On the Need for Constants

It was as if the house were melting, the leafless trees, the sky. Everything dripped and trickled. He stood in his pajamas on the back patio with the filter of coffee grounds in his right hand, listening. After weeks in teen and single-digit temperatures, the thaw was a moment to be savored. The thirty-four degrees felt like summer, like T-shirt weather. 

     He chucked the spent grounds out, into the long planter that ran the patio’s edge. In a month, the bare earth there he knew would be green with spears of day lily and tulip. The concerns of winter would be forgotten, long stored away, like his old jacket, in some slip of a closet beneath a narrow well of stairs. The chores will have changed, his clothes, his worries.

     He turned back to the house.  

     'As long as there’s coffee,' he said, raising the emptied filter in part toast, part request, to whatever force had brought him thus far without grave incident, 'We’re good to go.'