Birds is falling.

I was telling the ones in my kitchen about the sign. In the heat of August (though perhaps in June while standing on a dock, or perhaps in a December long before while throwing snowballs at a stranger's--who was to become a future Regis--window) something that had bounced within me all along began to stumble forth from me but was still frothing at corners like a flow getting caught in a stream--now it stands tall and light, beaming a gold tint upon everything that is. "The glory," like what Steinbeck writes about. As soon as it became able to speak it was silenced, however, until I determined that it couldn't, that it should not.

Anyway, that isn't even what I was talking about in the kitchen. I was talking about that new determination and I was telling about the sign. It came to me while I was out on a walk with our boy late at night. I was thinking aloud to the trees and to the stars and their sky. They have become the runners-up in conversation since I still walk here, because I like to think of their shared importance, and of the idea that, when you think about it, they are all sharing with you and I our same whistling air.

I was thinking through this light, wondering to the snow on the toes of my boots whether I ought now to shield it. I looked up and asked the trees, too, who had been solemnly listening with that stillness they carry.

Two people were talking together about the dances they have shared. He said that he missed it, he missed dancing with her, perhaps veiling the deeper, more obvious thought that dancing with her held a highest inclusion among his happiest patches of moments. Yet, "I love dancing with you," he said. Those blurry, whirring moments of scuffing feet and squeezing hands, and how could you do anything else but smile at how sparkling it all is. That is how he always thought of them, as moments that he had always wanted to start and never wanted to end, and he felt a fuse cut short by the way that she recalled all of those dances, pointing to him with biting expression, "I always had to drag and force you to start because you never wanted to."

How reasonable would he have sounded though, I could not help but think, if he had mentioned that the greatness of those moments, sharing a dance, bore little comparison to the small beginnings in hesitancy that were due only to a few foreign voices shouting through his head. But those opening seconds of nervousness, of crossing fingers to catch a rhythm, had been there, even if only for seconds, and so by existing would be available to carry a greater emphasis than the loud and glimmering dance.

Past memories can be manipulated to suit. What I was telling in my kitchen, though, was that I had lost my keys. There were inches of new snow stretching across that long park, and every criss and cross my steps took felt like it was impossible. I could make no new landmarks for places I had not looked. But after long hours of looking, when I had decided to give up and walk back home I followed a thought that struck me and checked my car door. It was unlocked, and my keys were sitting on the passenger seat.

Then the very next night my car had been broken into, the small change and adapters and gadgets gone, but only then my keys were no longer on the passenger seat.