It's Still Life

Pitch

the mountains at my back, lace-up waterproof boots crunching through the ice-crust on yesterday’s snow, and the air flying white as fine gauze, the sort of weather that flattens curves and rubs out distance, where light makes no shadow and you can’t quite tell where the ground stops and the sky begins, except there are pines shouldering through it, dark green, almost black, shaking loose little avalanches whenever the wind gets into them, and somewhere water is moving under ice, I can hear it but can’t see it, and my toes are beginning to complain despite the waterproof boots which, now I think of it, promise nothing whatsoever about warmth—

and I inhale.

pine. pitch.

and suddenly there’s my mother with that bottle of green disinfectant she poured into the toilet bowl, scrubbing the porcelain as if brushing teeth, poured into the cistern too, and down the kitchen sink, God knows where else, perhaps the whole house was afloat in it. a smell sweet as white daisies, she’d say, although daisies have hardly any smell at all, do they? not one you’d cross a room for, anyway.

one day at Girl Scout day-camp, blistering hot, hotter than any day I remember before or perhaps memory has cooked that too, I went down with heatstroke, moaning like bent wind and vomiting every few hours, and my mother chased each bout down the toilet with a splash of that pitchy-green disinfectant and flushed the whole mess away.

and here I am, years later, halfway up a mountain with snow coming sideways and pine pitch clean on the air, telling my stomach it’s a tree.

Written for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness, this week’s word is pitch. Some images created with Midjourney; all writing is my own work.©Misky 2006-2026.