Ten Seconds of Just Standing There

May twelfth. Mother's Day. I am writing this having already cleaned the kitchen floor, which I want noted for the record.

This morning I was making toast. Nothing ambitious, bread, the toaster, a jar of honey from the back of the cabinet that I have been using about a teaspoon at a time since February. I reached for it and my hand caught the edge wrong, and the jar went off the counter in a way that felt almost slow, the way things do when you can't do anything about them. It hit the tile and the lid held, which was the one piece of luck, but honey doesn't need an open jar to go everywhere. It went everywhere.

I stood there for ten seconds. I know it was ten seconds because I counted them afterward, reconstructing. The first two were pure reaction. The next four were a kind of inventory: how much, how far, the grout specifically. Seconds seven through ten were something harder to name, not paralysis exactly, just the moment before the moment where you start. Then I got the paper towels.

the cleanup era

The cleanup was fine. The floor is clean. The jar is on the counter with about a quarter of what it had. Gerald's vine is still grazing the shelf, the cord is still on the windowsill, the collapsed bowl is still above the stove, the kitchen looks like itself. And I took a photograph of the jar on the floor before I did anything, which I think says something true about me that I am comfortable with.