- listen to The Avalanches' Since I Left You
- watch Annie Hall
- eat coffee cake
- hear the ringing of windchimes and the wash of breeze in the trees and the passing of cars on the road beyond them - grandma's yard in the summer
- see the dust motes in the sunlight, drifting toward the green carpet where your dog lays like a queen on house arrest.
- eat watermelon. slurp. eat a turkey sandwich with mayonnaise on white bread, don't eat the baked beans. smell the steak cooking, don't eat it. eat an orange popsicle before it runs down your hand, melted, to miss your shorts and settle on your bare leg. eat grass once, just to see what the dog thinks is so great about it. spit it out when it becomes unchewable. eat grilled cheese outside on a paper plate as planes vaguely buzz overhead and you slide a chair across the chipping wooden deck, hoping the mosquitos haven't come out yet.
- hear the squeak of the fireplace door when it's opened. hear the grating crash of crumpling newspaper. wish you could nap in silence. hear the crack of your knuckles against your bony ribs in the unforgiving morning, walking to yet another obligation.
- see the way your dog's honey brown hair darkens to be the color of wet cedar when she is near snow - running through it with youthfulness unseen and unimaginable when you saw her creak to life after waking up.
- eat the microwave pizza even though, yes, it's still too hot. breathe in the steam that holds more than the promise of apple cider - it holds the promise of joy that all this will be worth it. eat the corn, the mashed potatoes, go ahead and eat the turkey gravy. "no meat in four years," my ass; it's a nice thought, but you love the harkening back to childhood memories more than you loved that turkey. feel happy grandpa has stopped trying to get you eat the turkey. eat the saltine crackers at night, in the dark, with the tv light blue, flashing, distracting and exciting. eat syrup-laden pancakes in the morning as you look out onto the fairy frostland touched by sunbeams for the first time in fourteen hours, but eat quickly, for the kitchen is cold and the couch under those blankets with the fire at your feet is warm.
jun 3 2012 ∞
jan 28 2013 +