After You Left

After you left, I went to that meeting, where the subcommittee sat and tried to cull the notes from the focus group into a vision statement and a mission statement.  Both of the ones we ultimately adopted were my drafts.  The committee chair smiled at me and said, "Yours just sound better.  You have a certain poetic side to you, don't you?"  I shrugged, and said, "Thank you." 

Walking out of the meeting, in a generic office building in Falmouth that used to be woods, we startled four deer at the edge of the parking lot.  They froze and stared at us.  We stopped and the standoff lasted for minutes, until they relaxed, started turning their heads, looking at things, letting their ears twitch.  We walked away from them, toward our cars, and they stayed, frozen, tracking us with their big heads until one gave an invisible signal and they leaped off into the wind, white tails shaking behind them.

Later, I drove into town to return the movie you and I watched last night.  On the way home I saw the rim of a setting orange moon, like a Cheshire cat smile, orange and thin and low on the horizon of the western sky.  I craned my neck looking at it on the highway, because it almost looked like a UFO or something and I couldn't figure out at first what it was.  It must have been the moon, but it was unexpected and lovely and strange.  I wondered if you were also seeing it on your long drive home. 

Comments

[M]

sweet date? :b