The Tea Went Cold Twice

April twentieth. Easter. I had a plan for this morning, which is always where the trouble starts.

The plan was: a real breakfast. Not the usual coffee-and-whatever, but an actual Easter Sunday breakfast, eggs done properly, something with bread, maybe fruit if I remembered to buy it. I bought it. I also, apparently, made myself a mug of tea at some point, set it on the counter, and proceeded to forget about it so completely that when I finally noticed it again it was cold enough to be reclassified as iced tea. I reheated it. Let it go cold again. Drank it cold the second time and decided that was fine.

There is something about a holiday morning that gives the kitchen a different quality of light, or maybe it just gives me a different quality of attention. I cracked eggs. I got egg dye on my fingers from the little kit I bought mostly as a joke and then used entirely without irony. The collapsed bowl was on the shelf above the stove the way it always is. Gerald's vine was doing its slow thing near the shelf. The windowsill was holding the arrangement the way it has been holding it for years now, the card, the photographs, Carol's small object, the cord off to the side. All of it in the same spring light it sits in every April.

Finally remembered the tea.

I eventually stood at the window with the finally-warm tea and thought about the one-block run from a few weeks ago, the way small things happen before you've decided to do them and then sit in the draft folder waiting to be named. I haven't named it yet, not fully. The Easter morning quiet is its own kind of permission to leave things a little unfinished. The eggs were good. I should have bought more fruit.