BitterSweetLife

I was sitting at the metal table across from the community center's football-field-sized parking lot, all nine stories of our refurbished-factory-loft building piled above me. The street lights bounced off the asphalt in the dusk and power lines ran through the trees that sporadically leaned by the street. Then a series of warm, nasal chords vibrated in the air, an unnatural sound in this concrete prairie.

Two Canada Geese swept over the parking lot asphalt, thirty feet up, gliding through puddles of light. I wondered if they felt like aliens. But they flew past the power lines and disappeared, their conversation unaffected by the urban provincialism. Two creatures so out of place, but unperturbed. But then--who is really out of place? Who is truly at home? Perhaps home is more a matter of created time and place and less one of constructed artifice.

We are all more or less at home as we allow ourselves to be, as we recall, and cling to, the rationale of our appearance here and our purpose for being on this sphere. Do geese have better memories?