The Light Has Moved
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I came in from the garden carrying three tomatoes, a handful of herbs, and one dry flower head I mean to save for seed.
The garden is doing that late-summer thing where everything looks abundant and slightly exhausted.
The tomatoes are ripe.
The flowers are leaning.
Seed heads have begun appearing among the petals without asking permission.
Even the rosemary looks as though it has had a very long week.
Inside, the windows are still open. The curtain moves whenever the breeze remembers it. Herbs are drying above the table, the floorboards are warm, and there is a small amount of garden dirt beside the back door pretending not to be mine.
The armchair I moved against the cooler wall during the hot spell is still there.
I have considered moving it back.
Not seriously.
I was halfway across the kitchen when I stopped.
Something looked wrong.
Not bad.
Just wrong in the way a familiar room looks when someone has shifted a picture frame or turned a cup around.
A long amber rectangle stretched across the floorboards and halfway beneath the table.
The sunlight had moved.
A few weeks ago, it never reached that part of the cottage at this hour. I know this without having paid any particular attention to it.
Living somewhere long enough teaches you its ordinary patterns.
Which floorboard creaks near the pantry.
Which window sticks after rain.
Where the kettle looks silver in the morning.
And apparently, where August keeps the sun.
Dust drifted lazily through the beam.
I set down the basket.
Whatever I had intended to do next could wait for approximately three minutes.
So I sat on the floor directly in the sunlight.
Not ceremonially.
It was warm and beautiful and currently available.
The amber light caught the edges of my wings, turning the sage green softly translucent. My curls glowed around the edges. One of the tomatoes rolled against the side of the basket and settled there.
Outside, the garden moved in the breeze.
Heavy leaves.
Leaning stems.
Ragged flowers still blooming anyway.
The cottage keeps a calendar in sunlight.
Smokey walked into the beam.
He stopped.
He turned around.
Then he lowered himself into the brightest, warmest section with the slow precision of someone claiming land on behalf of the crown.
“I was sitting there,” I told him.
Smokey displayed absolutely no evidence that this information concerned him.
His eyes closed.
I moved six inches.
The sunlight reached both of us, though clearly one of us had secured the superior portion.
The herbs could wait.
The tomatoes could wait.
Even the dry flower head could remain a small unidentified problem until later.
For now, the curtain lifted in the open window.
Dust turned slowly through the amber light.
And Smokey, having won a dispute I had not realized we were having, began to purr.
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