It was a splendid Saturday morning in early spring, bursting with limitless optimism, perfect for learning a foreign language, training school-aged children to pick up after themselves or beginning large yard projects involving truckloads of poured concrete.
On the kitchen counter on a recent Saturday morning, buried under drifts of schoolwork, grocery store circulars, sports bottles and two crude ceramic objets d’ art that have occupied the same spot on the counter for two years without explanation, I uncovered a large watercolor on an oversized sheet of white paper, pasted to an even larger black construction paper backing.
Dark days are short. Birds sit mute in their nests. Sunset is a perfunctory dot fading behind the crisp white crests of the Olympic Mountains, framed by twilight-black sky.
“Nice things,” our youngest daughter murmurs. Four sets of eyes dart from one face to the next, and with the arch of an eyebrow and a subtle nod, a quorum is convened. Her twin brother looks at his splayed fingers splintered like a small shipwreck in his lap. “I hid the remote and then I let you use it,” he remembers, squinting at her.
The bedroom furniture casts short shadows in the muted gray of late June. I hot-potato hop on one leg, a few flecks of shredded grass still stuck to my shins, pulling on a pair of khaki pants. My hands throb from nettle stings as I gingerly slip a dress shirt over sunburned shoulders.
The harbor slumbers at sunup like an ageless debutante still asleep in her sequined party dress, each murmuring wave a measured breath, kelp and seaweed splayed across the gravel beach like strands of hair on a feather pillow.
I commute to an office in town five days a week, but with a convincing excuse, my employer allows me to work from home, infrequently and irregularly.
I usually bake a cake. One year I trowelled on the frosting while the cake was still warm, writing “Happy Birthday Maria” in red cake-writing goo. And as we sang Happy Birthday, the green frosting oozed down the sides of the cake followed by the red cake-writing goo, forming a petroleum-spill red and green paisley puddle, pooled around the base of the scratch-made yellow cake.
