The Call That Goes an Hour

Eight forty-seven AM. The mug has been cold for twenty minutes and I am still sitting here.

I called Carol this morning, meant to just check in, the way you mean to just check in, the way that phrase never quite describes what actually happens. She answered on the second ring, the way she always does, and then it was an hour. It is always an hour. We talked about the October light, which she gets differently up there than I get it here. We talked about a thing she is trying to learn this year, which she mentioned once in a postcard and has apparently been quietly doing the whole time. We talked about my mother for maybe four minutes in the middle of a longer sentence about something else, which is exactly how those moments arrive, sideways, in the middle of something, and then they are past and the conversation keeps going.

I do not think I expected to feel as much as I did by the end of it. Not sad, or not only sad. Something more like located. The way a long phone call with the right person can make you feel like you know where you are again, even though you were not aware of being lost.

After. Just looking at things for a while.

Afterward I sat here and looked at the windowsill for a while. Carol's photograph is there. Carol's small object is there. The gap where the bowl used to be is there. Some part of the arrangement she helped make is now the thing I look at when I need to know where I am. I do not think either of us planned that. I do not think plans are usually how those things happen.