Marsh fires and more
I dreamed that the guy working on our house was also doing an elaborate wood carving to hang over the doorway and I was flipping through a magazine and found a full page ad about his work. Fitting as I feel as if everything is being done to perfection around here but wondering simultaneously if perfection is what we’re after.
I couldn’t sleep because of the marsh fire that is sending thick smoky air our way. It smells as if someone just burned a piece of paper and left it simmering in the ashtray by my bed. Itchy eyes. I woke up Tatjana and asked her about the smoke because at that time I didn’t know it was marsh fire.
Meanwhile, here it is, pre-dawn, the sixth anniversary of the Federal Flood and someone said yesterday, it feels like yesterday, and yet for me it feels like another lifetime ago. Yesterday, as I was putting the details together for my trip west, I thought to myself, having not traveled for a while, how anything becomes normal when done often enough. It became normal to live in the no man’s land between Ft Worth and Dallas in a cramped apartment with a few pieces of clothes. It became normal to return and live in a city that was flood ravaged and broken. It became normal to have a job where leaving and returning was second nature. It became normal to stay home. It became normal to get up to pee in the middle of the night and check the video screen to see Tin’s outline.
The thing about fire is that it destroys and reduces to ash what was once there, but afterwards, when the healing begins, something else grows in its place – sometimes shinier new and sometimes a pale remembrance of things past. We humans are only as good as our resiliency, that is what makes us strong – adaptability.