One Page #22

He aligned his book so that the sun slanted diagonally across the page. It was so bright that he could only read the shaded side of the page but reading those words, half cut off and mottled, he was reading a poem of mismatched and undirected phrases. Cassandra was jumping through red hoops of fallen leaves towards Bethlehem that was divided by lightning in the early morning sky of purple shirts and olives soaked in oil and sage. He closed the book and rested it between his chest and his arms, which he crossed over the book, clasping his elbows against the chill that was settling into the air after the storm that had raced through the night, rattling the windows and soaking the chair, which he had forgotten to bring in from his front porch. It was sunny now but clouds still passed meanderingly overhead sending him into shade and then sun and then shade again. When the sun didn’t reappear he took his book inside and put water on for tea. The light was dulling and lazy and when he opened the window that had been shut tightly to keep the rain out he smelled the gardenias and rosehips that were splashed across the side yard between his house and his neighbor’s house. Their house had just been painted a shocking pink with yellow trim and he had closed his blinds for the first few days as the paint dried to shelter his eyes from the glare that bounced off the nearly florescent walls. But he had slowly grown used to the pink and even liked the yellow trim so his shades stayed open now and he watered his plants by leaning out the window. Sometimes his neighbor Ron leaned out his window and they chatted about the weather or the Red Sox game (even though neither watched the games, the just read the newspaper and pretended that they had because that is what men were supposed to do). But today Ron wasn’t around and his plants didn’t need watering and the teakettle was boiling into a piercing whistle that brought him away from the window and into the kitchen for his tea. He had given up drinking coffee the week before and was still suffering the headaches that tea didn’t abate, and he missed the smell of the brew early in the morning that filtered through the house and made it feel like a home instead of just three rooms that he resided in. He poured the water over the mint teabag and the scent permeated the air around him and he thought briefly of England where he had lived years ago in the countryside and grown a selection of mint plants for no reason aside from the fact that he loved the scent. He drank coffee then and never made mint tea, but gave away the leaves to friends that did. Now he missed those plants, and the rosehips were no replacement.