Snapshot: "I'm Not Dead"

A day at home, dedicated to the paperwork that ends a marriage. Funeral rites.

Coffee on the pier. Gray day. Sluggish backward flow of an incoming tide near high. Quiet trickle of leftover stormwater from a pipe hidden by pier planks. Brown pelican passing at medium height, winging lumberous down the upstream toward open water. Sound of slow wings. The egret beneath ingresses between marsh walls, stark white against muddy banks and brown reeds.

All the while a wake of buzzards holds congress, lining the siderails of the pier reaching from across the way, stacked on roofline and chimney next door, and nearest and thickest perched by the dozen in a dead tree stretched over dead water. All this under overcast sky. Darkly hopeful watch they keep. Fit weather and fit fowl for this day's labors.

And when one circles close to see what sits so long without movement, taking it all in, a flashback. Dark bird to bring such a light thought and true. Not dead. Not yet. Not hardly.


And clearly, I need to replace that lost camera.