It's Still Life

Well, Maybe Not a Thousand …

It was the sort of summer that one vaguely remembers – an idle summer of a thousand different hours, except for a few days when Farmer Lars harvested the fields and left stubble and nowhere for rabbits and field mice to hide – hawks waiting in the trees with their sharp, hungry eyes.

I remember counting a thousand falling stars – the nights were dark and sweet and almost black – that sort of dark doesn’t exist anymore, and there was an ancient dresser and a wooden chest in my bedroom. It smelled of lavender and thyme, and I remember that scent clearly from smelling it a thousand times.

And after lunch I was always down by the river with its banks in bloom, wildflowers of a thousand different scents and wedged between more-than-a-thousand blackberries, the river flowed full of crawfish and minnows and the occasional silvery-grey eel.

Grandmother was fearful when I was near water, it having tried three times to take me, so she kept a glass of water under my bed so water would know me, know I meant it no harm, know to leave me alone.

One night when I was thirsty, I drank all the water in that glass – that was the first and last time I lied to my grandmother, “No, I didn’t drink it,” and I never forgot how that lie made me feel.

PAD (Poem-a-Day Challenge) Day 8 with Prompt: Well (blank), fill in the blank and use the phrase as the title. This is a Six Sentence Story, the likes of which you’ll find more over at Six Sentence Stories including the word “wedge”. Some artwork is created using Midjourney AI, and is identified as such in the ALT text or captioned. Images are copyright and not to used without permission, which I willingly give when asked, and when not for commercial use. Imagery and poems/prose ©Misky 2006-2024.