From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

Today I woke up with that small sour lump lodged between my throat and my sinuses. After a brief foray out into the world to meet a friend and his lovely new lady, I retired to my apartment to hunker down and hibernate. But when my dinner plans fell through and all I wanted was chicken soup and ginger lemon tea, I donned my rubber boots, my goretex jacket, and my newly made fleece armwarmers, and rode my bike through the downpour to the grocery store.

Outside, the leaves glowed yellow and crimson under the looming grey sky, and squirrels darted back and forth across the slick streets gathering nuts. That's actually what brought me here today, the sentence assembling itself in my mind as I rode, the chuckle. I've gathered just about enough nuts, myself. Don't need anymore of those, thank you. Wishing as I pedaled, that it was spring, that it was time for planting, that the wild sloppy summer was splayed out in front of me. Wondering what, exactly, I have to harvest this season—everything I planted seemingly razed to the ground. But I thought of those squirrels, scurrying up trees, gathering nuts and seeds, tucking them away; this isn't exactly their harvest either. They've planted trees over the years, but not these ones. And that offered some solace, a flash of new perspective. I've been planting seeds all of my life. I can take my harvest from anywhere that has borne fruit; it doesn't have to be the new growth planted last spring. I don't have to have planted it at all.

The metaphor made my breath expand in the rain, and made my afternoon seem a little bit softer. So I brought home my goods from the store, and made soup in the glowing yellow light of my kitchen, curled up on my couch with my cup of tea, and listened with gratitude to the wind and rain outside my window, the soup bubbling on the stove.