I’m sitting on my back deck, legs propped up, my big-dog-Figgis laying beside me. The sun is dropping toward the western horizon and the crickets are buzzing.

It’s Sunday. I have work tomorrow. Last week was the second full week of work that I’ve managed to get through since Peter died. I count that as a milestone.

My goal is to continue working through each week. Yeah, that might not sound like much. But extenuating circumstances beyond my brother’s death keep gnawing at my ankles and my balance is never great.

But, right now, I can hear the whisper of cars as they pass my house. Someone just down the road is hammering a piece of wood. The scent of my dinner is seeping out the open back door, inviting me to come in and take a bite. Or many bites.

Earlier, when I was hanging up laundry to dry, a mockingbird caroled me from the cedar trees bordering my property. I kept scanning for the bird, never able to find it. But I relished its cheerful tune, thinking of Miss Maudie (I hope I’m remembering her right) from To Kill A Mockingbird when she admonished Jem and Scout against killing mockingbirds. All they do is sing their hearts out and never hurt anyone.

I live. I wait. I breathe and I think and I feel. I write and stare at my words and wonder what’s next? I’m not even certain why I hold onto the that question. Why I write that question or wonder that concept. What’s next?

Three years from retirement.

And I wonder and wait.

My parents are returning to the US in soon.

And I wonder and wait.

What is the next step? I have been dreaming about Polishing the Bones and the most recent rounds of rejection have steeped me in silence. I write daily. I have been writing daily. But even now, those words feel flat and redundant. I have been writing in daily journals and piddling with stories and spilling out some poetry and dreaming of Louiston but then I feel the sense of what’s next?

I think of Mary Oliver’s poem “Crossing the Swamp.” I am in the middle of the marrow sucking mire, pushing a stick around to feel for snakes or whatever lies beneath the deep brown water, the slack earthsoup. I see the embankments surrounding me. I could just cut right or left and end the journey. No, don’t think of anything that dramatic.

But I know another embankment is beyond me. In front of me. I know that I can push forward but, right now, the warm water feels good as it laps around me, the mud sucking at my feet and pulling me down to my ankles.

I can feel the roots of the world beneath my toes. The nurient rich mycelium spreading around me. I am not alone.

What’s next?

I’m going to wait here. For right now. Wait and wonder.

And then I will switch the vowel to an a.

Wander.