The Kitchen Floor

December first. I called Carol after dinner and somehow ended up sitting on the kitchen floor, back against the lower cabinets, wool socks on the tile. I'm not sure when I slid down there. Somewhere between her telling me about the ice storm they'd had and me telling her about the food photography class, which I realize I haven't mentioned to her, so I had to start from the beginning, and the beginning turned into forty minutes, and then it was an hour, and then my neck was stiff and the overhead light felt very yellow and I didn't want to hang up.

We talked about my mother a little. Not heavily. Carol has a way of dropping a sentence about her that doesn't require a response, it just sits in the air until I figure out what to do with it. She mentioned that my mother used to do the same thing, sit on kitchen floors during long phone calls. I wrote it down after we hung up on a Post-it that I'm not sure where I put.

after the call

There's always this strange compression after a call like that. The apartment felt both smaller and larger than it had an hour before. I stood at the counter for a while looking at the windowsill, the letterpress card, the two photographs, Carol's small object, and it occurred to me that the windowsill is also a kind of correspondence. Everything on it came from somewhere or someone. I didn't set it up that way on purpose.

the windowsill after

It's December. I keep noticing that this is the time of year when the light in the kitchen shifts and the objects on the windowsill look different, not changed, just seen differently. The call helped. That's all I have. Sometimes that's the whole post.