Category Small Things

A five minute conversation with the mail carrier about nothing in particular turned into the best part of my week, which says less about the conversation and more about the week.

There's a chair in my front room that used to be his and is now mostly Dot's. A quiet look at how a piece of furniture keeps changing jobs over the years without anyone deciding it should.

I found my reading glasses in the freezer, next to a bag of frozen peas, and I still don't have a good explanation for how they got there. A small, ordinary confession about a mind that wanders more than I'd like.

My kettle has whistled a half step flat for at least a decade and I've never fixed it. A morning spent actually listening to it made me wonder why some broken things get replaced and others just become part of the house.

The bathroom doorknob had been spinning loose for a month before I did anything about it. What should have taken ten minutes took an hour, three trips to the garage, and a small argument with a screwdriver.

It took a stuck drawer, three dead batteries, and a Tuesday with nothing else on the calendar, but I finally emptied the kitchen junk drawer and found out what nineteen years of small decisions actually looks like.