What December Did to the November Sentence

December eighteenth.

In November I wrote one sentence about the cord's shadow, how it was angling lower than I expected, doing something slightly different than it had in December before. I didn't fully understand the sentence when I wrote it, which is usually a sign I should publish it anyway, and I did. The Thanksgiving post went up eight days early because the equilibrium arrived before the calendar did, and that sentence about the shadow sat at the end of it like a question I hadn't quite asked yet.

December came and I stood at the windowsill this morning with my mug and looked.

The shadow. December's version.

The shadow is lower. The angle is more acute. The November sentence wasn't wrong, the shadow in November really was doing something different, but December has clarified what that something was. In November the shadow was previewing this. It was the cord leaning toward the solstice the way everything leans toward the solstice, light getting scarcer and more deliberate, shadows going longer and more honest. I think what I noticed in November was December arriving early in the geometry of one small shadow on a white windowsill. I did not know that was what I was writing. I know it now.

The annual accounting. Kitchen, December.

This is the eighth year of the December tradition, though I only named it as a tradition in the third year, and I only understood why I kept doing it sometime after the fifth. The arrangement is complete: letterpress card, two photographs of my mother, Carol's small object, the named gap that is the sixth thing, and the cord off to the side, slightly apart, belonging to the arrangement the way it belongs to the windowsill, by proximity and by time, not by original plan. Every object has a concluded arc. Every question this sill has held has been answered or honestly set down. That's a new condition for December. It is quieter than I expected and not at all empty. The shadow is doing its job. The sentence held up, with amendments. That feels like enough.