loðrétt

I have a black pot of white tea. The room still smells, faintly, of ginger, from a bout of morning baking. The sky is white, the hill green and black except where yellow bamboo cuts upward from the fenceline. Without meaning to echo it, I have lined up tapers on the sill, all of them yellow too.

Just now I realize that the warm shape sometimes seen in the shadow of the trees past the bamboo is none of the things I have theorized it might be (a piece of metal flashing, a wayward bit of plastic), but the window of another house, lit from within. Someone is on the other side of the pane, no doubt enjoying being in a warm yellow dry space instead of among the wet trees. I know I am glad to be on this side of the pane through which I peer out at that one.

In between, rain sheets down, mostly invisible.