In Seattle staring into the alley behind my house from my writing room
stacked with boxes from nine weeks in Chiloquin. I have put books away,
washed clothes and put them away, cleaned nine weeks of grime from
kitchen surfaces, spent a joyous family evening with both daughters,
their sig others, their in one case dog in the other case human infant.

I need to take a shower, I need to restore order to this room,
I need to sit alone and weep a moment. I do not do transitions well.
I need to write the word "I" several more times as though that will
restore my self. How long does it take for a soul to complete a journey
it takes a body 8 hours in a car to travel? A writer whose name escapes
me gave a reading at the UW probably twenty years ago. He posited
that human souls couldn't travel as fast as airplanes and so those who
travel often are often soulless. He wasn't a spiritual writer, born-again
but maybe he was nuts. I (there it is again, look back, yup, another I)
feel oddly absent and so feel a kinship with the soul-travel idea.
In my mailbox yesterday a rejection from Hayden's Ferry Review, with
a "Thank you Laura!" perkily placed at the bottom of the quarter sheet.
Next to "The Editors." Longer than "Onward ho!" from Zyzzyva. This one
could go into the "mixed-message rejections" folder if I had one.

This paragraph poses the question: "Why does my grocery store have
living orchids in boxes on the floor of the flour aisle?"
and "Why does my local City Peoples have orchids 20% off?
Why so many orchids here? Why ANY orchids? Aren't these orchids
destined to brown and die on the coffee tables of Madison Park? Why?