In the morning it was darker than we remembered it—Lily called out to Alexa three times to change the alarm, and I went downstairs to start the coffee, to check my phone. My vision was bad from the bug that flew in my eye the day before, and I dreaded the idea of going to a clinic, it reminded me of an eyelash I got wedged in a tear duct canal in college that a nurse practitioner tried to help me with, by way of an ointment for the inner lid to keep it from getting infected: but it was a time of frequent marijuana use for me and ended poorly with a trip to the ER; it flared up red, the doctor with a tool like a hook prying it out, like a dental hygienist’s pick to scrape out the plaque, it gave me a profound eye sensitivity and fear of contact lenses, of eye drops.
I stayed up late waiting for the storm to come but it never did; I sat by the fire outside in the dark watching the last log hiss and crack, an almost breaking glass sound as the coals flaked off, like the scales on a dragon’s breast they glowed, amber-gold. The Mines of Moria, the awful hell of Mordor, a soft whisper, the ringwraiths ride in black.
The sound of a frog crying out in the darkness for reasons I’ll never know, its existential angst…the kids drove me up a wall over dinner for no good reason so I sat with my feet waving them over the fire—and the trees looked like Japanese paper cutouts: I wondered if they were gone, would anyone notice them on their own, as individuals (collectively, they were just “the trees”). And it wasn’t long before a gust kicked up and came through to make a deep rushing sound, a death rattle. I’d forget about the bug in my eye and rub it and then it would all go up in flames again: amazing, how something in the eye so small can feel the size of a basketball.
They drove me up a wall over dinner—Charlotte, smacking her lips and Lily, talking with her mouth full. Just the very fact it felt like years (years!) I’d been asking/telling them to behave right at dinner and still, they wouldn’t—and I couldn’t accept that maybe their behavior was my fault somehow, that paradoxically, their refusal to behave mapped back to me in some bizarro, fucked-up way where my kids’ sins manifest my own, made them so. My inability to accept them was deforming, distancing me.
The pine needles fell like snow when the wind came. The clouds in the morning reminded me of Scotland, arriving this time of year when we drove across the UK for three months. Driving north from Newcastle across the Firth of Forth, to Arbroath. The rain cold and hard with the wind at the cottage, and the owners apologizing about it but we didn’t mind, it’s what we expected. All we had was time.
Dawn took the girls to their dance lessons and I sat on the sofa writing: the bistro lights came on just now, and it’s only 6.
William Pearse publishes memoir, travel journals, poetry and prose. 
