Three Sentences That Are Still Waiting

November ninth.

There are three sentences in my draft folder that have been there since late October. I wrote them on a Sunday morning after I noticed that the light on the windowsill was doing something different, arriving lower and more sideways than it does in summer, turning the macramé cord's shadow long across the sill in a way that made the whole arrangement feel briefly unfamiliar. I wrote the sentences. I did not publish them. I am not entirely sure why, except that they felt like the beginning of something I hadn't arrived at yet.

The cord's shadow in November. This is what I kept trying to write about.

The windowsill arrangement is the same as it has been for years now. Letterpress card, two photographs, Carol's small object, the named gap, and since last September the cord lying off to the side, not within the arrangement exactly, but claimed by it. I have written about all of it at different points and considered it settled. But in this particular November light, the cord's shadow is doing something none of the other objects do. It moves across the sill as the morning progresses. It is the only thing on that windowsill that isn't fixed.

The forty minutes before. Still a draft. Still November.

I keep thinking that December is when I will finally know what those three sentences are for. There's a post I write every December about the windowsill in winter light, this will be the seventh year, and I suspect the sentences are waiting to go there. The cord's shadow in low winter light. The small new thing the arrangement is doing after all this time. Some drafts don't want to be published in the month they were written. They want to wait until the light is right, which is a different kind of patience than the one I'm used to.