Sail with every wind.

Something of the house when I come back to it late this night. The windows, opened that afternoon to let in the warm, wild winds, are open still. Once the sun went, the currents filled in my absence with the pulse and breath of a new feel for the rug at my feet. The winds knew of my afternoon, and of the rending brightness that turned a corner towards me with birds in her arms. And now with the last drink, I stand inside the whirl of my living room as those beams of breeze, phantoms, build themselves around me. I think that they know more, and listen to look through that thought. Their hands still flicker, tumble about my collar, and the heat of my face slowly strikes a match with the cool of coffee-coloured strands and shapes of sweet dark that billow in. There is goodness out there, bustling and elegant, and it flows here in my home as I stand still to hold its spill upon my palms.

Yeah, for a little while.

This past weekend the Nephew's Basketball Association came to town for a provincial tournament. They were all eight or nine or ten, and it is strange seeing how good these small people can play. Their supporters are very enthusiastic.

(The blog compresses videos really terribly.)

Champs. My boy is #5.

Emblazoned.

There is a second gunman.

Winking in the dark.

"After that kind of night, that company, I was stopping off at the convenience store for a chocolate bar, because after all of it there is nothing else to want and to be had. What kind, well, it was a Caramilk, the best to take your time with, it's true. Well, there was a lineup at the store. Three people in a row were buying gum, and a woman was behind me picking up a bag of chips. She was in a jogging outfit, so maybe she was cheating on her regime, or maybe she was giving herself a gift. Either way, any person deserves that. I had to get to the market, and asked the store clerk if he knew where it was from here. He shrugged, but the woman with the chips told me, 'Keep down this street three blocks, turn left and keep going, you can't miss it.' 'Okay, thanks,' I said, 'Thank you. Your backpack is open, by the way.'"

An electrical gadget on the edge of the tub.

Yesterday did not appear the type where riots would later break out in some distant suburban neighbourhood by bored university students on an Irish holiday. I was reading on the porch in the sun, with all the drinks, and was listening to someone who I could not see while they played every song they knew on their acoustic guitar. A woman with the type and figure of Anjelica Huston, though with charred golden hair, strolled with her air around the corner. She wore black, with heavy earrings and makeup, had a wide black hat on, and she carried a colourful goblet with lightness. She asked, do I know where that guitar is coming from? And then stepped past me, beyond the corner of the house and into my backyard. When she came back, she asked me again, and then told me some things about myself. She took two sips from her goblet, turned, and drifted past the next house and into its backyard.

Some bantering grace.

These first days when the weather warms give shocks to a person's body, so that everyone in this city wanders with enthusiasm. And I took my boy pup out to get some ice cream. When on our way home along the sidewalk, two elders were rolling past each other on their scooters, and the old man tipped his hat at the woman, winked, and said, "Good afternoon, darling." And the old woman gave that confident little laugh that young girls first learn when they notice how capable they are of manipulating boys. She gave that laugh, and said, "Don't you get fresh, sir."

No less than the journey-work.

Back to the places I grew up, where my family still lives, and where I went to elementary and then high school, where I went to church, I think to what the community must have been like when my grandparents were young. The world has not changed much there, I know. These were young immigrants, a family of brothers who crossed an ocean to work their small farms together. What was it, in that long move, which made them choose this place over any other? Location has always felt to me like a most anxious opportunity. I think about how I am someone who sits still and thinks too much, while they in their activities spent their time in simple joy. An every day happiness in working a small farm with their brothers and their wives, young families with their children scurrying behind them across great yards, dogs chasing through burrs, all shielded from the coming history that would succeed them. There are parts of those lives that I have had in my own. The sun, and the stick of grass to the sweat of forearms beneath a loose cotton shirt. In my own life, I am already long past the years when those families took a name, when their farms were built and when they would take turns to wake and work at each brother's farm to gather the food they helped to grow. When I look at my hands I see the years in them, and in the way that my grandfather and his brothers would hold in their hard hands their young children, now the ones who come to me, now on my own arms, and in the way I feel the morning.