Ihkaúutte above crept closer to the west

as my breath rose to meet him

Weeks upon weeks of cold darkness as I sit on my patio chair and sip coffee have me craving more of it, like a deep hunger for a steep walk up an unforgiving mountainside. I’d gladly enjoy an hour a day in the darkness, nothing but the whitenoise whine of vehicles on the interstate, the flap of a loose tarp the only sound punctuating the rest of the tires’ thrum.

But given the townhouse situation, almost never do I enjoy complete darkness. The owners of #8 live most of the time in a faraway town and when they departed before Christmas, they left their porch light on. For a while, the owner of #4 who is selling also left hers on, but that’s an easy fix because it screws upward into the fitting and is easy for me to unscrew while I sit out there. The new residents in #1 have a motion light which stays on far too long.

This morning, though, I went out, and complete darkness subsumed the courtyard. #1 is on vacation and someone turned theirs off. I don’t know what happened in #8. But for the first time in months I was able to just look up into the clear sky and see the Big Dipper, known as ihkaúutte or the weasel in Crow. I try to see it as a weasel instead of a dipper, which who even uses that word except to refer to a bird? Most of the time I don’t think about it because I can’t see it.

I used this pic in another newsletter recently but I cannot help loving this blue. North hills pre-dawn.

I normally take a few minutes to write in my tablet-journal, a habit I can abide only because I delete the pages at the end of the month, but this morning I didn’t even do that. To enjoy this completeness of dark was something I could not pass up.

I simply sat and listened to the bus riders chat before the arrival of the electric Mountain Line with its funny hissing and popping and watched as the neighbors to one side of our complex turned on their stove light, I imagine to illuminate the coffee-pouring that must be going on. Headlights shone all the way through #5’s windows from back to front as cars turned onto Rodgers on their way to work. The deepest, deepest blue from the early dawn gave relief to the silhouetted north hills and a lone headlamped runner high up on the ridgeline made their way north. Ihkaúutte above crept closer to the west as my breath rose to meet him.