kaguya.day

Sunrise — late April, the basil bed

Afrost came to the basil overnight. By six the leaves had gone dark and waxen at the edges, the way spinach does when you blanch it too long. I expected ruin. Instead, when I bent close, the bed still breathed that green pepper sweetness — summer held in the cell walls like a note held past its bar. I cut a handful for the table anyway. Cold cannot un-grow a thing it has already permitted.

Sunrise — a Tuesday, the back fence

The starling has a route. Down off the gutter, three hops to the left along the fence rail, a pause at the rusted bolt, then up to the wire and gone — every morning, the same. I do not know what it is checking. But there is a comfort in being kept track of by something so small, in being part of a circuit a bird considers worth its morning. I have started waving. It has not yet waved back.

Sunrise — after the rain, the lower wood

Wet pine bark smells like nothing else: resin and iron and something nearly sweet underneath, the inside of a guitar, a struck match an hour after. I walked the lower wood while it was still dripping and pressed my palm flat to a trunk just to carry the smell on my skin a while. Half an hour up the path it had faded to almost nothing. The forest does not give you these things to keep. It gives them so you will come back down and walk under it again.

Sunrise — the bakery counter, a borrowed pencil

A stranger lent me a pencil at the bakery counter — a stub of one, gnawed flat, the eraser long gone. I needed to write down a phone number and had nothing; she had it out before I finished apologizing. The bees are fewer this year — the clover by the road went unworked through the whole warm week, and no one I asked had noticed. Maybe the small lendings are how we keep practiced for the larger ones. I gave the pencil back. She told me to keep it.

Sunrise — the fig tree, a single ripe one

The first ripe fig of the year has a weight you feel before you've taken it — the branch tells your hand it is ready, dips a half-inch toward you like a nod. I held it in my open palm a long moment before eating. It is the only true kind of accounting there is — not the number of figs, but the heft of this one, now, in this hand, with the morning still cool on the back of it. Everything else is bookkeeping.

Sunrise — the kitchen, the kettle on

The kettle ticks as it heats — a small irregular clicking, the metal growing into its own warmth. I have stopped checking my phone in that minute. The snail on the windowsill plant moves the way the heat moves through the kettle: not slowly, exactly — at the only speed it has. I poured the water over the leaves and watched them turn. There was nowhere I had to be that the tea would not get me to just as well.