The Mug on the Sill

January twenty-second. There is a version of this post I have been writing in my head since October, maybe earlier, since the third walk when I carried the camera and came home with it unused, since Thanksgiving morning when I stood in front of that woven piece and didn't raise it. I have been waiting, I think, to understand why I wasn't using it before I let myself pick it up again. That is probably backwards.

This morning I made coffee, set the mug on the windowsill in front of the arrangement, in front of the cord and the card and the two photographs and Carol's small object and the gap that is also its own object, and I looked at it for a moment the way I used to look at things before I photographed them, which is a specific kind of looking, slower and more honest than the other kind. And then I picked up the camera. Not because the light was exceptional. Not because the mug was interesting. Because it was there and I was there and I had been carrying the camera without using it for so long that the act of pointing it at something ordinary felt like the only move left.

the camera sitting on the table, not being used

The photograph I got is of a mug. It is a perfectly ordinary photograph. The cord is off to the right in soft focus, the letterpress card is behind it, the window light is flat January gray. Nothing is golden. I sat down after and put the camera on the table and drank the coffee while it was still warm, which is a thing I don't always manage. I think the not-using was telling me something, and I think what it was telling me is that I was waiting for a reason good enough to justify breaking the streak, waiting for a subject worthy of ending the avoidance. The mug was not that subject. That was why it was the right one.

what she pointed it at