I trudged back to the house from the coop with a few eggs in my basket and noted, as I crunched through the swiftly melting snow, that I could find my characteristic treads with their waffle gridwork marking my trudge ahead of me, mixed through with Daisy’s paw prints that have persisted after her by a couple weeks now, but even then, I could feel the mist turning to flecks and drops of rain, and felt a knot of tension just south of my ribcage.
Soon all this will be gone.
Soon the rain will come and the world will continue turning over, the endless cycle cycling through to the next new moment and the next and the next.
I haven’t been able to pin the shape of how I feel lately except as a color to the world, or maybe a colorlessness. It’s fair, of course, in that the world around us has turned to a river of shit, sent downstream to drown anyone with a soul by a cadre of bullies guffawing at their stunts and hijinks even as the world starts to suffer under their muddy torrent of bad ideas, but it’s not that. I grew up under the pink thumbs of bullying monsters, and watched the waves come and go. It’s only new in its naked obscenity, where the murderous past still had enough remaining life in those crackling burned-out souls for the monsters to hide some of what they are.
It’s not that, other than that’s the color of the background, the steady murky orange of the skies over burning oilfields choking under a worn-out sun.
It’s not that.
And it struck me, almost all at once, that it was about home. My dog was just a dog, just like most dogs, maybe smarter or kinder or funnier or more inclined to feed my narratives, but I had a home in her heart that bridged the gap to the home she had in mine, and while so much of what is so good in my world remains, and remains good and worthy and special, the bridge has fallen, and when I look across the river of shit at where the safe harbor was, there are only crumbling foundations, just footprints losing their shape in the snow, and soon even that is fading like the warm forbidden spot on the sofa, or the sound of toenails on hardwood.
The only certainty in life is change, and I know that’s true.
I know that’s true, and it will help, but not just now.
In the moment, I know enough to take that feeling of void and let it remind me what my job is, and where my skills can serve in the overwhelming entirety of this mammalian realm, and there will be more to come—more joy, more awe, more suffering, more play, more curiosity, and more of everything there is—but I don’t want to move just yet, except to treasure the rest of the wonders I’ve earned, cultivated, and been given by nothing more than statistics, numbers whirling in the empty sky and the die is cast over and over again. I can reflect on where my privilege has given me more than my share and reach out to even the odds, regardless of what those with vicious dreams and ugly, dying hearts mandate to us, and I can open to possibilities and ponder new ideas that have yet to occur.
And still I looked out the window and watched the last marks fading in the grey rain and leave room to still feel like it’s not fair, or kind, or just, regardless of what I know to be true, and remind myself that I will soon regain my balance to be comfortable in a world where there is no inherent machinery of grace beyond what we offer to each other and the companions we choose, or who choose us.
The color of the landscape changes, leaving just the wet decomposition of all that was buried when the thin and rusting span of that old bridge between here and another kind of home started creaking and shedding parts before it finally fell, but what’s next is in the roots clutching hard at the soil and all the water underground, percolating just below the surface, waiting for the right moment to set things back in motion again in a torrent that may even be enough to wash a river of shit until it starts to run clear.
I feel like writing, slowly and tentatively, like I’m looking to trace out old footsteps and make new ones, but I don’t want to do it in the old places anymore, trapped in someone else’s corporate toybox filled with nothing but throwaway plastic with all the edges rounded off for the illusion of safety, ideas wasted on bottom lines, and so much packaging covered with advertising for things I’ll never need or want.
I have my tools, and the visceral memory of a warm presence watching me from the other side of the room, curled up on a little bed with one ear up, listening, attending to the world that I might be safe within it.
I think I’ll write about dogs for a while, like E.B. White reliving his times with Fred, his difficult dachshund, like I’m taking myself to the ruins of the old bridge for another long, wistful look before I head out again.
©2025 Joe Belknap Wall