This past week the last winter coat hanging on the pegs in the hall got taken upstairs. Its alpaca lining always felt like a hug. But the scarves still sleep twisted on top of one another in their basket like tartan cats, and my Astrakhan hat still reigns from the shelf above—expensive, authoritative, wonderfully inappropriate.
I feel hollow and chalky white in shorts.
This year the dandelions are so dense one would describe the yard as dotted with green rather than the reverse. Gary pulls them sporadically in the same way that he finishes up the dishes and scrubs the stovetop—with a gentle, persistent optimism that breaks my heart.
The hummers disclose their little bodies furtively at the feeders, or alight on a branch—animating the lilacs. The males have gorgeous necks like ruby Arrow collars, but the females are friendlier.
It still isn't warm at 4:30, when we sit with sweaters on the deck, drinking and eating olives. It used to be 5:30, then it became 5:00. I can't remember proper nouns anymore, or last night's dinner, but living seems pointless without a Happy Hour.
A succession of daffodils provided a centerpiece for a few weeks. I transplanted a brace of them I discovered blooming—as out of place as my Russian hat—in the brown, trash-filled gulley below our yard. The moment I saw them I said, out loud, You're coming to my yard.
I do so love a hopeless case. Is there really any other sort of beauty apart from tragedy? The bravery to shine when nothing or no one is watching; to do one's best simply on principle. The quality of not questioning the goodness and supremacy of life, of believing past all evidence—the kitten in the trash can.
Gary's Publisher's Clearinghouse bulbs laid on the kitchen countertop in the envelope for a month. Three of them died, but the last one is basking in the morning sun in a huge pot of rich soil, the object of frequent baby talk from me.
The elegant gray-green fists of the grape vine are cupped in anticipation. Slugs dangle from the iris. It's going to 79 today but my fingertips are cold as I type.
Our lives run alongside one another, a series of non-concentric circles—the aged and the young, the luckless and the fortunate, intersecting in a few moments of quiet clarity that become our happy memories.
Now up and down the block the lawnmowers wrestle with the turf, spitting stones, stalling out into brief, delicious silence.
