Meditations in an emergency

Kind of thoughtful tonight. Some days, I'm a hard adult woman with her shit together. Some days I'm just a girl stripped down to her running bra holding a dying baby squirrel in her shirt while trying to intervene in a domestic violence situation. That's all right, though.

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I have camping stories, and I promised Laura I'd write them, but I'll have to save that for a less eventful evening than this one has been. I have pictures, too. Good pictures! It's been a busy week--camping recovery, Joe's birthday drinking, bocce ball and then sort of a non sequitur tonight.

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April is the cruelest month, so the poets say. And sure enough, we have Mars running retrograde and Mercury turning back on the last day of the month. Easy to think about Mars in particular when the Blue Ridge is on fire and the air is full of ash.

I happen to personally know one of the trails at the epicenter--the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe up on 33. There's a monument, and on the back side of it, the AT, and in weather, the rain and mists wrap the place up until it looks like another world: a world of smoke and what-ifs and the ghosts of salamanders. Those aforementioned "knights" came through in 1716 in Spotswood's "expedition:" what was really a kind of party bus of a wagon train where a bunch of drunk, weak men from Williamsburg were carried through the mountains and made up names that wouldn't stick. Still, it's so remembered: the beginning of the Shenandoah as a frontier. And I think of it. A place of conception.

Strange and stirring to think of it burning.

But back to Mars. Oh, the old returns. A time to reexamine what angers us, what drives us, and what gets us off. Time to make friends with the parts of ourselves we don't like or understand.

But here's a few things I do like in April:
-Helles lagers
-tacos
-my brand new saucony Hurricanes and the subsequent 6 out of 7 day running cycle they inspire
-the front and back porches of my life

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Maybe because of the mercurial weather, or maybe because I've been wearing white pants before Memorial day and craving champagne, or maybe because I'm feeling altogether longingly wistful and cynical, but I've been in the mood for Frank O'Hara. I like O'Hara. He might have been one of those writers I learned a lot from, but he died youngish, when I think he was just starting to write his best thing. He got run over by a jeep in the darkness on Fire Island. That's doom I can relate to.

This is from "Meditations in an Emergency."

I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.