There is a towel. I want that established before anything else, because the towel is the whole reason today went the way it went. It is a plain towel, faded at one corner, the color of weak tea, and it lives folded on a shelf in the bathroom doing nothing for weeks at a time. … Read more
A large flat box arrived on the porch this afternoon, thin as a cracker and much too big for its own good, and I want it noted for the record that I was consulted about none of it. Not the ordering, not the delivery, not the decision to drag it through the hallway leaving a … Read more
Something happened to the kitchen today and nobody asked my opinion of it first, which I want on record before I explain the rest. It started with a smell. Not a bad smell exactly — I want to be fair about this — but an aggressive one, the kind that doesn’t stay politely in one … Read more
I want it on the record that I have made that jump before. Many times. It is not a difficult jump. The bookshelf is not especially tall, and I am not especially small, and the two facts have always balanced each other out in my favor. I have landed on top of that bookshelf with … Read more
It arrived without any of the courtesies I consider standard for a new presence entering my sightline. No gradual approach along the fence, no polite pause at a distance to be assessed. One moment the gutter above the back room window was empty, the way it has always been empty, and the next there was … Read more
There was a knock at the door today, which is already a serious event, and then a second knock right after it, which is not how anyone in this house knocks, and so before the door had even opened I understood we were dealing with an outsider. I took up a position under the console … Read more
I want it on record that I was awake first. I am always awake first, technically, in the sense that I never fully stop being awake, but this morning I was awake in the specific, aggrieved way of someone who has been personally wronged before the sun has even finished coming up. The alarm went … Read more
I want it on the record that I did not object to the candle itself. I objected to what it was doing. There is a difference, and I intend to explain it slowly, because I suspect no one in this house has fully appreciated the scope of the problem. She brought it home in a … Read more
I want it on record that I was not consulted. The reading chair — mine, functionally, though she sits in it sometimes when I allow it — has been moved. Not far. Perhaps the width of three of my own body-lengths, which I recognize is not a great distance to some, but to me it … Read more
