All those sweet, heady blooms of spring came back, and outside it was warm and had just rained, it felt clammy and moist, so I got a beer and a lawn chair and collapsed into both. Dawn accumulated three heads of cauliflower in the vegetable bin bigger than most human brains, so I cut them into florets and made the fabled curried cauliflower soup, and felt at once like my mental health had returned from a two-week stint. I sautéed an onion in olive oil with flour and curry, turmeric root, added some chicken broth, boiled it for 30 minutes and then hit it with the handheld mixer, added butter, let it cool. Even the kids liked it. I served it with croutons I made from a stale seeded baguette and tossed the rest outside for the birds. Our cat was sniffing around and so were two eagles, and I thought back to an exhibit on raptors I’d seen, how they crush the organs with their talons…and what a way to go like that, carried off to some witch’s castle, some stony nest high above the earth. We celebrated our 15-year wedding anniversary at an Italian restaurant in Redmond and pledged to do it properly when we could, next month. When I woke the next morning I was sad it was over, and remembered what I could from that time on my walk to the lake but then went back to thinking about work, got Charlotte off to school, decided this will be the day I don’t take a shower, felt good about being a contractor, found a recipe on my phone, the arugula they call rocket in the UK, wrote a post on my phone, decided I’ll call it rapture.

Categories: Memoir, prose, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, humor, pacific northwest, short form, stream-of-consciousness, William Pearse writer