evening

The house is quiet, my husband playing his guitar on the front porch. Both dogs lay panting from a run in the park, and with their breathlessness offer a rhythm for my typing. I could meditate to it if I could meditate.

I wonder what my life will be like in five years when I am sixty four. The Beatles made it seem so far away, but I am just around the corner from being an old woman. I can feel it in my knees, my step, my intolerance of celebrity. In the way I view the pale sky; a sky I know I will never see again -- not in just this same way. Where I live now, I have to walk three blocks to get a good look at the evening sky. I used to stand on my deck with the whole of the sky sprawled before me, unaware that there would ever come a time that I would want for a view.

One night the Aurora Borealis dipped down into my backyard, swags of scarlet and purple light. I remember my neighbors pouring out into the street like marbles from a bag, some of them calling it the end of the world. “And the sixth seal was broken and read, ‘The moon became as blood.’ It is the end of days.” Voices either keening or drunk, it was hard to tell. I remembered my mother just then, how she would have quoted the same scriptures, how she would have feared for our souls. For some of our souls. For mine.