Since sleep has once again proven too fickle of a friend, I rise early enough to think of breakfast as a late-night snack.  I eat my eggs at the dining room table and take my second cup of coffee to the porch.  The day has dawned fine, with a sturdy sky.  The maple leaves wave to me.  My flags join the fray as I take my seat and rock.

Yesterday’s indolent evening prodded me to take up a novel which I bought for a quarter last fall at a friend’s garage sale.  I didn’t want it, no more than the other things I purchased.  But there I stood, watching his deceased wife’s belongings drag themselves down the driveway with strangers, desperate for a lover’s touch.  I could not turn my back.  I shuffled through the cookbooks and the old novels, finding some which would eventually make Christmas presents, with their uncut pages and pristine covers.

The funny little novel which I began to read last night turned out to be engrossing.  It took me through to midnight, and past this morning’s tepid mug of coffee, straight til the apple and hummus of my early lunch or late breakfast, as it were.  I let it fall onto the metal side table and study the wind chimes.

I feel guilty about those chimes.  I bought them for a pittance on Amazon, and my friend Kevin hung them.  He remarked on the wooden one shaped like a temple.  I like the other one better, with its opaque disks supposedly made from shells.  But it’s a glitzy thing, dangling with the type of promise to which I desperately cling, like the fingernail polish that I occasionally trick myself into wearing and no less insubstantial.

Now the one that Kevin and his wife Carolyn preferred still clunks against itself letting out a low unobtrusive sound.  Beside it, the one with shells has gotten tangled and hangs in a mess, silent and unrepentant.  I’ve sorted it twice already.  The design failed to include some type of counter-balance to keep the longer strands from wrapping around each other.

My son called to wish me a Happy Mother’s Day.  I told him about the wind chimes.  He said, Oh that’s too bad, and for a moment, I heard my voice through his younger ears.  I realized that I’ve taken to remarking on the most inconsequential occurrences, partly because I have so little chance to talk to anyone and partly, I suppose, to keep from crying.

I’ve been taking aim for joy but I would settle for unresentful.

I leaf through social media and click the ‘like’ button on all the wishes for a happy day.  I don’t dwell on any photograph of brunch, or parties, or people of the present.  I look at everyone’s photographs of their mother — holding babies, sitting on benches, walking down boardwalks with their arms looped around girlfriends or new husbands.  I study the picture of my mother and myself.  I’m sixteen.  My long hair falls forward, blocking my profile.  My mother’s hair clings to rollers.  She’s wearing a t-shirt and leaning against the railing of a porch.

I remember that day so well.  We took one of our little jaunts, to the Bissell House in North St. Louis County.  Mother pointed out the various plants along the walkway.  She showed me a patch of Columbine, and I bent down to breathe its delicate fragrance.  When we got to the porch, we sat for a long time without speaking.

Now the sun starts its climb towards the far side of the western sky.  Dishes need to be done, and laundry, and a bit of straightening.  I have to settle my personal accounts.  From what I hear through the open window, the dog wants my attention.  It’s going to be a tiring afternoon, but I’m not complaining.

It’s the fourteenth day of the forty-first month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.