Lavender says farewell

In the warehouse where I am working on my art projects, I sometimes worry about the air. Alana is over talking about a movie project, and there is warning in her tone when she asks if the air is okay for me to be breathing every day. And when I ask Andy about it, he tells me he’s been in worse places most of his working life, but that same tone is in his voice, too: warning. The air in Manhattan is so bad that the worst rates of asthma in children can be found in New York. The air in Jersey is so ridiculous that people in New York see fine sunsets as the particulates of manufacture block day’s last lights: pollution on I-95 is a gauze on industry’s scabs, and the light that seeps through makes for the best sundowns New Yorkers have ever seen. I worry about what I breathe. But I tell Andy and Alana that I will be in clean air soon enough, and we remind ourselves of the lungs’ tremendous capacity to repair. My 78-year-old mother on her deathbed was asked to stop smoking; she stopped, astonishing her doctors and family when her dementia left for two months, but then started smoking again and was dead shortly after.

The air that I breathe worries me.

So I am here, around 66 degrees north, some kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Maya works in the aluminum smelter in Reykjavik, but that is hours away, and the winds do not blow her ashes north. I am in the crispest air. The kind of stuff they thought about at Westinghouse when they pushed refrigerators into every suburb. I breathe Djupavik's turbo-oxygenated airs, and feel like lettuce, green and watery, my very own fibre, can be eaten with anything.

The sunset falls out of the air, and its blast is a farewell in lavender and iron. We stop for two hours on a windless evening, and become bits of graffiti in our own kaleidoscope. We are not looking at the sunset; we are the sundown itself, smidgens of color and exclamation at the very end of the planet’s revolution, one more harmless day spinning into the next, stitching time into patterns we try to sell as schedules instead of acknowledging the days as fun rides in the fairground that is every person’s personal life. To be sure, some of the grounds are wrecked or poisoned and lives are snuffed before they start, or go bad slowly, but most of us here in FB-land can quit the schedule anytime we want and walk into our own carnival of being and take a ride into the sunset.

Is it really yesterday out west? And when light comes back and chases away the cold, will tomorrow really already be happening?

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