Someone like anyone you need

I am wary of saying that I feel better, but the fact remains that for our eighth anniversary we went for a long walk out to Bailey Park at the top of Lowell Street where we tried, during our first year together, to find a planetary conjunction on a clear night. This time it was a crisp sunset full of smoldering sailor-reds and streaks of apple-green and we couldn't stay long because of the smoker on one of the benches, but we stood and faced the same quarter of the sky and held one another against the cold that feels like winter, even in a year without snow. The Tipping Cow was open on our way home, so we stopped in and got stout ice cream and blueberry sorbet. We cleaned off the wasteland of papers that our dining room table had turned into and put a tablecloth on it and nice placemats and set about dinner.

( Now I want to do that without entertaining another thought. )

We had originally planned to order from our traditional restaurant, since it claimed to have reopened for takeout, but it turned out not to mean it on the weekends and then neither did our fallback restaurant, so we procured a three-meat combo from the Smoke Shop and enjoyed the carnivorous richness of sweetly sharp St. Louis ribs, very tender pulled pork, and brisket over Texas toast with cornbread and half-sour pickles. The eggnog butter crack cake tastes like it's been mulled. We discovered Cecil B. DeMille's Madame Satan (1930) on TCM and gripped one another with delight as it escalated from a sex comedy to a masked ball operetta to a disaster movie and then crash-landed in sex comedy again. There was a zeppelin. spatch gave me an IOU for a T-shirt and I gave him an IOU for a mask. We lit the last night's candle for love.

The light will bring you home

It's a small thing, but it has been ages since I was able to make myself dinner that was not a holiday meal or a sandwich and tonight I cooked some canned mackerel with shallots and tarragon and black pepper and ate it over spaghetti, with appropriate libations to the cats, of course. I sat on the couch with Hestia curled up in a little black seal-heap beside me and watched Kristoffer Nyholm's The Vanishing (2018), a harsh and atmospheric maritime noir drawn loosely from the famous disappearance of the three keepers of the Flannan Isles Lighthouse in 1900, here transposed to the 1930's and given the starting kick of a wreck with a dangerous secret. It was full of gulls and salt and the sinewy coiling of waves and winds about its rock-chip island and should have been released under its original title of Keepers, which contains among its double meanings the implication of finders. It was the closest I could get to a goddamn sea urchin, selkie. My niece has been fully vaccinated.