Almanac

 

Yesterday so mild. Sweet misty morning.

 

On my afternoon coffee walk I happened upon that exploded car. Hood mangled and charred, windshield smashed. 

 

Now I’m too sticky far from my dreams to remember. Something like a basket or a net plunges into the water and pulls nothing up. 

 

What do you call that little net you use to yank the goldfish out of their tank at the store. Or when you need to clean the bowl. We lost so many fish that way.

 

Wow, I love March. What a warm soft gray month. 

 

Even though yesterday was cold. And I had to drag my ass out of the house into the evening rain. The way that it pelting mixed with petals from the trees. Pink. 

 

What do I want to do when May rolls around?

 

Trying not to get too caught up in that track of thinking about what I don’t have. Coming home last night, always when it’s raining, I feel the gratitude for a roof and a bed. Send that soft feeling of arriving home and being safe and warm out to people I know are spending the night tucked under some stairs. 

 

Pack up some things to give away amid all this collecting I’ve been doing. I sift through my closet and don’t want to wear anything I’ve got.

 

Where did my Columbo shirt get to?

 

I should call the hotel. 

 

I kind of maxed out on that podcast I was stealing the voice for this fiction piece from. Try not to let it stop me from finding it useful. Things started to be too much of a stretch. The same thing is happening as I rewatch The Killing. 

 

What mystery doesn’t ultimately leave you cold?

 

A chill after a week of warmth that coaxed the flowers out—hellebore, daffodils.

 

People on instagram kept pointing out the crescent moon lined up in the sky with Venus and Jupiter—stupider.

 

***m showed up in my dream last night. I had started dating ***s, I think? And I was stopping by the old house to ask ***m if he could watch the cat while we ran off somewhere.

 

I had woken him up from where he had been sleeping on a quilt spread out in a square on the floor.

 

The house wasn’t our house. If I try to place its geography, it was somewhere like the strip mall that shared a parking lot with the Food Lion in Shippensburg. 

 

He said sure, no problem. But I could hear the problem in the back of his voice. He said that he loved me. But I was like a child eager to run off and play with my friends. Sure sure. I love you too.

 

Two nights in a row of soaking up 10+ hours of sleep. Double snoozing the alarm and really clinging to my dreams, which were highly involved. 

 

I can’t actually remember this morning’s, but I still remember some of yesterday’s. Working at the library with ***r, but the stacks were a cylindrical column. And our work had more to do with checking volumes for validity.

 

There was a sort of hall of fame for books that had been incorrectly bound with covers that had nothing to do with their contents. It also contained a pumpkin  wrapped in a skin of paper mache. I accidentally rubbed up against it and it pulled right off. 

 

That person at the conference who shared their dream with a table of strangers at breakfast. They didn’t drink coffee, but they had dreamed up a small cup of it. Not a small cup, but a small amount of coffee. Into which they were endlessly pouring hazelnut creamers. 

 

Another person at the table asked if it would be ok for them to interpret. Then shared that coffee can symbolize hospitality and a sense of welcoming or belonging. But conversely not having enough coffee can symbolize a feeling of alienation. 

 

I just remembered that last night’s dream was about caves. Strange mounded stalagmite formations covered in fungus surrounded by water with fish living in holes in some of the reef-like structures. I voiced concern about the fish getting stuck in the holes when the tide moved out.

 

We did, some night this week, see the moon. 

 

The amaryllis buds are cracking open. Getting ready to yawn. 

 

Two chickens splayed for a few days on the corner of the sidewalk at the intersection of four blocks carved up into freshly built condos and new development underway.

 

How the construction crew tore up the two big trees that a man slept under all last summer. Excavated into layers of brick to rout out channels to lay foundation. A grid of rebar and wood filled in with concrete. 

 

The first day, just glancing at them from the other side of Cumberland, I thought they were someone’s abandoned winter coat. 

 

Then the next day, when my usual sidewalk was blocked by construction vehicles, I crossed the street and found their two neck-wrung bodies. One tawny blonde, the other rougey brunette. Their tiny pink combs. 

 

Strange that none of the neighborhood rats or cats or raccoons, who constantly terrorize the trash, had dared to disturb them.

 

It’s only a few days later, after someone moved them away to who knows where, that I see their yellow and purple entrails spilled out and left behind and wonder what curse is at work. 

 

There must be a waxing crescent somewhere. But I haven’t seen it.

 

The order of my dreams is coming unglued. I’m not sure if I was in the plane buzzing the tree tops with some older woman and man first. Or if I was in the desert with ***s saying, so you bought a trailer?

 

Or if he was maybe in the plane.

 

At some point, towing the trailer we stopped for gas. Or at least at a gas station. And he and his friend told me I needed to go buy this small frozen pizza called The Great One.

 

I went in and the freezer was right in front of me. Folks lining up at the front to pay, eyed me digging around in it. Now and then I closed the door to keep from letting cold air out, and I kept searching through the fogged up glass.

 

I would see a swatch of yellow, which no one ever described to me, I just saw in my mind a vision of the packaging when ***s told me The Great One was what I wanted. I also knew it had like a double layer of pepperoni in the middle somehow.

 

Not finding it I moved on to survey the other coolers around the store. A woman who worked there tried to help me, but had a bit of a tone like I was crazy.

 

Without any luck, I finally left.

 

 

Six million dreams about work and then in the middle of it a dream in which we were back in the Morris Street House, sort of.

 

My mom was dizzy from medicine and arose from the bedroom and began putting on her coat to go to the drug store. I stopped her and said I would go, but part of me was expecting my brothers to come along or go in my place. I think we sort of went.

 

A memory of being in the front of Rite Aid rather than the back at the pharmacy counter. Reading glasses and ear plugs. And some man who I had a strange affair with and also didn’t. 

 

But it  was also like we never left the living room. And suddenly I was looking out the door, and noticed that I shape I had earlier though was just a crumpled paper bag on the lawn was really our father. We ran out and carried him in. 

 

I also remember ***h ***n and her mother being there to clear out a bunch of ceramics and glass work they had lent us. And them being astonished but also resigned—lets just hurry up and get out of here—about the state of the house.

 

An image of them on some spiral staircase that didn’t exist  but went down in the the basement and exited out the back into a courtyard with statues. It had been caked with dust that they shook loose revealing elaborate wrought iron and gold.

 

***h’s mother cleaning off two glass swan planters. Me trying to be helpful or own up to things, telling her, anything glass is yours. Her looking down to avoid rolling her eyes at me.

 

 

Dream that my brother was in the jungle working on a movie set with bird actors.

 

I expressed that this must be very cool, but he said—or was it the bird that said—actually it’s very sad.

 

How the bird had seen many of his friends abused and killed. At the least, humiliated. He was a giant cockatiel with thinning, yellowed feathers who clung to some sort of belt wrapped around my brother’s chest.

 

My brother held him at a distance with some resolve.

 

 

Just overripe full moon. High of 47, low of 30. Mostly cloudy.

 

Good morning to you good morning to you. A Mister Rogers sing song greeting. My mother driving us—who is us?—to daycare in the “school bus.” The Isuzu Trooper. Make and model.

Brian Kohberger’s Hyundai Elantra. How does it feel when you make a plan. How does it feel to execute. What do you feel after. 

I do remember this. 

The full cast of characters swimming in and out of my dreams last night. Now I can’t remember. I do remember two nights ago. Or mornings. A dream where two columns of cars were lined up in the driveway of the Morris Street house. At least six cars packed in. People sitting in them? For sure ***n and ***a were sitting in one. In the middle on the side closest to the house. So that if ***n would have gotten out of the driver’s seat, he would have been pretty close to the walkway. But he didn’t get out.

They were waiting for me. I remember they seemed out of place. What are they doing here? I wondered.