New Year’s Bones

Not far into this morning’s run, from about two houses away, I startled a pair of coyotes, which saw me before I saw them and dashed off through a neighbor’s front yard and around the corner out of sight. Had they come my way instead, they would have been immediately upon me, and I could have told them that I wasn’t one of those setting off fireworks most of the night, scaring them, and scaring veterans, old people, and their dogs and cats. I’m sure they would have understood. “Thanks, Bill.” Or had they been hungry, they could have mauled me instead, which, in some measure, I would have deserved for invading their quiet, early morning world. Near the end of my run, standing on the front sidewalk in front of the house a couple of doors from ours, a group of about five revelers were talking and laughing prior to going home, presumably tired from their long night’s work of drinking and setting off explosions. There was a light rain, and as they watched me pass I thought about how different we must be in our outlook, and how like them I once was, and still am in many ways. I almost waved. Had I, I would have been waving to myself, just as I was running through the moist-misty scent of myself, past the pine tree, cedar, and juniper that is myself, into the warmth of home. How is the space inside our house different from the space outside? It isn’t. Space isn’t bothered by walls, just as I’m not confined to this lopsided, sleep-deprived bag of New Year’s bones.

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