Tonight after work I went looking for the pillow I had seen on the sidewalk during my morning commute.

Earlier in the day at the office, I saw my colleague, Sue Spilecki, and mentioned the misfit pillow to her. When I first saw it on Monday morning, plump and expectant on the sidewalk near Allandale Farm and across from the Exxon station, I immediately thought of Sue and her poetry and imagined the pillow catching her poetic attention. My own thoughts — more scenic than poetic — pictured a person, very tired, walking along and accepting the pillow’s invitation to lie down. I pictured that person, a woman, stretching herself out and giving herself over to sleep with cars and school buses streaming by. This imagined woman was very tired; the journey had been long.

But in my mind it was not a poem; it was a person, a character.

I promised Sue I would go back and get a photo for her. After all, the pillow had been there a few days in the same place – why wouldn’t it remain there? I veered off my running route tonight to track it down. It was gone. There was a sign for an event at Allandale Farm – “Craft” – and I wondered if a caterer or event organizer had tidied up the sidewalk in advance of guests. There is a fancy element to Allandale, even though it is a farm, and in fact the property is owned in trust by a wealthy family though they have deeded it (and therefore protected it from taxes) to some land trust for protected use.

what i saw after i didn’t see the pillow

I wandered down the dirt road and even breached the No Trespassing sign. I had done this once before and been asked to leave by a woman who drove up to me in a blue Audi. Later, the encounter made me write a short story about it, something to do with wealth hidden behind bucolic agriculture and what rural land may mean to different people (characters) in a community: migrant farm workers, a young mother/photographer, the landowners themselves. At the time I wrote that story, I had not imagined a pillow on the sidewalk or a woman reposing on it.

Another colleague, Tracy, asked me today about my blog and my writing. “I miss it,” I said, even though I also admitted I had set my writing aside last summer in a very deliberate, practical way and only now am I rejuvenating it, feeling both tentative and awkward.

Also today I read a student essay in which the writer used a lot of interesting words that were almost but not quite right. The misfit words could have been misfires in the student’s working vocabulary or they could have been errors created by autocorrect. Only one of the ‘off’ words charmed me: the writer referred to a “collusion” of automobiles, and in the context I believe the writer meant “collision.” How more interesting to imagine two cartoon-like cars, with their noses together, whispering, secretly planning, conspiring. In a dystopic future, imagine all our smart, sensor-filled cars, controlling us and not just doing our bidding, whether driven by us or some network of data.

I do not, though, have a mind for dystopia. I would really have to commit to it and imagine more than two cars, a whole community of them, with leadership and planning and resources and, more than anything, motivation. Why would they want to take us over? I cannot picture what cars would get from us that they would actually want or need.  See, this is not my genre.

Next to me on the couch right now is a plate with cracker crumbs on it. I wet my finger, dab them up, and eat them.

I hear the buzzer from the washer in the basement, the load done. I told Lydia I’d hang up her sweater.

sidewalk where i expected to see a pillow

Tomorrow, another day at MIT, reading more essays, a summer project for a bunch of us. It’s optional (paid) work. It seems my most cheerful colleagues sign up for it. We get a free lunch (Middle Eastern food), and we sit together and don’t talk about work, kind of like indoor recess. We do talk about our children, our writing, New York vs. Boston/Cambridge, Uber, and – for a moment – a pillow on a sidewalk that no longer exists.

And yet it does: Sue wrote a poem about it.