A Piece

Today I drove into town and visited a doctor about my cold/flu. he was referred to me by a fellow I work with. Turns out he knows my uncle and my aunt. Small towns! Kinda wild. I've spent the day in a sort of dream state. I've been awake and going about my business but I've also not been entirely....here. It was a spectacularly gorgeous day today, sunny and mild, soft breezes blowing, the temperature rose to the upper 60's and stayed there until nightfall. As I was driving home from the doctor's office and pharmacy my thoughts turned again to my childhood here in West Virginia. I drove the "old road" back to the farm, down highway 19. The road loops and dips and whirls around mountains and along streams and rivers. Yawning meadows stretched out on the roadsides, pastures dotted with grazing cattle, horses, neatly wound rolls of hay. The sun slanted in from the west and painted everything in an ethereal light, rays playful on falling leaves and sweetly swaying branches. I passed the post office where earlier I had retrieved my mail. I passed long-abandoned houses and businesses that I recall seeing when I was just a boy in the backseat of my father's sedan. It really has only been 28 years since that time. In some ways it seems like centuries, in others it seems like only moments ago. Where does the time go? The light this time of year is golden and precious. I remember being a boy and playing in my childhood neighborhood in Beckley on these Autumn afternoons and evenings. I was enrolled in elementary school and had already started the institutional process but I was still untouched then, unfettered by mature concerns. I'd have spent the afternoon riding my bicycle around, playing G.I. Joes or a pick-up game of football with other neighborhood kids. I'd be wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes, a t-shirt and a hoody. The light would begin to cup the streets and crease the lawns and avenues with shadows. In a while I'd hear my mother's voice calling for me, my name echoing off the hills and houses "Maaaathhh-EWWWWWW!!!! Time for DIIINNNNNNN-ERRRRR!!" to which I'd belt out a reply "Okayyyyyyyyyy!! I'm COMMMING!"

They weren't the best of times or the worst of times. But they were childhood times and there is something haunting, holy and sacred about these memories.

I'm beginning to get better, to get over this sickness. The yuckiness has moved from my head and into my chest. I'm on antibiotics now. My thoughts are turning towards the work I have ahead of me, the work at the resort with the closing of Mountain Creek for the season and me and my crew moving up to the Bluestone Dining Room for the remainder of autumn and for the coming winter and spring. And I'm thinking of the work that lays ahead for me with this cabin and my life here on this farm. This new adventure I've undertaken, this old dream that has never died, never been silenced, never gone away. My thoughts drift less and less on the summer's romance that didn't work out. It still pops up in my consciousness now and then but my mind hasn't been dwelling on it much these past several days. I guess I'm finding comfort in the thinking that if I was just a piece of ass to her then I guess she was just a piece of ass to me too. Nothing more. I want more than that but it is what it is. If she wants to treat herself like just a piece of pussy then I guess that's what she was: a piece of pussy. Hit it and quit it, I guess. But I'm getting too old for that shit, man! Hahahaha!

Tonight the cabin walls embrace me with their tattered memories and quiet, pastoral dignity. Tomorrow I'll return to work cooking for people, feeding people. And the future? Well, the future will take care of itself. night night, The Myth of Matt