night_walk kerry i wait for you even until it's dark. i want to walk and i want to walk with you. standing under the black cherry tree you said "should we spin in circles to decide which way to walk?" and i grab your shoulders and we are both laughing and i would like to do it, i am serious but you are not--you keep walking and i have to jog to keep up. you let me be bossy about our route. "you tell me i should be more decisive don't you?" and you say "well i guess that's true." the night is alive. we walk down a road where blue lights are strung overhead from house to house. a young couple is walking a buggy and we stop to let them by but can't stop talking. the bikers are drinking beers on their stoop, taking up the whole sidewalk, their beards long and archaic and grizzled (and they smile when i walk past in the early evenings with my dog and i am not sure what their smiles mean). a man on a corner by a bodega steps aside to let us pass. a girl comes out of her house just in front of us and before she shuts the door we are accosted by the scent of italian cooking, and we are both sniffing the air, not saying anything about it, just quiet for a moment. we are on time to our destination, wherever that is. back on our street, two doors down, i am hit by a wave of familiarity--it is something in the air, an odor or a breeze or a ghost perhaps, it is like when you find the smell of your childhood home. i thought of my hamster, bo, and the cedar-sour smell of her cage, and how she nibbled my fingertips and sat in my sweatshirt pocket and died in my hands. i think that was the smell. 210804 what's it to you? who go blather from