We’ve been gone two weeks and now, when my dog comes inside, she smells like basil. Right away I note the shift. She pitter-patters at my feet as aromatic as an Italian brisket. Other than that, she hasn’t changed a lick.
It’s as hot and dry as it was when we left. The air is the open-wide heat of ovens and bread stones laid flat for baking. Once home, we have to do a loop around the house, inside and out, to reacquaint ourselves, look for broken pipes, trapped animals, the mischief of elves. We need to check what has changed.
While we were gone, two men in Fort Collins stood beside each other under a tree during a thunderstorm. It was evening; they were in a grove called Sherwood Forest on the Colorado State University campus.
Lightning smacked the tree, traveled down the trunk and into the two men. One man died that night; he had a 2-year-old daughter. The other man died almost a week later.
While we were gone, a girl I once feared would never grow up into a woman came to Colorado to visit. When she was young, her father hurt her in ways that have nothing to do with love and everything to do with predatory control and sexual perversion. Her mother did not try to save her.
While we were gone, she vacationed with her husband and 2-year-old daughter. She’s giving birth to her second daughter in November. She lives radiant.
While we were gone, a man walked into a church in Tennessee and shot eight people. Five of them died. He claims he did it because he hates liberals and gays.
While we were gone, a woman riding her bike in early morning was killed by a young man in a car. He was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving.
While we were gone, the world spun on its axis, the sun downed and rose, the days strung out beside each other.
I have unpacking to do, laundry, mail and grocery shopping. The boys have spread themselves out on the couch like frosting, sweet and still. I plan my tactic to rouse them, get them to water the pumpkins and thread the new grape vines up over the fence post. My husband is road-weary and content with simple arrival.
The dog taps her paws on the glass door, seemingly to beckon me like in a cartoon: “Hey you! Look here!” The long overhang of white hair framing her face is covered in mud and dirt clods. Her nose and muzzle and front paws are earth-caked and fat with stuck twigs and gravel. She’s a mess and ever so happy.
I go outside and follow her bounding body to a curling trail that winds through the basil plants and ends by becoming a tunnel under the cottonwood tree.
While we were gone, a vole came to stay and eat at the roots of the tree. I leave the basil-smelling dog, her face in the dirt, and retreat to the house. The boys and my husband have not moved, sunk still in the stupor of a long drive and home, finally.
I check my office, crack the window for air. On my desk is a newspaper paragraph I cut out of the New York Times, July 11, the day before we left: Stoppard Overwhelmed by World’s Problems.
It reads “Tom Stoppard, 71, says that he has a case of playwright’s block, and that the cause is the world’s problems. “So much is in the foreground now, huge, important subjects, that you kind of goggle at them — OK, shall I do global warming or shall I do Iraq, maybe I’ll do Afghanistan, and nothing gets written.”
This little column bothered me.
We are back now. Tom Stoppard is wrong; the foreground has always been hard. Nothing’s changed.
Things are just as terrible as they were when we left. Fat bees pong along the shaft of lavender bushes. And things are just as glorious.
Nothing is different. There exists a silence and disquiet that fill our background, our everydays, our regular hours. We move from one moment to the next, full, sometimes, of pain, and full, sometimes, of flittery, elusive, peace.
Tom Stoppard could write about that. He has to. He doesn’t get to say it’s too hard.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
