Kobi Returns and other night adventures

Last night as Bob was leaving, Kobi and Roxy streaked out the front door into the night. Within 15 minutes or so, Roxy came back, but Kobi was still nowhere to be found when I locked up and went to bed. I don't like to leave her out like that, but I know it's silly to wait up or go looking, and she'll come home and i'll find her waiting on the front porch in the morning.

At 3:30 I woke up and got up to check the front porch, figuring maybe she had scratched at the door and that's what woke me. No Kobi. I checked out back. No Kobi. A little worried, I went back to bed. Tucked my feet down under the covers and.... there she was.

My little dog had come home in the night, climbed the fence into the back yard, come into the garage through the doggie door, pushed open the door to the kitchen, let herself in, and put herself to bed. Clever girl.

After a chilly and gray day, the evening turned warm and moist and wonderful tonight. I went for a walk and smelled the trees and watched mockingbirds swooping through the evening air. It reminds me of something, somewhere else, another time. It reminds me of North Carolina, I think: the smell of the trees. I remember certain evenings there, standing in the forest, which was everywhere, all around and through the town of Chapel Hill, and smelling the trees. One night in particular I was at a party at somebody's house out in the woods. It was October. Just beginning to chill. I was with a group of people and we decided to go on to another party, so we all went out onto the deck to load into our cars. There was a guy in the group and we were doing that subtle, complex ritual you do at the beginning of a new relationship, when you know there's a mutual attraction, and you're both trying to engineer a way to be close, to touch, to share something. He was walking just behind me, and as we stepped off the deck he said "look at the stars!"

I looked up, and I had to look waaaay up, through the sharp ring of pine trees that circled the house, that circled the black, shining piece of sky straight above us. It was alive with stars. I leaned back and he let me lean on him, and that moment – with the holy brightness of the stars and the ring of black trees, the smell of the forest, the cool of the autumn air and the warmth of him at my back... that moment was one of the best moments of my life. Just then.

I think of it sometimes when I smell trees.