BIOLOGICAL EXUBERANCE

This is Reginald*, my new best companion. And sole source of heat.

(*That is what it says on the door. I do not name inanimate objects.)

And here's where I'm writing, right now.


Driving here, as I climbed up into the coastal range, snow suddenly appeared. The trees wear it weirdly here, like trying on someone else's shirt, limbs held out, snow perched atop them. In Minnesota it frosts them completely, they wear it like long underwear.

Still the sight of it--exacerbated by sleep-deprivation and new-year's-day pensiveness, I'm sure--made tears come to my eyes. Is it ridiculous to feel so deeply for a form of precipitation?

Here, on the other side of the mountains, the coast-side, it is all fecundity and decay and red dead leaves. The trees are heavily bearded in furry, yellow-green moss and they all lean one way or another. Ferns burst up from the forest floor. Everything is growing on or from something else. The river runs so loudly it sounds like a shower always going in the next room.

I slept eleven hours and have spent all morning setting the ground for the novel I am finally going to write. Biological exuberance of the long-shelved short story. I am listening to Thurston Moore's "Trees Outside The Academy" and it is perfect.