Tricia Knoll

Summer News

Don’t get me started on whether the sky is the limit. Viewpoints change. You know that. You are aging and nothing looks the same, including you. Think about creatures hardly anyone knows or cares about — meiofauna that live between grains of sand. If no one knows you exist, what is the cost of extinction? What call do you make to a world that has better things to do than consider being that small?

The other day I was all at peace, thinking of Broadfork Farm. A farm where in today’s hot sun, the pigs sleep in the shade of the barn. The white guard dog is under an Oregon white oak in a shallow hole he dug in the silt. Even the hens are sleepy. The sky is a sum of blue-without-clouds summer peace. Then on the radio: a wildfire moving up the highway from White Salmon, the road closed. Prepare for possible evacuation. Crews struggle to build a fire line in acres of debris left from logging, flame sparking up to the ridgeline of tall pines. Roots burn. Breath of smoke.

the Buddha garden statue
brown-green with algae
last winter’s rain