Forty Minutes About Nothing

October 25th. I called Carol this morning with no particular reason. That is not usually how I do things, I am a scheduler, a planner-of-short-notes-before-dialing. But I had the mug and the window and the particular Sunday-morning-on-a-Sunday quality that fall Sundays have lately, and I just called.

We talked for forty minutes. About nothing I could bullet-point for you. She mentioned something she has been reading. I mentioned the prints still leaning against the kitchen wall, which she found funnier than I expected, and honestly funnier than I had been finding it. At some point she said something about her neighborhood getting that particular autumn smell, and I said yes, mine too, and we both just sat with that for a second. The calls where you do that, where you sit inside a shared yes without needing to explain it, those are the ones that leave you feeling like a person afterward.

After the call, before anything else.

The mug was cold by the time we said goodbye. I noticed it when I finally set it down and the ceramic felt the same temperature as the air. I didn't mind. The October light was doing its low-angle thing through the kitchen window, and the windowsill arrangement looked exactly like itself, and I sat there for another few minutes doing nothing in particular. Which felt right.

I don't have a tidy thing to say about it. I called, we talked, I'm glad I did. That's the whole post.