An old man, dark-skinned, his head soft and browned from years of sun, looks at the light blinking through the now dark, almost black, pine trees on his side yard.
He’s been fixing the fence and begins to gather his tools. He takes the drill bit out of the chuck and loops the cord tightly. He checks the pickax for dirt, scrapes clods off, places it in the wheelbarrow. Next he loads a hammer, nails, his levels and a plumb line. He wheels around to the garage and puts each tool away.
Then he goes in the back door of his house and enters the laundry room. He is methodical, measured. He takes off his work shoes, leaning heavily on a wood table for balance. He takes a glass from a shelf that holds only that one, fills it with water from the wash sink and drinks. He replaces the glass. He zips out of the green coveralls protecting his clothes, washes his hands with powdered borax, slips his feet into his house shoes and moves to the kitchen.
The moths haven’t begun to bop themselves against the hollow bulbs; it’s not utterly dark. But you can almost see night move out from the underside of trees to preen in the smack center of the yard.
This darkness comes to my house too, yet so often I miss it.
My computer stays on all night. My cellphone chirps at me like a small robin in my pocket and unless I put it in a drawer, I can hear it rooms away, calling.
Some nights I am all go, go, go, and do, do, do, and equally full-in- thought of what I didn’t get done, even if it is dark, even if it is late. I’ve seen my son sit in a room, until his face is lit only by a small patch of blue glowing from the screen on his phone. He’s typing with his thumbs. Our hours rush together in whirlpools, spinning.
Sometimes when I wake, I wonder what hit me the day before and then it starts over again. Each time this happens, I think of a tide rising, the “whoops!” of soaked shoes, the hit- upside-the-head feeling of “Quick! Move!”
A tide rises like a flat wind out of nowhere so that when you swing around from surprise to see what’s coming, it’s already arrived.
First, a wave breaks farther up the beach than the last; the dry-hiss sound of saltwater permeating dry sand rises, invisible but audible as light bells. Another wave or two hits high while people are otherwise occupied walking, or talking, or watching the gulls chase blown-away Cracker Jack.
Unless you are watching closely, nothing that happens next is incremental.
The water doesn’t seem methodical and measured, but a chaos of rush. It arrives, carving eddies and alternate paths that grab and pull and race over anything in their way. People leap up, yank back coolers and bags full of car keys and cellphones. Strangers, who’ve lain beside each other silently for hours, speak. “It’s coming in fast!” they say and gather up to retreat toward higher ground.
You realize you missed some slight and powerful change because you weren’t paying attention. Suddenly it’s come in, and all around.
It’s November, when fall settles in like a fat hen over her nest. The light grows weaker. In Colorado, the cold lingers longer in the morning; eventually it will last all day.
We need to pace ourselves.
If you said to the old man, resting now, at his table, “You didn’t finish the fence,” he’d say, “It’s work for tomorrow.” He has transitioned into rest and the idea of a life without pace simply foolish.
So much around us never stops; we start to think that this is how we want to live. These last months and especially these last weeks have exhausted us all. And now, ahead, there is still hard work, healing, a knitting together through the winter that will come.
Go easy with yourself. Go easy with each other. We need to pay attention and take it in steps.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
