December 31, 2017

succulent in winter

The house is a maze of small upheavals - at the dining room table, a pile of bills and letters
needing payment and reply, holiday cards colliding on the mantle, disks of lip balm
overlapping in a dish already mountained with coupons and stray rubber bands. 
This is the lumpy topography of living, a labyrinth we navigate with lopsided measures
of engagement and avoidance, and today might easily beckon as the grandest of cleanups
before the year snaps shut. Still, I don't quite know where to begin, which stack to start
dismantling, and my eyes shift from clutter to clutter, gauging the work ahead,
almost missing the windowsill where a cactus, purchased two summers ago in Austin,
is quietly maintaining a tidy ecosystem above a sink full of breakfast dishes,
its spine soft against the glass in an innocent dare of beauty or hope, or both.