No demon birds this morning. Nice and quiet. I even set the coffee on to brew before getting out the laptop. HA. Planning. Let’s go with the morning prompt, set the timers for fifteen minutes and let’s go.
Okay I like this one. This one speaks of secrets just waiting to be dug out.
Thursday, September 29th: The fog rolled in off the ocean.
The fog rolled in off the ocean. It turned even the brightest of colors into faded pastels. ‘Not that there is much bright out here,’ I thought as I looked out of the window. Decades of wind, rain and salt spray from the ocean had taken it’s toll. The only bright spots were the yellow of the light house light and the red of the newest buoy in the water of the bay.
The fog obscured details, details I was fine with seeing blurred. Later I knew I would have to have long thoughts and hard conversations about some of those details, but for now there was a relief in letting the fog take them.
I sighed and turned away from the window letting the fog eat the world unobserved. The room hadn’t changed since I left. I hadn’t really expected it to. The bed was the same and although the linens were the same familiar ones from childhood they were freshly laundered. The entire room had a freshly laundered feel to it.
I knew that was Mrs. Evans. When told I was coming, an attack of cleaning had been arranged and executed. I had no doubt that on the last sunny day, all of the windows had been propped open and fresh air allowed to blow through every room in the house.
I almost smiled as I remembered Uncle Walter complaining about such airings. He claimed they disarranged everything. Mrs. Evans argued that she made certain everything was put away before the airing and therefore nothing could be disarranged. Uncle Walter invariably claimed it was the dust being stirred and causing his allergies to rise and Mrs. Evans would get into a huff because of the implied criticism to her cleaning efforts.
It was an argument I heard twice a year, once for the spring airing and once for the autumnal one. It occurred every year since I came to live with Uncle Walter. At first it startled me. No one in my parents’ house had ever spoken above a moderate tone. All conversation within my presence was kept in calm and even tones designed to create a harmonious environment. That phrase had been pulled from one of the self-help books my parents devoured and was one of the few things I could still recall clearly form the time before the accident.
‘Harmonious environment,’ I repeated the phrase in my head.
Uncle Walter’s had not been harmonious. Conversations were high spirited debates and arguments like the airing of the house were frequent and voiced in billowing tones that would be loud enough to shake the non –existent dust from the rafters had there been any dust, or exposed rafters. The arguments never changed anything. The airing still went on. Winning an argument never seemed to be the point.
The argument was itself the point.
But now Uncle Walter was gone. The house had been aired, and there was no argument other than the echoes in my head.
Ten til Midnight 