Stick Season

I've heard this called " Stick Season" . The leaves are all gone but the snow has yet to arrive. You drive around or just look out the window and all you see are sticks. Trees reduced to the substructure .  A couple weeks ago I got back from the hospital , from the second attempt at this leg problem. My personal sticks have an infection. When I got hit this summer I landed in the dirt.  There was a full canal only about 20 ft further on but my trajectory was a bit oblique to the best flight path. And a bit uphill. I'd have likely drowned and might not have been found for quite some time . But I'd have missed out on the home IV ordeal. I landed in a patch of trees instead, with lots of dirt.
     From my window at home I can see, across the road and a field and a power line cut there's a ridge of hardwoods. Maybe a quarter mile away. When the sun hits right there's a glow of bright red from bud tips where leaves will sprout next spring. I'm not sure what kind of trees they are. It's likely a mixed stand as most are around here. The low angle of the winter sun hits these nearly broadside . The tiny red sparks glare bright on a curtain of gray sticks over a field of old grass and low brush. It's the liveliest thing out there. They seem not so much heart as seeds.
     Winter is just beginning and I have a long uncertain way to go . I need them to be seeds.

Back in the ER

Threre are places where fear starts at the door. Emergency Room is a mixed bag . I knew that the antibiotics I needed weren't emergency , more like urgent , but the nurse I was dealing with said to do it then , at 10 30 , now 11, so I wouldn't stagger my dose off schedule so much . My pic line was blocked, needed clearing , which the ER could do. So in we went, very tired, sleepy. 

   It was apparently a quiet though busy night , and I lay on a gurney in the hall, tended to well, by nice folks . I dozed . I had not been there since the accident that started the whole thing . And I'd been for a kidney stone , and I think some other stuff, long ago. I knew was going to be ok, mostly , I and we cleared out my clog with a three way blood gizmo. Pretty slick. And I lay there and dozed, and half dreamed.

   I remembered all the times I hadn't been there. But they looked the same as if I had. When the ceiling clouded as my vision dimmed . From someone else's stretcher, I saw the line of lights , a highway down the hall to what might be the last vision ever. Or the time I didn't lay there , next to a partner , hurt too, but not so badly, so they had to wheel me away while partner tried to express that there was a simple way to make it all so much better. But I saw the words fail in his mouth as I was wheeled away. And the idea die in his mind with his hand stretched over .  These weren't the times I'd been here. These were someone else memories, nudging their way past my closing eyes as I lay and drifted in and out, with the fluids flowing in my arm and the slow careful cleaners walked and walked, and all the blue scrubbed night shift workers walked with careful focus not to be distracted, so much desired need on every side. 

     But I slept and waked and dreamed and remembered , all those times I hadn't been there. And never could find , that time I really had.