After only a few hours of sleep Bruce awakens with a feeling he usually associates with beginning a day when he has something exciting or risky planned. In fact, it's the beginning of an end of summer holiday weekend and he has nothing planned.

He gets up from his bed in the dark and puts on water for coffee. Then sits down in front of a long wood table and gazes out through an oversized window. Predawn light stirs in through trees and scribbles dark lines onto walls in back of him. Outside, a sullen mist hovers between the first line of tree limbs and the earth. Bruce smiles, enjoying the way the wildly overgrown landscape sits free here. And continues to smile as a soft ray of light prisms through a crystal hanging in the window and cuts a rainbow across his face and bare shoulders.

God, how he loves this place. It's easy, unobtrusive fix with the land, and intentionally simple, lighthearted layout. His private and personal oasis, secluded, simple -- non-threatening to any thing or any one -- and yet at the same at odds with everything else that’s going on out there.

Bruce closes his eyes and prays that his simple actions taken here at odds with the prevailing flow might somehow fuse with others in order to stop what's going on and allow for something different and better to happen. Or, if his actions and wishes are not enough to help provoke change, then he hopes his prayers will reward him with Grace: a smooth, fortunate, unnoticed life. Bruce closes his eyes and mumbles a Lakota prayer for the skill and luck to be able to become invisible when the circumstances warrant.

On that note, he tells himself that it is time to turn his prayers into action and take care of business before the sun comes up any further. Then he smiles in a way that is an answer to his own thoughts. A self-contained smile that just hovers on his face. He had not provoked its appearance by practicing some rigorous spiritual exercise, nor did it appear after something unexpectedly fortunate happened. It had simply shown up one day; coming on its own, in its own time.

The smile mirrored a profound change in the tone of the voice that moderates Bruce’s inner-feelings and dialogue. Its appearance reflects an ongoing internal process of allowing a distinctly more accepting and accommodating voice to replace a plethora of persnickety self-critical ones Even though all the voices are still stubbornly vying for his attention, the softer one is becoming dominant; hence, the smile.

Bruce looks up grinning, knowing that this newfound smile often disarms others. They don’t know if he is smiling at them, with them, or at something or someone else entirely. Accompanying the smile is a willingness on the part of Bruce to be alone in order to understand these kinds of things about him, which only further perplexed people close to him.

`Though perhaps they are just concerned about you,' this new voice of moderation tells him, ‘or envious of it.' Bruce peers out the window at the sky brightening and the voice advises him to get to work and not to worry about what other people are thinking. It doesn't matter.

Bruce likes that, so he nods his head agreeably and smiles at nothing like one would to a perfect sunset or new lover.

---

The small house Bruce is residing in is the former servant’s quarters for the main house on this five acres of land set near the top of a hill. The thought of the word servant rocks Bruce’s imagination. It’s hard for him to comprehend how people could have agreed to be called that, or why others would want to do so. Bruce fancies himself a historian of the anecdotal bent. He learned from the present title-holder of the main house that the land and house were originally owned by a small family who founded a textile factory outside of Philadelphia. The people who lived where he does now took care of the family’s meals, cleaning, and children. So in Bruce’s mind they were workers, hired hands, not servants.

The person now occupying the main house is a friend of Bruce who recently divorced a successful businessman after he ran off with another woman. She received a generous settlement and put it into acquiring this place. She invited Bruce to rent the small house on the property in order to have a man around – she’d been living here alone with two teenage daughters – and to also have someone here whom she hoped would take an interest in the property and help her tend it.

Bruce took a strong interest in, and liking, to the property – but as it is. Between lulls in her dysfunctional relationships with other middle-age divorcees, and after her daughters were asleep, she’d come by the servants quarters and help herself to Bruce, sliding around and gulping on him. Afterward, she’d invariably prod him to try to do some ‘landscaping’. Bruce tried, but could not bring himself to do anything more than pull a weed here and there that was choking a flower.

‘Hell,’ Bruce protests, gazing out the window at tall grass intermingling with same-sized weeds, ‘I make my living – such as it is – from weeds…’.

On that note, Bruce decides once again that it’s time to get on with what he got up so early to do. For some reason he hasn’t quite figured out yet, there’s a section of false flooring in the main room of this small house with an earthen storage space below it. The main room of the house includes its kitchenette. Bruce is aware that people in this neck of the woods prided themselves on preserving fruits and vegetables from spring through winter, so he guesses that it was used for storing jams, preserves and blanched vegetables. Whatever its original purpose might have been, the underground storage space that remains cool and moist year round, and is hidden from view, suits Bruce’s present needs impeccably.