by: d. heidel

It’s late today.  It is late.  And maybe that is the way that it is when you get older and the early morning is too nebulous and fidgety in its existence to comfortably open a seat for you.

The sun is full out now, already tending to hot-and-humid.  And I rise and walk out in slippers, feel the air against my flesh and, in the warmth of the day, the air feels like flesh against my flesh.  It’s the kind of air that, as a younger man, would give no additional pleasure to the smoking of a cigarette.  (Cool fall days – yes, feel the cold air twine itself with the tobacco smoke.  Hot days like this?  No, it feels like every breath is thick with something and so the tobacco is not singular in its remarkability.)

“Can you remember me?” the voice is almost faded away completely.  Almost washed altogether aside.

I stand and stare at the hazy blue.  Stand.  Still.  It is not worth the effort of even a head shake.

I wear a grey t-shirt.  The t-shirt started as a white one, but over the course of hundreds of washings and lawn-mowings and more washings and oil changes and more washings, it is now an ever-so-soft grey.  I don’t wear it to town.  I have more respect than that.  Not self-respect, but respect for MaryJane who would have to smile politely when speaking with me.  I put on a blue t-shirt with a tightly-stitched pocket when I go to town so that she can speak to me as she would her bank teller or grocery cashier.  A man who is unremarkable in all aspects – neither flashy nor dour – is a man who can work easily in the exchange of words.  Words as currency can be trusted in his judgement and his colorings of opinion can be taken or left alone on their own merit.

But here, on this day, the sun is upon my shoulders and back, the bees move past my naked legs, the grass moves inconsequentially over the tops of my slippers.  And I stand in a grey t-shirt.  An ancient frock of cotton.  Cotton that has given up its youth and softened its fibers to leave a few holes here and there within its warp and weft.

I have given up my own youth and these moments here, beneath the sun, atop the earth, apart from the MaryJanes of the world, I show my own holes within my warp and weft.  The wind knows them and whispers through them.