On certain days it’s possible to see the outline of your dreams.

It takes being tired. Not just tired from a day of work or days of work, but from weeks and months working exhaustively. Neglecting yourself and those closest to you.

Until one morning—after being up all night because the baby has cried (she is tired too), your wife, half crazy from being up all night too, just gets up and goes to the other room and shuts the door. Something new.

Your eyelids are burning they want to shut so bad. But instead of going back to sleep you get up and start putting the baby in her warm bear suit.

Immediately she starts smiling which makes your own face stretch into a smile and you can feel even the muscles of your face burning a little bit because you’re so tired.

You put her in the sling against your chest and then walk out with the dog. He knows the routine.

Outside it’s grey and cold and too early to be out on a Sunday morning unless you’re going snowboarding or surfing or anything else but. . .at least there isn’t the workday traffic speeding down 80th street, bumpers only a few feet away. 

You stumble into the Urban Bakery because you were too tired even to make coffee this morning. You leave the dog tied up (poorly, just a half-hitch around a chair) outside. The thin Asian woman smiles at you . . you’re a regular. . .and the baby—who you realize is asleep now. 

There’s a moment where you drink the coffee and read a bit of the book left in your coat pocket (Philip Levine), but feel yourself drifting back to sleep in the warm café so you walk back out and start your daily hike around the lake with the baby on your chest.

Now you're walking and thinking you could write a poem about all of this. About how this lake used to be a wetlands and some kind of drainage until they impounded it and how now it's used for national rowing competitions. About how the others—your neighbors—running around the lake with their babies in strollers, seem so detached from you and from this place. You remember the homeless Indian guy you saw sitting under the larches as if he’d been there for a thousand years. You think about juxtapositions. The memory of a homeless Indian and an old Jewish Poet from Detroit whose book is rolled up in your pocket. Do these juxtapositions count for anything?

Then there’s an enraged sound—cawing—as a half-dozen crows flush a hawk out of red alder. “They own this place,” you think, “crows own this place. That would be a line of the poem.”

But you keep walking, realizing of course you'll never write this poem. Even thinking about it instead of just letting your pen move means it’s too late. 

You keep walking and walking and realize you’ve gone a long way this morning.

There are breaks in the rolling clouds and for a minute the sunlight zigzags across the windblown lake-surface. The baby is still asleep and you can feel her chest rising and falling. You worry for a second that she’ll wake up here wailing with hunger and you’re a long way from home now where mamá can feed her. 

Up ahead you notice shifting green branches that seem familiar only you haven’t reached this part of the lake before. As you get closer it’s unmistakable: the smoky green tone of the needles, branches growing from the trunks in whorls. It’s a small stand of Eastern White Pines, like a piece of the mountains from the Chattooga back home, transplanted here.

You go to one of the limbs and examine the needles. Bundles of 5. A white stripe down the middle.

Then you keep walking, feeling something like nostalgia, but different. 

Up ahead there is a guy fishing. Bait fishing. He has headphones on—not an ipod but old-school headphones and a walkman. He looks homeless. He’s the only guy you’ve seen today engaging the land in some slowed down way rather than speeding over it. 

You decide to turn around then and head back home, only this time, as you approach the stand of white pines the sunlight is in them differently. Stopping now and watching the outlines of the branches, all those times you paddled down rivers and camped on beaches flanked with these trees, all the people you were with then, some of whom have since died, all the stories you have to tell your daughter and places you have to show her—your dreams—are right there.