FIRST THE FOREST THEN THE STREET (OF ANGELIC INSECT SPRAY AND WHITE PETAL PARTS)

The wind in the forest was throwing white fluff from somewhere all along the corridors. It was like a living dream and I didn’t know where the white cotton-like particles came from. I watched it go through the air and then some bits of it would alight on verdant leaves whist others kept on going. The forest itself held up a large hill adjacent to it and that hill was hardly trodden. I could see the flaxen summit with its tall feral flowers and grasses being brushed over just so by the wind. I wondered about all the people that were known, a long time ago, in New Port Richie, in Dade County, or even other places, closer to this North, and where they had been. The departed also came to mind, and whether they had come again, or were to be no more saving for remnants of memory. The place had for the most part cleared out. I looked up to the ceiling of branches that for the most part covered the sky. A strange plane could be seen as it went overhead. It looked like something old, from the nineteen seventies or such. It was pretty somehow against the clouds and blue. The beloved and I walked and the canines ran around and sniffed, played, explored. There were at the end little marshy areas and an open field where old tractor equipment and wild clover live. We looked at the sandpit, at the little berries on robust trees half in the shade and half in the sun. Eventually we made our way back, trying against odds this and that action in order to avoid mosquitoes. There is a natural spray, but I don’t know if it works. It has lemon. Maybe it attracts them more. Once, not knowing the container was in a vehicle compartment, it spilled some out and I thought the beautiful smell must have been guides and angels. Soon we head out. It had been regular enough, which means beautiful and quietly fruitful.

Later on, amid a large street, there were little shops such as hair stylists and bookstores and even a tattoo shop. There is a church that waits on the end with signs that say when mass is. Also, there are green patches, a large intentionally rust colored sign that arches over the street. Some of the patrons of the shops are affluent, and some are not. There are scuffed shoes, and there are non scuffed shoes. The sun was strong, and I thought for a second of the deep forest and its stillness, and how it can look in the rain, in the new snow, in the morning, the dusk, or in the late autumnal afternoons with those hues somehow joyous. Yet, at that time, though there is the excitement of new beginnings, there is some intense underlying energy that can be called anxious. Again, for some spirit reason, I thought of the sub-tropics and of being one week there amidst the palms and sand and sea…those sights and smells and sounds…and then hours later being in the Canadian fall. It reminded me of Aerosmith’s Walking in the Sand song, and of Cheap Trick’s song, The Flame. But the street. It has artist types and some business types, but mostly upwardly mobile types. I don’t have a negative feeling for it or a positive one. It’s a bit different though, and has some character. It’s on a hill, which is different. And the sides are even hilly if you observe and think about it. But there is not much there one way or the other. If asked to decide, I would in an instant choose the forest with its fallen pine needles and butterflies, its pathways and wind and with its peculiar, even slightly esoteric white particles of cotton that were flying around. I would like to think it was the transmigration of souls, or an auspicious sign, such as one sees when reading the earth or discerning the firmament.

But sometimes things are just what they are.

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