The light burns outside, blue-white and yellow. A shadow passes, the neighbor's gray cat. He looks in the front screen door and my cat hisses. Warning! They used to live together, next door, but "my" cat is declawed and got picked on by the other two and started peeing on the clothes, on the desk. The neighbors put him out, I took him in.The sun goes behind the clouds and the porch rumbles. A fading moving, a plastic seat cushion pulled off and sitting on a trunk out there, faux woodgrain catches the light, a bright white stripe down the left side. The reflection bounces up into my bedroom, the front room of the house. I'm on the bed, a velvety spread red like a not quite ripe enough watermelon. The wrinkles catch light, throw it around. I feel so luxurious on this bedspread, I paid $2.99 for it at Texas Thrift.
The cat is in the side window now, higher up, keeping watch over the compost bin, hoping for a visitor to the bird feeder. He is gray, too, and blots out the pale light that comes from that window almost completely. That light doesn't have a chance, what with the long awning hanging over it (it's like I'm under a petticoat) and the pale green house next door refracting sunlight, soaking it in, taking some for itself before giving it over to me. Here, I'm done with this, you can have the rest, you can have the leftovers.
Leftover sunlight. It's sitting on my front porch, lounging on the broken wicker chair, warming the cat hair covered cushion. There's a cardboard tub I pulled out of the garbage. It has a lid, would make a great container for something, if I had something to store. But I don't have anything. I am not a pack rat. If I could save the sun I probably wouldn't even do that. My ex used to say I'm not sentimental. He didn't say it to hurt me, just as a matter of fact. But it seemed like an insult. You're not sentimental like me; you're not sentimental like the rest of us. You don't care. Ouch!
I think maybe I'm too sentimental. I push things away so I can't be caught up in them, because I would surely be taken down, like a moulin on the south pole, a hole in the ice where melting blue water flows straight down, hundreds of feet (or is it miles?) to the water. That's because of the global warming, the environmental crisis. The sun is the culprit. Or is it us? The sun is the unwitting culprit. Pretty sunlight. What a beautiful day. A sunny day like this---
