Auction house

     It helped to go into J.’s bed at 2 am for a bit. some of the soothing electricity passes between or goes somewhere, into the blankets. We will be ok. Couple little smooches. But go back to my bed after a bit. Sleep more. Dreams reaching. Kind of like this choral singing from The Early Music Collection. Reaching to encompass the whole story. I get to an early morning moment where usually I would’ve arisen but today I try for more sleep, stretch to new parts of body and it works, I connect in to more sleep, the sleep of more and more connection to the whole story, all the way back to Jeb and I'm standing next to me whilst our Mother-screams-at-sky, and how we took a fork in the road from that moment on, all of us, Miriam too, and Kirk wasn’t there, is that it? No. Wider than that and not so articulate. Having similarities to that movie __________ the other evening, where the 11 yr old English girl has a visit at a resort in Turkey with her divorced Dad, who is loving but distant, holding hands but conflicted, and then the few flash forwards tell you in a few frames that it was a last visit, as he disappears up a corridor, freeze frame on her waving at him goodbye. That movie making! Still flooring me days later. How a movie camera can take you into a person’s experience, a young girl. Saying goodbye forever. And me. Mee. The dad button pressing and the distant Mom & Dad, who are still alive, fought through the lack, the incredible LACK-a-FLACK, but I didn’t learn, you never learn until later I suppose, how its all connected, until trying to let go, the muscles holding the gun, the death tool, is there always a death tool or machine in the background (life is a machine of life). But I had a better grasp of it earlier, the gestalt feeling as I slept further & further, want to go back for more of THIS sleep, and hitting various buttons back in time: the 2 weeks carrying, canoeing the Algonquin Lakes all in one button of many, carrying those heavy canoes between lakes, maybe that was the back break for me, YES, I carried the weight for Cindy and Jay so they could find love for each other while Dad was excluded, sometimes he slept in their tent, sometimes he slept in my tent. And then they argue about what weight of patriarchy that I then put on a hinge pin (where is a forked tree so I can emerge for a moment?) that hinge pin that unloaded broken that Trump election week for 2 years or more of back pain, still it’s in the neck, am I sturdier than ever?
    Back to age 14 in those blank woods, a bear crossing the road unconcerned 50 yards up and I wanted to go closer, and my Mother yelled quick, No! Don’t go up there Hugh!
It’s hard to describe the feeling of letting go of the house and my roots letting go of the pieces of the rock, and my brother who wandered the land restlessly and drew pictures sublime of campfires, and his trucks and the sky, starry, Celtic knots and in a couple there’s a cabin nestled back beyond, with smoke emerging, going up to the sky. Aren’t we all going up to the sky, at least in the morning when we first put feet down on the ground, the smooth wood floor with splinters occasionally and a few nails sticking up. I’ve learned to walk in this house a little less carelessly, snake bitey areas where the boards were taken up in the early days of electric install and the wound to house is as yet not healed. I have done that, in Paul’s house, a road straight through the 2nd floor hall, past each living bedroom.
    And I managed to tell P. and K., at their ten room mansion which can’t quite find the light yet, at the end of the tunnel, when they came in midday, a little bit suddenly (but it always feels that way) and they said ‘We’re getting out of the office, We were getting yelled at’ -as if they needed to explain to me, so yes it’s personal for them, their project to put lawyer’s offices and their own kindly lawyer’s offices into the old English style mansion with wainscoting up to here and a room with gargoyles, a niche -  it’s called the niche, with four lions overhead and that's where the morning light comes splendid (the only morning light in the house like some kind of magnifying glass) and I managed to think like a lightning bolt and say ‘Naw, naw heck with them yelling at you! You guys have good intentions! Forget about them!’ And we hee hawed for a minute on that while my ‘Honky Tonk Radio Girl podcast blares a bit in the background. So then I show them the 9 foot pocket door set and how it rolls a little bumpy even though I fixed the one hanger and that’s fine with Pete, he caresses the door a little as it rolls in and out, that’s how I know it's his old money.
    How electricity jumps so suddenly sometimes, in just a moment an entire memory can be made, a place and arm movement, a face or two, a talking into the air, a sound wave exclaiming.
    And I’m taking the day today and that does worry me a bit, shall I do it and I know I shall. SELL echoing like at an auction house, the farmer’s auction house in Barnesville near my Quaker boarding school. Have you ever been around those rooted farmers, the smell of the floor is rich soil, manure, mature, life and death in a mini heart beat, and growing, everything is always growing. The working farmhouse Mom feeling the opposite end to the auction house with it’s barn doors wide open and suspenders and overalls everywhere. Makes you feel small, but in a good way.