Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

Capitan Gap You look through the broken skyline of burnt trees still hugging the ridge some 3 years after the fire. The clouds build up over the Sacramentos like some sort of meringue- ominous, multi-hued, whites and grays. Your cooler is full-- the food you ate replaced with freezer bags full of raspberries harvested from the ridges in bundles of 4 or 5 to a bush and 4 or 5 bushes every square yard. The raspberries are every where, and after eating handfuls you settle into collecting, gathering, relishing in the harvest that only a natural cycle can bring. The memories return of you on a hillside, younger, talking and playing, gathering raspberries in a neighbor's wild yard. There is nothing mundane about this memory: the red stain on your cuticles, scrapes from pulling bushes up and moving further into the patch unaware of time-- the slow monumental decay of daylight. Rain will come, you think, and you'll return to your life of electronic gadgets and trying to look busy by ki...