The Country Stack and Other Decisions I Made Without Asking Follow-Up Questions

February twenty-seventh. The bus ride was forty minutes and I had a window seat and the town was quiet in the specific way small towns are quiet on a winter Saturday, not empty, just unhurried in a way that city blocks are never quite unhurried. I had no plan beyond 'somewhere not here,' which is sometimes the only itinerary that works.

I found the diner because it had a hand-painted sign and a menu taped to the inside of the window. I ordered the Country Stack because the name was confident and I did not ask what it came with. It came with four pancakes. Full-size. Stacked. The plate arrived and I looked at it for a long moment and the server did not comment, which I respected. I ate all of it. I drank two cups of coffee. I sat in that booth for forty-five minutes and felt genuinely excellent about being a person who had made this particular choice on this particular morning.

after the Country Stack, I walked it off. one block. that was the whole town.

Afterward I walked the main block, which is the whole town, more or less, and looked in the shop windows and let the February light do whatever it was doing at that angle, which was mostly casting long shadows across the pale sidewalk and making everything look slightly more significant than it probably was. There was a framing shop. There was a hardware store. There was a sign for something I didn't catch in time. I took a few frames I haven't decided what to do with yet.

I was home by four. The collapsed bowl was on the shelf above the stove when I got back, the windowsill caught the last of the afternoon light, and Gerald had not moved, which is Gerald's whole thing. The Country Stack was still making its presence known in a polite but firm way. I don't know that the day needs a larger point than that. I went somewhere. I ordered the wrong-sized breakfast without regret. I came home. That felt like enough.