For Now

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Two a.m. and I am wide awake. A lifetime of insomnia has taught me the subtle difference between normal wide awake and the wide awake feeling that means I won’t be going back to sleep any time soon. There are no blinds on the windows at the Johnny Gunter place. This is yet another outcome of for now, a state of temporariness that describes the transitional nature of this house, either because something is actually on the docket for rehabilitation or it is simply returning to the land from which it was ultimately borrowed. Regardless, one advantage of unobstructed window glass is an ongoing look at life on the outside.

At two a.m. Moon is smoothing the creases of the meadow with bony light. One grandson emerges from his sleeping quarters in the walk-in closet off the bedroom, a shallow cave walled with two-by-four studs and insulation that for now is uncluttered by interior walls and new shelves. He picks his practiced way around the bed and out to the bathroom, while next to me Kim continues the rhythmic breathing of sleep. A short time later the other grandson clumps to the bathroom from his bed in the living room and returns to his night nest of sleeping bag and blankets. I rise, slide into tattered moccasin slippers, and find my way into the living room. Moon is waning and gibbous, her ivory light flooding unabated through the south-facing picture window. Chris is half covered by a rumpled blanket. I stop to spread it over him before moving toward the door. His child voice carries the intuition of a seven-year-old:

Grandpa, are you going out to look at the moon?
Yes.
It’s really pretty.

He returns quickly to sleep. We travel our separate ways to separate places in different states of consciousness. I pass the jumble of garden tools that for now are stacked next to the mudroom door, exiting the sagging outside door to step beneath the precarious porch roof that is up for now and soon to be replaced. In the parking area the tattered sole of my right slipper catches with each step in short-cropped grass stiffened by summer drought.

Moon hangs above the southern ridge. She is a pale continent drifting in a starlit sea, her leading edge eroded by shadow. Stars cower beneath her intensity, and at first I feel myself staring into those incomprehensible spaces between them. Infinity and I have not always been comfortable dance partners. So I reel myself in, focusing on the taste of moonlit air bathing my back like lukewarm milk. An especially warm pocket persists around the pile of basalt slabs at edge of the parking area. The old pickup floats like a mechanical whale in the moonlit yard. My shadow is etched sharply into the parched grass, as though carved with a razor. If only my other edges were so clearly visible.

Sentinels of Douglas-fir bristle dark and high around the meadow. At first this feels comforting. Then I remember there would be no meadow had the people before me not cut the old trees, burned the stumps, and grazed. I carry this injustice forward by mowing, keeping the wound open, fending off the forest’s natural inclination to reclaim itself with seeds, then trees, then moisture-hugging shadows and moss. I do all of this in the name of keeping the house safe from fire. Yet this landscape has always burned, has always been reset and renewed by fire. The house stands for now. My new job is to forgive fire in advance for eventually reclaiming this outpost in the Coast Range. The lumber I have milled and used to rehabilitate the place will someday be reduced to charcoal and ash that will become nutrients that grow a new forest that with luck will become an old forest that will eventually burn again. These cycles of deep time begin to open another dark space in my chest.

From somewhere in the immediacy of moonlight comes a feral urge to walk. My imagination knows the way. Slippers and skin would traipse past the old house, down the driveway, and into the dark maw of second-growth fir. At the main road, forty steps on pavement would take me to a sharp left onto a gravel logging road that climbs the ridge. Two miles up a right turn on a dirt two-track traverses the ridge above Johnson Creek. In my mind I meander for miles, striding through the dimness with muscles long and loose as a loping coyote. Somewhere along the way Doe snorts, her spotted fawn invisible in the brush. Cougar crouches in the shadows, night eyes shining, keeping a suspicious eye on this interloper. All the while Moon drifts casually westward, her ragged edge receding imperceptibly. As she descends toward the ridge tops, dawn creeps up in the east. I point my feet downhill, back toward home. In the yard, there is a sigh of happy exhaustion. Then I shutter myself in the house to sleep through the heat of another midsummer day.

My fantasy is short lived. Who am I trying to kid? At my age there will be no impromptu nighttime hikes, not tonight or any other night. Those small adventures are receding in the ever-lengthening view into my rearview mirror. Returning to reality, I do exhale that long sigh, but it is one of satisfied resignation. I find my way back into the house that Uncle Johnny built, the one where my wife and grandsons now sleep.

Come morning in my real world, Edmund and I journal on the front porch with coffee and hot chocolate. Moon has moved west and hangs like a treetop ornament above the spire of a giant sequoia planted below the meadow a century ago. After breakfast, Chris and I mill lumber for the new front porch, while Edmund and Kim spend time in their books. Afternoon eventually smothers us beneath hot blue wings. We drive downriver to the swimming hole, which is only deep enough to be a bathing hole, a splashing hole, a hole where cool water allows kids who don’t yet swim to wallow and squeal within their comfort zones.

In this real world, everything is for now. As in for this one authentic moment. The slickrock creek bottom with small craters eroded into various shapes and sizes. For now one of them is heart-shaped. For now crawdads lie half hidden with blood orange heads and claws protruding from beneath brown cobbles. For now a trout panics as schools of finger-long dace stream around our legs. For now languid water washes salt sweat and sawdust downstream toward a tunnel of alder shade.

Here lies a version of infinity even I can wrap my mind around. Where time can be stretched by carving it into infinitesimally smaller slices limited in size only by our attention to details of the moment. These are the spaces between my smiling heartbeats:

for now for now for now …