We’ve been flung out over water like skipping stones—not on a lake or pond, but across the long, wide, never-ending turquoise ocean of the Pacific.
Soaring in a metal tube while everything that follows us arrives by barge.
As we settle our belongings—the dogs forget soft green grass and ocean sands—we learn not to step on cactus spines and sharp stickers.
We stand back when a mountain lion appears out of the shadows.
The dogs know to call us when there’s a rattlesnake in their outdoor hay beds.
One of us drives hours to and from work, the other motors miles simply to obtain sustenance through vast spaces ringed by mountains.
Endless open skies become mirrors of oceans more familiar to us.
We settle now to the chuffing and bugling of elk, the scream of a cougar.
A great horned owl perches in the tree just outside our bedroom window.
Coyotes yip first nearby, then far away.
We settle like boulders and sand after a monsoon rain, gazing up at stars too close to gather into a human frame.
Their closeness at nearly eight thousand feet.
The crispness of thin morning air.
Not the watercolor wonder of the islands, but freezing mornings morphing into blazing afternoons, all cooling again for sleeping and dreaming as a pale moon rises.
We gather into one another while wild creatures cruise mountains and forests, settling for the night in trees or fields, tucking tiny beaks into fluffed-out chest feathers or huddling close, steam rising from warm bodies attuned to imperceptible sounds and subtle shifts across the high desert.