I woke early today, in a quiet house.  I could hear nothing but the tinnitus, my constant sound track.  I listen to it idly, remembering that brief few weeks earlier this year when I tricked myself into thinking it had abated.  I close my eyes and let its rhythm overtake me.  It’s not so bad sometimes, my life’s refrain.  Today it trills like the crickets on a summer night in the Bootheel.

For some reason, my life flashed before my eyes last evening.  I stood on the porch, studying the bunch of plants on the table.  We’d gathered them so as to catch the rain but not topple off the rail in the storms.  Some of them need to be trimmed, but that’s too big a job for late night, or early morning.  It’s a weekend job and so I left it; and I don’t do it this morning, either.

The chores pile around me.  The clutter of shoes that don’t go over my broken toe still trips me when I rise at dawn.  On the floor under the sheaf of dangling slats in the broken blind, the pile of clothes that I want to give away has yet to be bagged.  On my rocking chair, a heap of coats from the downstairs hall tree slowly slides to the floor.

I stretch for a few minutes, standing in the breakfast nook, NPR blaring loud enough for the folks on the next street to hear but barely breaking through the symphony inside my head.  I reach, I bend, and reach again.  The swelling in my foot seems smaller; the black has gone purple; the ache just a bit less bothersome.

Back on the porch with my lukewarm coffee, I notice one plant still stands on the deck rail.  It’s got a good heavy pot, broad and stable.  Its flowers raise themselves in the morning air.  I’ve never seen anything like them; their  color intrigues me.  I study the blooms, violet, intense, fragile but enduring.  I snap a picture.  Some things bear remembering.

Then I go inside the house to get ready for work, while the music in my ears plays on, and the radio tells me what kind of day I’m going to have.  Dawn completes itself, and we head into morning.