My run took me downstream yesterday. From the front door it's a diagonal line to the river. Across the empty block of pink and purple clover, past the parking lot of oily puddles, past the rusted hulk of the half-toppled gravel shed and up to the docks where I turn left along the levee wall. The levee is perfect for lazy running. It’s quiet, straight and flat. After the first quarter mile the gravel fades to grass which, when the fog creeps in, can feel like those narrow paths that skirt the edges of English fields. Protected. A little magical. It ends, however, at the sugar factory, which is straight Dickens. High blackened spires rise up like jaws behind a twisted iron gate. Soot-smeared brick, barbed wire fences, plumes of yellowing smoke that pour from a tangle of metallic tubing behind every window. I’d stop running at the sugar factory even without the gate. Inhaling within a half mile of the place is like breathing syrup, and it's easy to imagine the candied shell of your own lungs impaled on some kind of pike, set out as a warning to future joggers.

Anyways, that was this morning. Now it’s afternoon, and I’m in the moldy orange hammock I bought L for her birthday last year. Above the scrawny branches of our back yard tree the ominous silhouette of a local hawk circles, watching for rabbits. As it happens, I am sitting beside two rabbits. At this point Moosh is too big to be hawk food, but Zazz is still tiny and snacklike. I'm out here to scare the hawk away from Zazz. With luck, it'll be the third rabbit that gets snatched - a potatoish brown one that L has affectionately dubbed Mr. Rogers. Moosh spends his days attacking Mr. Rogers through the chain link fence, and, despite his being Our Enemy, I've come to think of him as our actual neighbor. But also hawk food.

Ok, took a quick break there. Fast forward a couple weeks. Same situation, more or less. Hammock, rabbits, a light breeze. Zazz (which Siri tries to autocorrect to “Zaznibar”) now sports an enormous bandage around her left front leg which covers the honest-to-Christ degloving that Moosh managed to inflict through the fence. Happened in a blink. There was a brief ruckus by the back door and I ran out to find Zazz limping away from a black tuft of herself. The top of her paw was gone, all the way down to the tendons that connect her tiny little wrist to her tiny little claws.

If you hadn't figured it out already, I'll just say it out right: I'm not sure what I'm writing about. I had this notion of rebooting the blog because for the first time in a long time I have a sense that future me will want to know what it was like before everything changed. If our luck holds, in a few short months we'll all be living on the other side of the country, and I'll be beginning fatherhood and a PhD program at the same time. It doesn’t seem terribly hyperbolic to suggest that the me who emerges from that particular mix is going to feel a bit ... changed. Dazed. Might reach to his face to find burns. Possibly wrinkles. Might wonder exactly what the hell just happened. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could slow down time and show him? Or at least pay him back the sports commentary of that one sick tackle that took him down?

Of course as I sit swaying in this sunny back yard in New Orleans, the whole venture seems pleasantly abstract. Today’s big project has been to collect a few of those clovers from the lot across the road and feed them to the bunnies. Made myself a sandwich a while ago, took the dog for a walk. Tomorrow ... I’m not even sure what tomorrow is for.