A Day In The Life Of...
Around dawn he was exhausted and felt defeated, his nerves worn thin. He had no traps and no money to buy any. It had been three days since he'd eaten, all he had was coffee which he drank constantly, it added to his already frazzled temper. He was ready to raise the white flag. That morning, he sat outside in a lawn chair purchased at a thrift store the previous fall. The sun brought solace, comfort, and warmth after a long winter of what seemed like continuous rain and chill. He sat very still, sipping coffee, watching the butterflies, bees, and birds going about their business. They looked purposeful, they had jobs to do and no time to waste. Time was all he had, and he was very good at letting it slip through his fingers. He wanted someone to visit him, but nobody ever did. He was alone with the birds and the butterflies and the mice and the river.
He had long since stopped trying to direct his thoughts in any kind of meaningful way. Memories and images welled-up unbidden; he treated them with indifference as though they were someone else's for whom he didn't care.
He sat this way for most of the morning, nobody came, there were no sounds except for an occasional bird and, of course, the river. He wished he was part of the river, he wished he could just walk into it and become one with it, going wherever it went, cascading over rocks, slipping quickly past the banks, onward to the sea. He roused himself to walk down that way and stood on the bank watching its swiftness and certainty, it decisiveness. The river harbored no doubts about itself, it knew what it was and reveled in it; it had power and purpose and meaning.
He closed his eyes to listen, trying to absorb and infuse his soul with the sense of it. For a moment he forgot himself, letting the strength and determination of the river saturate his dried-up and depleted spirit. Then it passed; he stood detached, separate, and alone.
Suddenly, a gust of wind from downriver ruffled the thick brush along the banks; the towering fir, cedar, and maple began to sway causing him to look up. A solitary twig broke loose, falling silently to the forest floor, one among many already there, lost in the confusion. Then, as quickly as the wind had arrived, it too passed and all grew still again. The self-contained bubble of air seemed also to have purpose, to be on a mission of its own, traveling fast with no time to dawdle.
He walked back up the hill to return to his chair in the secluded clearing in front of the trailer; he poured himself yet another cup of coffee, now lukewarm.
He sat very still, the sun coursed the blue sky, the butterflies and birds continued about their business; nobody came to visit, he didn't care. A mysterious peace filled him, he was no longer anxious and unnerved, no longer worried and uncertain.
He sat in the sun sipping coffee listening to the river as the Earth slowly turned under him.
It was spring, the field mice had overrun his small, hole-riddled trailer set in the dense woods near a narrow, shallow, yet fast-moving river. He had been kept awake all night long by the sounds of their foraging, sitting up to shine his flashlight in the general vicinity of a disturbance whenever it got too annoying, then screaming at the offender to scare it out, a temporary cessation, very temporary. So, he laid in his bunk, just waiting for the next mouse scratching and shuffling amidst an otherwise still and quiet night, the faint rushing sound of the river in the background.