The Seventh Year

December first.

The sentences have been in my draft folder since late October. Three of them, about the light arriving lower than expected, about the cord's shadow going long across the sill, about the whole arrangement feeling briefly unfamiliar in a way that made me stand there longer than usual. I wrote them on a Sunday morning and then left them there, which is apparently what I do now. Leave the thing in the draft folder until December, and then discover that December was always where it belonged.

This is the seventh year I've written a windowsill post in December. I didn't name it a tradition until the third or fourth year, and by then it already was one. The arrangement has changed slowly: the letterpress card from 2012, the first photograph Carol sent, then the second, then the small object from the last envelope. The cord has been there since September 2022, longer than the photographs, now, which surprises me when I do the math. What the cord is doing this December that it wasn't doing last December is casting a shadow. The light comes in lower and more sideways in winter, and the shadow comes with it, long and thin across the pale sill, and the whole arrangement looks slightly different than it did in August. Not wrong. Just a different opinion about the same objects.

the cord's shadow, the new thing the arrangement is doing this year

I stood there this morning with my coffee and looked at the shadow the way you look at something you weren't expecting. Like the cord knew it had been sitting there fourteen months and decided it was time to do a thing. I don't know that I would have noticed in summer. Summer light comes straight through and everyone in it just exists. Winter light has an angle. It picks a subject.

seventh December. same window. slightly different light.

Seven years of this. I have a photograph of what the sill looked like in December 2016, when there was still a gap where the collapsed bowl used to be, before the gap became the sixth object, before I understood that the absence was part of the arrangement. What I notice now is that nothing on the sill was planned. Every object arrived through some other arc, the pottery class, the letterpress workshop, Carol's letters, the cord I finished on a July evening without deciding I was going to. And every December the light does its angled winter thing and I write about it, and the writing is different every year because the light's opinion changes. This year the cord has a shadow. That's the new thing. I'm glad I left the sentences in the draft folder long enough to find out.