The unfinished day
At nine I closed the laptop without finishing everything. This was unusual enough that I stood in the kitchen for a moment, waiting for the feeling of forgetting something to pass. It did not. I put the kettle on anyway. On the shelf was a tin with two broken pieces of shortbread from the weekend. I put them on a saucer rather than eating them over the sink. Some evenings, that is the whole ceremony.
What the tin remembered
On Sunday, a friend had helped me cut the dough into decidedly uneven rectangles. We had planned to make neat little gifts. Instead we talked through the measuring, lost track of whose ruler was where, and produced a collection that looked like a very small, poorly planned town. The narrow pieces browned first. The broad ones needed more patience. We packed the presentable cookies and kept the odd bits, which turned out to be the best part of the arrangement.
No improvement required
Now the kitchen was quiet. I could hear a bus stop outside and someone bringing their bins in. The shortbread broke into my tea, leaving a small buttery raft that I fished out with a spoon. Nothing about the day was solved. Tomorrow still had its list. But there had been a weekend, and a friend, and a slightly ridiculous afternoon with a ruler. I washed the saucer, dried the tin, and left both ready for another ordinary evening.
