you mean?” Wes says.

“It’s so direct. There is no filter. You can almost feel it in its purest form. You know what I mean?”

She nods. After all, she used to live in Seattle.

“There’s no way to really describe it any further than that. The air there tastes right and feels right on the skin. The hint of evergreen is always there – now that’s something I really miss.”

“The evergreens? Yeah, I know. Even just the color – there’s no green like it.”

We pause for a moment in the morning light that stretches across the breakfast table. I breathe deeply. This is it. Tomorrow begins one month on the road to visit old stomping grounds and write my heart out. I have friends who’ve traveled half of Europe in twice the time and seemed to handle the upheaval without a wince. What happens to me is that my heart just starts to pull itself away from the rest of my body, leaving little marks across every turf I touch that resembles my childhood. Heartsick nostalgia. Tainted longing. Evergreen fever. Call is what you will, it’s potent and it can either wreak havoc on the writer’s soul or feed it like a drug.

So oh, let it be the latter. Let the raindrops be like venom, seeping through two pierced-holes in my skin. Each drop a word, each word on a veiny path, each path leading to the heart, the heart pumping out stories to the tune of my pulse.