Fresh Sticks of Rosemary.

On the morning of his seventieth birthday, Jack opened his eyes and considered the curtains hanging over his bedroom window; soft, late winter sunshine struggling behind them signalled that the day had finally dawned. 

He had dreaded this moment, already five years longer alive than his own father had been, he believed himself to be on borrowed time. 

Raised partly in a time of bible dominated faith, he had lived his allotted three score and ten that was prescribed therein. 

What next? 

The curtains across the window were still there, why not him? 

The winter sun showed that they were patched in places, worn in others, a little thread bare compared to their youth. He was patched. He too was worn in places, better on some days than others, at risk of coming apart at the seams but at the same time held together by something invisible. 

Hope perhaps. 

Or was that a younger man’s mistake? 

He lay a moment allowing the fabric of the curtain to inform the fabric of this new beginning. He had spent the last few months preparing himself, calming the worrying thoughts with the knowledge that in truth, for the last twelve months, he had been blissfully living out his seventieth year already, whilst believing he was younger. Younger. He tried the word out in his mouth, then swallowed it and instead spoke out loud.

“Rabbits.”

Jack was not a superstitious person as such, but he had long ago decided not to take risks with fate. 

His mother had always insisted that at the start of a month the word had to be said, preferably with the prefix ‘white’ before any other words were allowed to contaminate what was to come.

Never questioning her, Jack had adopted the practice, distorting it in his own way to start the New Year and now his own next. What the hell, the lunar new year would kick in tomorrow so he might as well use it then as well. 

“Happy Birthday to you…” Jack’s wife, forty years in the autumn, started to sing.

“Squashed tomatoes and stew…” Jack continued.

“You look like a monkey…,” she started giggling, “and act like one too.”

Jack lay there for a moment allowing her giggles to wash over him like an embrace, turned and kissed her. She giggled again. The curtains, all this time, hadn’t moved, but now Jack did.

He stood, stretched, creaked and walked across the floor which creaked back at him.

“I guess you’re not coming back?” His wife sounded sleepy.

“I need to write something.” Jack replied.

This.

 

He wrote in the kitchen; Not every day, but most. There was no set routine only a set need. Sometimes it would be for a few moments, often for hours at a time.

At the end of either, he would then leave the table step outside the house and walk through the forest. Walking jostled the thoughts he still carried in his head and he would often return, desperate to write them down, and so he would continue deep into the evening. 

Never at night, not once the pages turned black.

 

That morning it was short, five hundred and twenty words or so that poured out in a stream that he felt unable to interrupt. 

Then, he stopped, stood, crossed to the kettle waiting patiently for its own moment of creation and made tea.

Fresh rosemary sticks placed into two mugs and he returned to bed.