Nine moments of the year settling, with three small forward events.
Jan is 31.
Year three.
The cup is the cup. The cardigan has become part of the apartment the way the lamp is — not worn but inhabited. Third notebook, two-thirds full by Tuesday at 7:14 AM. The February window light comes in pale and cool and does what it does. I'm thirty-one. I don't know what that means yet. The morning is the morning.
Naomi's email arrived Wednesday at 11:14 AM.
Subject line: "a small idea I have been carrying." In the year since the chair piece published, Naomi has sent me approximately seven emails. All careful. This one was careful. The careful line: "have you thought about a small book of these? Not yet, just—eventually, would you think about it?" Read it twice. Closed the laptop. Didn't reply. The question became a thing I thought about on Sundays at four. The not yet in Naomi's email was the door she held open without pushing.
Greg has been with me five years.
She has taken the shape she wanted. I haven't, in five years, killed her. The cabinet of cleaning supplies hasn't, in five years, opened for anything but the cleaning supplies. On this Wednesday morning in February she produces a new leaf — the twelfth since I started counting. Water her. Say thank you without performing it. The plant accepts the water the way Greg accepts most things — by growing.
The snow started at 3:14 PM on Friday.
Eighteen inches forecast across thirty-six hours. August texted at 3:18 from his apartment four blocks away: do you want me to come over before it gets bad. Had already been thinking about it. Texted back yes. August arrived at 4:14 with an overnight bag, a bag of groceries, and a look on his face that meant I was hoping you'd say yes. The snow continued. The apartment was, by 4:42, the apartment plus one.
Eighteen inches by Sunday morning.
August was, by Saturday evening, the person in the apartment during the storm. We didn't leave. Read. Made soup. Watched the snow-light come and go from the window. The lamp did the work the cold gray daylight didn't. Wrote, in the third notebook at 4:14 PM Saturday, the phrase my person for the first time. Didn't say it out loud. Wrote it. Closed the notebook. The snow continued.
Sunday at four, with snow in it.
The light came through the window in a gray-white way I hadn't had before. August was on the couch. The cat was on the chair. The lamp was on. The Monday-feeling was in the next room. I have been in this Sunday six times now, and each one is its own weather. This one was the peace with snow in it — the same peace, dressed differently.
Greg got her year-three pot on the Wednesday after the storm.
The new one was, by my own reckoning at the shop on Franklin, exactly the right size for the next two years of root growth. Repotted her at 11:42 AM. Apologized for the shock of the transplant. Greg accepted the apology by being uncomplaining about the roots. Patted the new soil. Told Greg that the new pot was the upgrade. I've said this same sentence to her three times now. On Wednesday morning, it's exactly true again.
Mom called Wednesday at 8 PM Eastern.
Sarah's basil, Henry's school project, the bakery's new awning, the weather. At minute eighteen Mom said, in the voice she uses for the things she isn't quite saying: your grandfather isn't, this winter, as well as he was. Said it once. Said we are not, yet, in any specific worry. Said come in May. Before it gets too hot. He would like to see you. I said I will. Mom didn't return to it. Sat with the phone after the call ended. The lamp was on. The Wednesday call had shifted by half a shade.
The third notebook hit its second-to-last page on Friday morning.
The fourth had been on the desk for two weeks, waiting. Black cloth, slightly smaller, bought from the paper shop on Court Street. When I bought it in early February I registered: I have become a person who keeps a notebook-rotation in stock. The third will be done by next week. The fourth will be open by March. It will be the notebook I draft the email to Naomi in, in April. The notebooks hold the pace. The pace holds the year.