bullpenned

Valentine

by MB

You let me sleep in. I’m grateful. I put on my moccasins. Go into the kitchen. Turn up the heat. I look at the garbage and think there’s enough room for yesterday’s grinds. I dump them out. I rinse the coffee pot, barely. No one will care about aluminium mushrooms. Fill it up again, turn the element of the stove to high. My dog’s sleeping on the floor. I pour her a bowl of dogfood. I say, Look, pellets! She raises one eyebrow, then the other. I warm some milk in my favourite saucepan--the beige one from Village des Valeurs. It’s got 70s style caricature flowers on its side that make me glad on the inside. I put in some milk. Whole milk. Stir a bit. Get my bread. Rye is best. Slide a pair of slices into the toaster. (Say it like this: tooost/tooohst/tooowst.) Pull out a record, something nostalgic, like from before anyone became Yusef anything. Get my seven dollar Île d’Orléans blueberry jam out of the fridge, got my butter all loosey goosey melty on the table already, my prune yoghourt. I put my grandmother’s plate on my mother’s canadienne table and pour the almost burnt café au lait into my mug. I spread out my books. The one about libraries, the old Atlantic with all the writers, the suicide girl diaries. The coffee’s too hot but the milk didn’t skin. I pick up the libraries book and smear jam in the margin and spill crumbs in the spine. And I think about Virginia Woolf and her gossipy intelligence and I look through the plastic-covered patio windows to my backyard, where snow’s piled waist deep and it's bright with winter-slanting sun. My dog dreams dog dreams. She swallows back a bark. I take another bite into my toast (tooohst). Saturday, I love you.