Sunset

Today has been awful. Yesterday I hurt my neck, I don't even know how, so all day I've been walking around like a whiplash victim in a commercial for an ambulance chasing lawyer. Nothing I've taken has even touched the pain. All I want to do is tilt my head slightly back and 30 degrees to the left and then NOT MOVE. Bad week for that. So, I've been grouchy with the kids and short with the husband, and all day he's wanting to discuss prices for the solar power system in the middle of everything else and I just want to sit down in a corner and cry. Then, tonight I run over to Little Ceasers for some cheap dinner, and it's a circus like usual -- stand in line for longer than it takes to make the pizza -- I finally get up to the counter and the woman has suddenly lost the order pad. Argh. Anyway, the order is placed and I go out to sit in the car to wait the necessary 15 minute pizza assembly period. I sit and stew, fidget and grumble, and eventually it dawns on me that there is a pretty sunset and I haven't even noticed it. It wasn't one of the big flashy ones; just quiet horizontal stripes of gauzy coral, peach, and gold cloud across baby blue sky. Peaceful clouds. And then, look, there's a star -- just one, above that shorter palm tree. The palms look nice sillouetted against that sunset. The last few birds are coming home to roost, but the bats aren't flying yet. There's a lot of bird noise this time of night. I guess evening chaos is a rule of nature, not just the rule at my house. It occurs to me that I'm going to miss this parking lot. I know it so well. The low hedges of rosemary that bloom in January, the stupid round-about that everyone just drives around, even the bird noise. I spent a lot of time in this place. The parking lot where I wrote my first book, sitting in the truck with a DC adaptor on the laptop, sitting for hours, sometimes till after midnight, sometimes when it was so cold I'd only type with one hand at a time while warming the other under the computer. That first year in Vegas, my first away from Tucson and family, it turned into a story about searching for a place to belong, and the price of belonging to a place and a people. I flew with those birds that winter, after so many years of thinking I was a penguin, I discovered flight. I've been thinking like a penguin again lately. I've got to stop that.