Books on my shelf I’ve suggested others to read more times than I’ve opened them myself. A keychain tape measure, mini metal ringlets draped over the wooden edge. Work schedule with shift times different colors based on the responsibilities for those employees that day. Yellow is medicine. Green supervises the morning checklist and in the evening. Red is surgery, naturally. Lavender Sundays because it doesn’t matter. We’re not open Sunday anyway. It’s just the dogs and cats still need to be fed and we still need to give them their meds.

There’s a table beside the table I’ve made a desk with four, eight square sets of seedlings.

Scruffy black wisp of a dog with a healthy ironic name and level of codependency inducing anxiety. Her fear of the world is an invisible leash that can not fall from my hand. The only time she ever ran, I was two hours away in Utica for work, and she was staying with friends. I drove back and found her a mile up the lake Ontario coast and lost my keys and it was an ordeal. I locked her up tight and drove back to Utica and worked the next day and she held it until Ashley got home the following morning. She’s needy. And wouldn’t you know it. That suits me.

I hope to be sitting writing beside baby squash and Ashley cucumbers very soon. I hope to be sitting writing beside a great many things. Some are waterfalls and some still water and others stark mountainsides that spread rumors about their never ending neighbors spread out like rashes on the young face of the earth, a rippled horizon, a cheese grater to clouds and planetary acne and prehistorically popped zits and broken, reformed and rehealed. Scar tissue. Appalachians. Rockies. The many names they were called no one knows to call them anymore.

It’s all so similar. It can be infuriating. You back up outside yourself yet full rooted legs crossed eyes gracefully closed self aware. You see you are so like a mountain. Or like a tree. If you give them your voice the way you would give it to a pen or a pencil or a keyboard or a microphone or a loved one or a frightened animal or a sound in the night or a bullhorn or a stranger or a friend you see across the way who hasn’t noticed you yet.

Give the mountain your voice, and you’ll immediately hear it already had one.

It’s you.

You’re its voice.

And. Actually. While I’m thinking about it.
I have a book that you really need to read.
You know what. If you want.
You can have it.