Four::

The clouds over the Sandias speak of snow, yet here in the lower levels it is rain warm and dry beneath the quilted gray sky. Ulf paces and pauses and paces some more, needing to get out. Once out, he sniffs and pokes about. Whatever his needs, they seem to be bids for breathing the outside air. I understand this. Inside the dryness is sometimes like breathing cotton, taking the fibers of the air in rather than air itself.

I used to like sleeping outside.  That was never exactly under the stars. All that openness kept me awake. But I like to feel the air moving around me. Screens are good. Lots of screens. A screen porch, where the outside is just there.  Or in a tent with screen windows and doors. You feel the air and hear everything but this little fabric skin keeps you safe. From insects I guess, although for me, the feeling of being protected was deep and nameless.

The first time I ever slept on a screen porch was among kind strangers in Moline Illinois. They had a screen porch on the Mississippi river. I had a hankering to go across the country. My friends all had gone to Europe for the summer months. I needed to escape the everyday and join in the adventure. There was a ride board, someone driving from Berkeley to Massachusetts who wanted riders to share the gas cost and respite for the driver. I was not quite a car snob, but it was a BMW and that sounded like a car that was going to make it those thousands of miles without breaking down. I was in.

One of the other riders had an aunt and uncle who lived in Moline. Either this couple were the coolest ever, and possibly that was the case, or it had been arranged in advance. But we showed up, four kids from the west coast with sleeping bags, and they put us up on the screen porch. They also took us out in the motor boat on the river under the full moon.

On that same journey I saw fireflies for the first time, in Lincoln, Nebraska, where flags were outside all the houses for the 4th of July. It was a sight to behold, block after block with red, white and blue banners decorating the verandas. It seemed like such an innocent love of country, a pride of belonging to a time and place where Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post covers could be brought to life by an entire community. Where I grew up, it was all about the fireworks. We would head out to the shopping center in the station wagon. There would be a soup pot full of popped corn, a bottle of root beer and some plastic glasses. The tailgate of the car would go down, and between the explosions you could hear everyone at once going "OOOOOHHHHH!!!!". I remember wondering if there was a script of some kind the adults had, letting everyone know the sound to make.

Today we stack rocks. I make a mistake and do one tall stack at the edge of the down slope, and it tumbles toward the road way below. All the rocks stop short of coming to rest on the road, and I realize setting these spires on the edge above may be a bad idea. There is no reason for them, other than to balance boulders. I lift the largest ones I can manage, and play with them, edge upon edge, until they are steady, then add a third. Today, it is threes only. Most of the snow is melted away from the shadowed side of the arroyo, and yesterday temperatures stayed in the 50s in the afternoon. Winter will have another go or two here in the high desert before it is done for the season, and those are the days I anticipate most, the days of the fluffy snow. I can never get enough of it falling through the air. It doesn't fall so much as swirl and dance. High desert snow is like little girls in full skirts, turning and turning.

These are the days of impeachment hearings in the senate. Someday people will ask, why was the country so divided? How is it possible that enough people believed in the righteousness of a man so intent upon fostering the divisions? How could the same people who elected a progressive man of color turn around in just a few short years and elect a man so crude? But for now, there are many divisions. The other party, the Democrats, who could put an end to the madness, are also victims of the scourge of divisiveness perpetuated by social media. Their weakest candidate, the so called Democratic socialist, an elderly crotchety man who believes in social justice but no more so than the rest of the field of candidates, is supported by a cadre of non-persons with social media accounts who publish divisive stories designed to cause people to dislike others. Ironically, they are the same non-persons or designed by the same group in eastern Europe who fostered and fomented the campaigns to discredit the 2016 progressive candidates and promote distrust and hatred. Does anyone who supports him give credit to these revelations?  Most people think they know the future now. They thought during the 2016 elections that the first woman would be elected president of the United States, and they think today that impeachment will not proceed to removal from office. I watch with only the knowledge that the future is malleable, unknowable to those caught in time, mutable, bearing surprises no one can predict.

I am not pretending to predict anything now.

There is no such thing as being right, in the usual sense of right or wrong, a sense we all agree upon. There are points of view. This is not a play on morality. They said ten years ago, one person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist. The world today is torn like paper along divisions where interests are represented one way and then another way. You can take up the banners of any side and find arguments to support it.  The subdivisions are becoming ever more numerous, and tribes keep forming and reforming. We are more and more like sand. When the tribes are so small no one can define them, we achieve unity.

For those living within them, these are harsh times. Here I am, having left my island of sanity having recognized there was no such place. Some of us feel it is midnight in the garden of good and evil, midnight at new moon. We all carry cell phones that light up, and which way is the light turned? Out into the world, or up into our faces?

Tonight shall we sleep under the stars? It is almost warm enough.