Pebble
"You can tell autumn is on its way when the mornings are cold but the days still remain warm," he'd said.
But autumn has already begun, taking larger and larger strides into winter. The trees aren't fooled; they shuffle their yellowing tresses, shedding a little here, a little there, getting ready for the change in seasons. I feast my eyes on the greenery and remaining flowers which survived the summer, having travelled from winter to almost-winter, save for the flowering of southern sakura and deep purple magnolias, seven days in the tropics and the steamroll of late summer humidity in Tokyo.
The girl on the other table wears the same ring as yours, on the same finger, though in gold. She struggles to cut her steak, having long, manicured nails that didn't quite allow her a steady grip on her fork.
Late afternoon sun smiles through the leaves of dying tropical plants, rendering them a pale translucent green. The girl and her beau clink their glasses of sangria which look a little too pink.
Children in the playground, kicking up tiny sandstorms. I try to push away the thought that in some weeks the entire landscape will be transformed. White. It will be all white. The girl and her beau share a cigarette, curling dirty grey smoke into the air.
The thought is somehow daunting and comforting. Time is passing, wounds heal, old creases are ironed out as new ones form and things eventually move along and work themselves out. I remember the time my mother seemed to be more conscious of this.
"看开了", she said, after telling me some stories of her own troubled past. Certain things are not worth holding on to. She showed me the plants in her garden where we had both taken refuge, told me each of their stories over coffee and biscuits I found a little too sweet.
The sangria is as pink as the cardigan the girl tied around her waist, preferring to slink around in her spaghetti-strap singlet. She and her beau suddenly got up and left in a hurry, their glasses half-emptied, leaving pink shadows on the table.
I guess the afternoon must be moving on.
People keep asking me: "What made you move up here to Canada?" Australia is supposedly all sun and beach, you see — some kind of heaven, in other words. Well, if you disregard the wind from Antartica. Lately I've been telling people I'm trying to escape the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole.
Posted by sniffles at October 05, 2004 11:04 PM