New Year with Ghosts

Each post emerges

like a separate gray soul

on the snowy road. 

On the last day of 2012, I went for a long run. A light snow fell. Milky banks of fog shifted across the landscape. Along the sides of the rutted roads, old fenceposts and signposts materialized one by one, like memories stepping forward from my subconscious. Beyond the border of the road, the horizon was a cloudy sea, marked by underwater dunes and mesas. In the distance, the Dome reminded me of the volcanic rock that rises out of Morro Bay in Northern California, where I spent so much of my life. 

I often miss the Pacific Ocean. But has it ever left me? Have any of the faces, seas or skylines I knew in the past really left me? I thought once again of how this ancient lakebed acts like a canvas for the imagination, how its shapes and sounds evoke remembered beauty or pain at every shift of the seasons, at every turn of the light. 

According to a Chinese superstition, ghosts of the past shouldn't be mentioned on New Year's Day. We should look forward to the future, focusing our thoughts on the coming months. But I don't fear these ghosts, or regret them anymore. I live with them comfortably now -- much more comfortably than I did when I was younger. I greet them like old companions on the road, like the old wooden corral posts that I've come to know so well. 

Snow Brooms

Like brooms against snow

shadows of the rabbitbrush

sweep a restless mind. 

Snow fell again on Saturday night. Its planes and hollows are laced with tracks -- birds, coyotes, rabbits, dogs, humans -- like frenetic thoughts crisscrossing the mind. The rabbitbrush blossoms turn dark bronze in the winter, their fine branches spreading like broom straws agains the snow. The sagebrush have turned powdery silver against white. 

Yesterday morning I was lighting the propane stove, when I remembered that we've always had the tank refilled in December. I checked the tank level, and it's down to zero. Why can't I remember this? Meanwhile, we have just ordered a truckload of aspen logs to heat the house for the rest of the winter. We use propane for the stove and for the hot water heater, but those two appliances are responsible for hot showers and coffee -- two of my only remaining addictions. Filling the tank and loading up on firewood can get expensive, but it's still cheaper than heating Eric's turn-of-the-century house in Denver. 

My thoughts are as scattered as the snowtracks. I come home late from the nursing home, and my brain is still numb from the alarms and call lights. I fall into bed and dream of charting I forgot to do. In the morning I have to ask Eric to repeat things that he told me the night before. I worry about forgetting something important. I worry that I've inadvertently harmed someone.

The blue snow shadows calm my mind a little.