Afternoon. Just me and the dragonflies out here on the slope on my last full day.

This morning I woke after seven and started what is becoming, or has become rather, my ritual for this new place. It was cloudy and cold and I worried that my sunny streak had ended. So I checked the weather report. According to it, it had not. I read in bed, made tea, read in bed some more, and then ate a bowl of cereal outside on the bench on the deck. The water in the straight was inky. It bobbed as always, sloshing in one big rip between competing currents. I looked at the clouds, they had mass. I searched them for weakness, a hint of the predicted blue eking through. I went back to bed, and read. And after a while, I got up again, the sky brighter, now, the cloud cover breaking up. I made a wicked thick brew of french press and hauled that hearty mug, my REI camp chair (in urban brown), my binoculars, and my big fat book of fiction out to the upper shady spot on the grassy slope. I read and spied on the neighbors and commerce and wildlife until the acidity of that mighty brew menaced some delicate lining and I retreated to the kitchen to prepare a lunch of local-made goat cheese, apples, and almonds, all of which I hauled down to the chair and the shade and the new book chapter waiting for me. A bit later, I added a chocolate graham to the crew. Thus fortified, a bit weary from sitting, and with noon coming on, I decided to ride into what passes for a town on this rock. I put on a T-shirt to cover my sunburn—to conceal the fact that I had acquired the patina of one of those fleshy mainlanders you see waiting for their flights at the Honolulu airport, the outline of their beachwear burned onto their skin the memento they never ordered. My shame concealed, I added American Apparel's version of my uncle Kerry's shorts plus flipflops and set off on my bike for the hippie grocery store. My bare and scorched skin goosebumped in the cool wind as I descended from my point past an inlet toward another point and the island's modest skate park slash thrift store slash public restroom and on downhill past farms not on the waterfront. I wondered, do those landlocked landowners wish they could walk out the backdoor, step off the back porch to mosey down the grassy hill to the shore, where the thin, precarious soil surrenders to bedrock and the ocean, which, ever voracious, chews and chews on it till the shore is pocked and gnarled? And on, to the stop sign and left, uphill. The ride is shockingly satisfying. Hilly, at times challenging, with rewarding downhills to cool you off. You can smell the evergreens baking, and the yellow of the heat mixes with the cool blue ocean breeze to tinge everything just slightly green. Magical, that. At the store, my bike to pasture at the sitting spot (where a sign read GTO PARKING ONLY ALL OTHERS WILL BE TOWED, whatever that means) I claimed all but one of the packages of locally smoked tofu—ssooo good—treated myself to a small bottle of aranciata, and took three of Ken's spelt cookies from the pastry case. The woman wielding the barcode reader remarked, "Stocking up?" Indeed. I retrieved my bike and walked it across the road to the local gift shop, which claimed to sell locally crafted things but that mostly had things from faraway places that other people, decidedly not local, had made. And so, I left there feeling a bit disappointed but also reassured in my situational commitment to austerity, as if the commitment were determined by the fact that most things for sale are shit and not worth having in any case. Thusly, I sailed home (home—listen to me go on!) on two wheels and under my own power, aided exhilaratingly in parts by that lusty helper, gravity. Not a single car passed me in either direction, and I reveled in that observation, thinking how lovely to ride on such roads as the roads of my small-town youth, where it is possible to travel for several miles without encountering a single car. Back at the caboose, I ate the last of my open package of smoked tofu, mmm-ing at each miraculous morsel, chasing it with the aranciata, which was, oddly, too sweet-tasting. At long last, I set again to the business of reading, in the shade, just me and the dragonflies, until the chapter ended and I had chilled enough in the shade in just a T-shirt and shorts that I was compelled indoors to change into the hoodie, to brew some more of that virile coffee, and to break a Ken's cookie in two. I grabbed the half bag of cherries from the fridge for contrast and dragged the whole lot outside, negotiating the door and navigating the steps with the loot dangling from my carabinered fingers. What a dance! And since then, it's been me and the dragonflies as I write this down—and one long-soaring eagle overhead, for which I stopped writing and watched for a long long time through the binoculars, noticing for the first time how an eagle can cap or tip its wings to swoop and dart, or lever its tail to climb up sharp. And then, even the eagle grew tired of the height—I know my arms did—and flew around the point, out of sight.

Last nights are for finishing things: books, booze, open containers of food. They are for reflecting. When I look around the room, my stuff is everywhere, utterly unpacked and strewn about. An imploded yard sale, no buyers. It's strange how quickly some of the tapes in the mind's black box loop around. In some ways, it feels like I just arrived and yet a part of me feels like I've always been here. I look around at the books stacked on each other and drooping off table edges, the bottles growing in number over by the trash can, contents spilling out of my bags, power cords still umbilicaled to the wall but the devices borne and roaming free somewhere else. I found a dune of hair skulking in the lee of the doorsill of the bathroom. Apparently, I've been here a while.