Morning

The morning dew was so heavy that you have thought there was rain during the previous night.  The song of the cardinal, sparrow, crow, robin, and others rang out loud enough to overpower the sound of tires on road, the whine of a diesel engine as it downshifted to slow down at a four-way stop, and the bass of a distant engine from an older car preparing to make its way into a festival where the older car was the queen of the show, the belle of the ball.  The sun shone bright and warm through the broken, mostly blue, sky.

He stood on the lawn, tending to his dogs.  His attention to the terrestrial was weak, as he drifted in the sky with the speeding clouds.  Both the boy and the clouds moved across the sky in such a hurry that he tried to slow down, to creep, but felt, when he slowed, that he would sink into the earth.  He started to think to himself that everyone should slow down; it was Sunday after all.  But the clouds kept on pushing, and time kept rushing to some end result, some terminus.  He looked out upon the morning sky and marveled at the parade-like precision everything moved.  The clouds walked on one of those mechanical walkways you see at an airport, a flat escalator, a treadmill.  And then, a car rolled by his house; it was good that he held on to his dogs without thought and with a tight fist.  Bark and snarl.  The tugging and snarling on the end of the leash made his thoughts roll to highways, stuck in mechanical beasts which snarled at stoplights, yield signs, and slower moving traffic.  He thought of folks who had to go, had to move, late, late, late, for a very important date.  But it was Sunday.

Then, he thought of internet connections and blinking television sets.  Monitors on laptop computers. He wished he could fly, perhaps even to the edge of the atmosphere some 100 miles up, perhaps to the edge to see the stars and floating space junk and active satellites.  He blinked to avoid an Astro-collision, and then once again, he was back into the sky, racing with dark, cold front clouds.  Feeling a cool breeze, contrasting the heat of previous days, He closed his eyes and listened again to the birds and their happy morning song.  

With a bark and a yelp and a hard tug of the leash, he opened his eyes and was crashed down on to the lawn and his dogs, and all that machinery and rushing.  The birds slipped into the background; the dew evaporated into the warm morning air, as folks in the far church parking lot slammed closed their car doors, rushing into the building.  Leaving him, by himself, who stood on the lawn, tending his dogs. 

Facebook. 23 July 2017