Transitions

Tonight as I drove home from work, there was still light in the sky, the first time I've noticed anything but dark in ages--well, since before the time change last fall, anyway. It was so beautiful to just look up--the blue was at once both infinite and dome-like. Have I been living in this color all along, never noticing? I've been trying to look up more lately, like last night, pausing in my quest for a lemon to enjoy Orion. When the synagogue goes up on the hillside, I don't think I'll be able to see many stars, and I want to have that memory of beauty. Like the eucalyptus trees that were once there, now gone, but I still smell them sometimes, when the construction machinery disturbs the shards of their roots and branches still scattered on the hillside.

Ticked off: emptying the dishwasher tonight, I noticed that one of my slippers was sticking to the kitchen floor. But I'm honing my obliviousness, so failed to notice the Rorschach blobs of blood until there were four distinct splats decorating the vinyl. The amount of blood a tick can hold is incredible. Their squeezed-out exoskeletal shells are translucent as mica when flattened, appropriately opposite to the gunmetal bullets with whiskers-that-once-were-legs that they are alive. Why aren't I bothered by crushing the life out of these creatures? I guess I only hold certain lives sacred, "charismatic megafauna" as my scientific friends would classify them--who cares about fruit flies and white mice and ticks when chimps and dogs are at stake?