With leaves of hearts and petals tender like kisses the flower spoke in the language of love. It’s gentle perfume whispered promises that would never be kept. Layered in sweetness and fond remembrances of sunshine past, beneath the coolness of a dew gathering, the scent carried something more.

That’s what some damn hippy poet wrote anyway. Making romance out of the thing, when there’s nothing lovely about it. The first vine had crept through a crack in Main Street, nothing more than a shifting of black top in the hot sun, but once the first leaves opened to the sun it did nothing but grow. In three weeks time Main Street was closed to all but foot traffic. Tourists poured in to see what the citizens of Canton considered a Public Works disaster. Bright orange cones and white saw horses rerouted cars to the surrounding blocks as more and more foot traffic gathered. With their fanny packs, their cameras, and silly hats they came to see what we could not seem to kill. The vines had coalesced into a trunk of sorts, and by the fourth week the thing had capped thirty five feet in height. It ripped up pavement as it swelled in the sunshine and still the crowds grew, tightly packed to eww and ahh at our failure. Someone joked we should call it Ygdrasil, the tree of life, since it seemingly could not be killed. A blogger picked it up and the name stuck. There were patches and t-shirts by week five.

The lines spiraled out a block in every direction as everyone came to see the beautiful Yggdrasil, nature conquering all of man’s efforts to stifle her. It was then, in the sixth week that the first blooms opened.

Three thousand seven hundred and fourteen dead in the blink of an eye. They simply lay down in the sun and anyone that rushed in to pull them out did the same. I’m ashamed to say that they lay there and rot for the first three days. We were a small town, crushed under the industry of tourism and didn’t have the man power or technology to handle it. The government stepped in, forming an ever-widening quarantine area while men in hazmat suits with tanks of imported air moved in with bulldozers to clear the dead.

Yggdrasil was no tree of life.

It’s been five years since that day. No one lives in Canton anymore. No one lives within two hundred miles of Yggdrasil, except the desperate and insane. They say it is taller than Mt. Everest now. I believe them, though I couldn’t have anyway to verify it. I was there when it all began and I hope to be there when it all ends. That’s why tonight, on a lonely dirt runway I’m helping to load a black market Russian nuclear device into an old beat up Cessna twin turbo. It will be a one way trip, but that’s ok. I don’t have anyone left to say good bye to.

In a world where entropy will swallow everything and a twenty-four hour news cycle will rob your attention at any given moment, we can only have special moments by giving them to ourselves.

Last night my wife and I sat down to watch some TV together, not something terribly special (though we only watch TV once a week), but we made it special. We were getting to watch the most recent episode of Mad Men, so we dressed the part – pulling out our finest clothes. I even ended up in a tie for a while. We made cocktails. We laughed, talked and flirted. We made it special, because no one else was going to do that for us.

Today is only what you make of it.

I’m not sure how old I was at the time of this memory, old enough to look suspicious but too young to have a proper ID of my own. If I had to pin a number on it, I was 13. My family owned and operated The Candle Factory, a small business that unsurprisingly specialized in the production of candles. The Candle Factory was a place that I loathed as a child. Spend more than a few minutes in the production areas and a menagerie of ultra feminine scents would sink so deeply into your clothes and skin that you would carry it for days. The wax was much like sand on a beach, it clung to everything and after only a few hours you could feel it in your hair and coating your fingers. Your shoes would be ruined as well, the soles coated in a microthin layer of wax that would enable you to slip on any surface known to man.

When business was good and orders outstripped the production of the normal staff it often fell to my brothers and I to help out in some way. We’d work after hours, in the evenings when we’d come home from school and the other workers had gone home to their own families. It was on such an occassion that my father, my older brother, and I were all pulling into the parking lot. The factory was all locked up, so we let ourselves in with a key and the alarm let out its shrill beep, as it always did. My memory turns murky now and I can’t really say why the alarm was allowed to go on too long. Was it because we entered from the wrong side of the factory, expecting that the alarm had not been armed? Was it because my father forgot the code? The latter seems unlikely, as there is a family joke regarding the alarm code of that building – for the longest time it was simply the address. Difficult to forget.

Whatever the reason, the alarm sounded for longer than it should have and the security company alerted the local police, as was their duty. The police arrived promptly. I was pulled aside from my father and brother, asked for a story as to why we were here, what we were doing, and who we were. On the last bit he asked for details: my name, my address, and my birthdate. My story was then to be verified against the claims of my father and it all did, all but one thing. My birthday. My father, whose memory contains more knowledge than I will ever see, much less remember, had forgotten my birthday.

We were not arrested. My mother was contacted, as she was the designated contact with the security company, and one presumes she was able to accurately relay my birth date to the police. It worked out in the end – no harm was done, aside from my shattered ego, and I am left with a story to tell.

“What was that?” my wife asked, her question punctuated by a loud shriek from beyond the glass. I set aside the glass and moved toward the door. I flicked on the solitary 40 watt, which barely threw enough light to see the fence on the far side of the yard, much less anything in the field beyond. Sounds came again, a choking rush of sound, something like the noise my toddler makes when she isn’t sure if she should laugh or cry because she’s too excited.

“Maybe, its just some kids playing?” I said, with more uncertainty than optimism.

“Get your fucking hands off me!” came as the reply from the voice out in the darkness.

“That isn’t playing,” my wife said. We met eyes only for a second and then I ran down, barefoot, to the far side of the small suburban back yard, hoping that I might be able to see more through the fence as the sounds that have broken down into something that wasn’t language anymore. I hoped to see young lovers in the midst of an overly dramatic fight, but instead could only see darkness. Something inside of me wanted pick up a stick and go running, to find what was happening and put a stop to it. My wife took the more sane approach and dialed 911. The dispatcher took down what they needed and said police where en route, and asked if we’d like the police to come speak with us. We agreed that would be ok, and then I went to the front yard to wait, not wanting their arrival to awake our then sleeping daughter.

For what felt like an eternity, but was perhaps only minutes, I sat in the yellow glow of our porch light waiting for something – anything – to happen. It didn’t take long, soon a helicopter was flying in tight circles around the field behind our home and a squad car went roaring past with siren and lights all ablaze. A few neighbors came out to stare up at the low flying helicopter as it swept in circles above our homes, but none of them stayed for long. I waited and waited, but the helicopter turned back and disappeared into the night and a several more squad cars came and went without one ever stopping to ask us anymore questions.

I hope that they found nothing, or that they found a tear streaked teenage girl who only needed to work on appropriate volumes for public conversations, and not a trip to the hospital. I don’t know what they did find, and I guess I never will.

I need to play this back every morning until it fully sinks in. Time to stop waiting and start doing.

In the last year I hit some of my big goals. I started self-publishing after I was unable to get any of my stories published through more traditional means. I finished another NaNoWriMo, and did some of my best work in doing so. On the other hand, I haven’t kept up with this blog as well as I’d like and obviously I didn’t get published in a traditional format which is one of those little pieces of recognition that I’d like to accomplish before I kick the bucket.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that I’m re-visiting the idea of being goal oriented in the coming year and plan to produce a list of 32 goals to complete in my 32nd year. I have just over a month to figure them out, then a year to accomplish them in. I’ll post anything that isn’t overly personal here, so that there is a bit of accountability in the doing.

Here’s to new beginnings.

Context: I’m a middle class white dude.

If I pay cash, with a big bill, and the cashier or waiter holds it to the light to check for the security strip I don’t really think any thing of it.

That said, tonight at the grocery store a rather shabbily dressed black gentleman paid for a small amount of groceries with a fresh Benjamin. The cashier held it to the light, as is her job, and my gut reaction was “racist”. Which is just weird. Maybe I’ve just been hitting the old NPR too hard.

I’m afraid to watch any streaming video…