Haibun: Adapt and Tell
I recently came to eat my words, with gloves and jacket on and my truck’s heater turned up as high as it could, I looked at the temperature on my watch and it said “53.” I remember picking on my brother-in-law when I first moved out here because he had a sweatshirt on when it dipped in the 60’s. He shivered before he went in to get it. He was cold, six years into living in the Sonoran Desert.
It’s interesting how we adapt. A year and a half ago I was in Jackson Hole, WY, looking for the Teton’s in a snow storm with a t-shirt on and still pulsing that Upstate New York antifreeze through my veins. But now I have adapted. Now I can work a full day outside in the 110 degree sun, still grasping for shade, but still able to keep a steady pace for a full day.
This is our lives—change, adapt, and a new normal— and so we tell ourselves in new and interesting ways again and again and again. It is in this constant change that our words come alive with a pulse as we tell and retell our reinvented selves to those who have been intently listening for years.
dawn puts on her show, hot pinks
with winter in tow
