how, after the night’s / morning’s rain
the soil of north garden
looks a deep rich dark
_______
small stack of silver dollar pancakes
on the cooling rack on the butcher block
secret ingredient: almond extract
so sweet and easy when i’m doing the kitchen dance solo
i might like to continue this
friday tradition
______
ashby the gray cat and moonstar the black cat
both following me around so i decide
to take them on a walk loop
down the backroad, across the pond dam, past the hoophouse and through the little lookfar-to-whitehouse trail back
to point A
and how they saunter and pounce
through the tall grass and scramble
across the just planted fields and pant with tongues out near the end
from the exertion of the excursion
_______
shooing the escapee chickens out of
the just planted beds in north garden
and undoing their kicking-things-up damage
again and again
_______
the caramel with the tiny babydoll
perched on top left
by trish
in my cubby
_______
i don’t know how it is we got to the idea
of taking new names for darien’s last week here
but i do know all of us are laughingin the kitchen about it over dinner
and the best is when tyler is doubled over at the sink at the suggestion of lieutenant reverb / lieutenant freebird as his.
and after much brainstorming and laughter,
the others are:
erik = glow
emory = shad casterson
jack (the dog) = chicago style
trish = boomer / boom boom
baigels = womp
joseph = senor captain coolant
me – scribble or lil’ scribbs
darien = zen or zendo
cynthia is not there, but the best we come up with is toolio which is not only an ode to her mastery and care of handtools, but also to coolio
and then we toss a few around to rename sandhill:
chainmail chapel
and
harness heaven
and then we each write our new names
on name tags that we stick onto ourselves
_______
the tick i pull off my lower back
at the start of our sit
and how i debated whether or not to move
to grab it but if i was debating about such a thing anyway
it’s just the same as breaking the stilness
detail collector 