Hope & Uncertainty
September: it was the most beautiful of words, he'd always felt,
evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
Alexander Theroux Darconville's Cat 1981
For the third time this month, he'd come home after work to find red ribbons - the narrow, satin kind that little girls used to wear tied around their pigtails when their mothers dressed them up for a party - laying in swirling loops across the front porch of his small, frame house. They trailed down the steps and wandered curiously over the lawn. The first time he found them he assumed they'd blown onto his property from some gift unwrapped at one of his neighbors. He gave up that idea after he found the same ribbons waiting for him on subsequent Thursdays. James Elliot had seen them as a nuisance, like the leaves separating from his maple tree now that September was nearly over.
This afternoon he felt something else. A tinge of sweet regret, perhaps - a keepsake from spring shoved into a drawer and found accidentally on a raw winter day. He left the ribbons where they were, opened his front door and walked to his living room window. He leaned against the frame and looked out on his lawn for a very long time.
evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.
Alexander Theroux Darconville's Cat 1981
For the third time this month, he'd come home after work to find red ribbons - the narrow, satin kind that little girls used to wear tied around their pigtails when their mothers dressed them up for a party - laying in swirling loops across the front porch of his small, frame house. They trailed down the steps and wandered curiously over the lawn. The first time he found them he assumed they'd blown onto his property from some gift unwrapped at one of his neighbors. He gave up that idea after he found the same ribbons waiting for him on subsequent Thursdays. James Elliot had seen them as a nuisance, like the leaves separating from his maple tree now that September was nearly over.
This afternoon he felt something else. A tinge of sweet regret, perhaps - a keepsake from spring shoved into a drawer and found accidentally on a raw winter day. He left the ribbons where they were, opened his front door and walked to his living room window. He leaned against the frame and looked out on his lawn for a very long time.