A look inside myself

This is the me I put away in a closet for the long part of the year.  I try to be someone else for those minds eye cameras that shutter on and off all summer, but I save this me for the fall. When the wind is as crisp as an autumn apple and the savor of rain soaked water colors streak the every mornings sky. This is the me that waits for those times.

It's been a fine Sunday. I spent it in the library at a local middle school which I open for services every week. I love those folks with their weathered good books in hand, men in double breasted suits and women wearing their church hats. I help them set up then retire to the library to read and listen, as hymns waft up to me from below. Comforted by those linen soft voices, as the congregation sing songs from yesteryear's basket, I poke through books, traveling to places authors left stamped on the pages till the sermon concludes. Then it a race back home, on my trusty old mountain bike to where my aging friends, one cat and one dog wait. My cocker spaniel got her walk in the park where I collected pine cones for the first taste of hearth paintings, the first fire place memory of a new fall. I've popped the bread dough molded and left to rise all day into a warm oven, fashioned pasta pies filled with cheese and onion and garlic, opened a big bottle of burgundy and let it breath and worked out while I watched Sunday night football. (I need to feel I earned my dinner with a calorie killing work out).

Now, the smell of bread fills the room, touched with those wild grapes. Pasta simmers in a deep saucepan filled with pesto and the fire throws friendly lickings of light across the far wall, while I push this pen around the paper.  And, I'm happy.  Now in this restful part of the evening, with my dog lying contented on the carpet before the fire place, my cat is telling me how hungry she is for the fortieth time and can't I please hurry up and feed her and soft jazz playing, I have a euphoria all my own.

Tomorrow it will be back to work, and be the person the company wants me to be. But, for tonight,dressed in ragged cut offs, a sweat shirt, barefoot and looking like an escaped character from a Ginsberg poem. I have pure heaven.

Well, that's me.