Catalog

If you were to catalog the inside of my mind, you might first find yourself looking into the folder of windows. Of light washed along a wall, speedy and bright. Flip through a foggy day, diffuse and airy, and land on a shadow cast down the wooden floor of a hallway, so dramatic and swollen that you almost don’t see the water reflections moving on the ceiling. “How did they get there?” you may find yourself saying, and so you add that wonder into your catalog too, tucked away to figure it out another day.

Next comes my children, glimpses of their eyelashes opening and closing before sleep, or perhaps during a waking; if my memory serves me, they look the same going in as they do coming out. I see them jumping in leaves now, joyful and never-ending, in a loop of laughter, dirt, and cold necks. Puddles of rain, they lay down together, squinting and smiling until they eventually give in and keep their eyes closed, heads touching, deepening their place in the ground by letting go of any hesitation and just learning how the rain feels on a face as it pours down and down without a laugh line to river through. A seat in a car, leaving it to dance on a wintery day when there is not much else to do but play in the car until the sun sets, orange and fiery over the marsh.

I can feel the back of a fern now, the spores bumpy on my fingers. This memory in the catalog starts early, where my fingers are smaller because I am the child learning about the world. Cut to yesterday, when I found a fern on the forest floor and habitually flipped it over to check for spores. I didn’t know the spores had a place in the catalog until I wrote this just now, but apparently they do. Before them comes the ferns, before the ferns comes my father, then a whole lot of bird baths somehow, and the sound of choke cherries falling onto the ground. Night swimming, full moons, laughter again. Thunderstorms, the way people sound when their mouths form letter “s”— how they are the same, and how they are different. I spend so much time on these things.

Which brings to me right now, as I catalog more, deepening the practice that I have lived life long, of spending time inside of a single second. The sound of my mouth when I say “single second,” and how my teeth feel different in my mouth today than they did when I first said “single second” so many years ago. Then I take that realization and drive home to hug three children and meet them where they are at that moment, paying attention to their “s” sounds and wondering where they will take me next.