A notebook found on a dresser, smattered with scribbles – the happy mess of a child – kernels left by a brain scrawling with the awkward grace of stubby fingers.

I’ll fit some writing in between the loops.

And the widening gyres.

All things repeat.  The fields – or what’s left here in October – are coarse and husked.  The ground is hardening now, little by little, under a smattering of frosty nights.  The roots still fit somewhere between the cooling clods.  Summer rains are gone, the sunshine is lean, and the stalks have dispersed all their sugars and saps and vitality.  And all that remains are the seeds.  Granules.  Tiny nuggets of life torn by the wind or harvested by the farmer.  Sugars and saps and vitality spent, roots whither between clumps of the cooling earth and all that is left of those square miles of field life are just the tiny kernels of trust.  Trust in the unknown.  Trust in another spring.  Trust in what lies on the other side of miles and miles of winter snows.

I recognize the freckles on my arms that I picked at as a kids, but in these middle years, the veins underneath have grown ropey – as if the vitality is leaving my thinning skin and sinking deeper into the dark vessels.  But my hands still work.  And so I’ll write.

Between smatterings of scribbles, amongst the kernels of exuberance and youth, I’ll write.

Between the loops and gyres.

And so I’ll begin here.  And I’ll write amongst the nuggets and granules of young hands that scribble where they want, always trusting in more paper and in a vibrant spring even beyond my own autumn.

from the collection of: d. heidel