Six years ago exactly, I took the picture on the left while on a walk near my home in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. I'd voted in the US presidential election just a few hours earlier and was feeling pretty lousy about the whole thing, and pretty unhappy and directionless in general, really. This crumpled cone, flattened into the pothole it had surely been meant to warn others of, felt like a perfect expression of that moment, and it made me laugh. The image stuck with me, and I started to identify it with my dread, which was the dominant emotion in my life at that time, and with the constant deluge of nonsense thoughts and non-sequiturs that filled every quiet moment in my brain, which I was just beginning to realize was a coping mechanism papering over that dread and not how most other people's brains operate.
Tonight I took another walk and snapped a quick picture of a fire hydrant on its side in a heap of leaves next to another traffic cone. I'm back in Ohio this fall after a pretty tumultuous and draining few years on the west coast. I'm still a mess and my brain is still very noisy but I have a very different relationship to change now than I did then. And hey, this time the cone is upright. I'm resting a lot, which is good, because I need to, but I am pretty eager to get on with it and find out what's next when I'm ready. I walked by the original spot on my way home and the pothole's long been filled. So here's to fall, and to change, and to lying down, and to finding little bits of joy in among the all failing infrastructure.