Warmer days, light that fades later and later. Finally we can fling the windows open. The clasps grate and rasp, like throats gargling salt water first thing in the morning. Rooms crammed with more than winter’s fat; eaves with bits of leaf and twig, blinds lined with ledgers of dust. The drawers groan with socks and scarves, the pantry shelves with unopened cans of beans. I want to scrub all the corners, scour the tiles in the bathroom with bleach— even the stripes of grout between each one. I want a pot of yellow strawflowers, a bowl of blood-red tulips, nothing else but the mellow gleam of wood in the middle of the room. I read about ascetics and what they chose to renounce. Sometimes I think I want that. Sometimes I want to be both the mountains emerging from their heavy robes of ice and snow, and the streams they feed below, rushing and teeming with color and new life. Sometimes I want to be the clear unflavored envelope of agar, other times the small mouthful of sweet azuki bean entombed like a heart in the center.
In response to cold mountain (31).
Work has kept me from responding to these responses (one reminded me of the Desert Fathers, and yet I forgot to send the passage), but I especially enjoyed “Thaw.” “Enjoy” isn’t quite the right word for the familiar ache of the investiture of the daily and familiar with the oldest of unspoken longings. Lovely, and thank you.
SJ – gotta thank *you*, for what you’ve written in your “thus” blog of late has managed to set off that same “familiar ache” (in exactly the way you describe) for me. And chocolate chip cookies (or, as the case may be tonight, Sweet n Salty Caramel Bugles) just don’t cut it.