Merlin
Excerpt: "The Pedicure Goddess"
***
The day after clocks sprang forward, he found himself sitting on a Chippendale bench weathered gray by the seasons of snow since he designed, milled its delicate cedar boards and constructed it.
Snow was no more a memory that Monday before St. Patrick’s when, a week hence, the Church would hold its first Evensong, a medieval liturgy of Psalms set to music he remembered from his youth.
He did not remember the names, the Gloria in Excelsis, the Magnificat, the Cantate Dominio and Nunc Dimittus, although the acapella voices and music in that darkened church he could still summon. That study had only come much later when he began to listen with new ears. It was easier now he knew the name was nothing more than the first line of the psalm in Latin.
As he sat there with a steaming cup of coffee, the cat ambled up and he glanced disapprovingly at the appearance of his forearms. The skin had become thin, showing veins and scaly. When he rotated his forearm, the diagonal wrinkles would show: this way on top, that way underneath.
The cat leapt up on the seat.
Looking downhill from the old farm house, he saw the straw color grass slowly moving toward the thick greenery of early spring.
Across the stream and up slope, a song sparrow called in the silence, joined later by a towee and a red-bellied woodpecker.
Of course, like Evensong, these sounds and sights were familiar after twenty years here, but their names were not.
The back door opened and his wife stepped into the brilliant morning sunshine, eyes squinting. He was pleased with her and she joined him on the bench once the lolling gray cat was evicted.
She set her antique Blue Willow coffee mug on the arm of the garden bench.
She sat a moment, looked at her coffee cup again, then commented “You won’t let it fall, will you? Wait, let me get Merlin…”
He ran his hand across the gray weathered surface of the cleverly-built bench, one that had survived ten or more years outdoors. It had been made of eastern red cedar, a tree from the farm with a resinous character that protected it from decay and weathering. It had been pegged, designed on a smaller commercial bench but he built it with heavier stock.
“How old is this bench?” he asked her gently when she returned with the cell phone, holding it up so Merlin could create a sonogram of birdsong and identify the species.
It was not just one, but almost a dozen names that appeared on the screen and she began to read them all.
“No, don’t,” he said. “Can’t remember them all: just one or two so I can write them down…”
“Must be at least ten years”, she said of the bench.
“That long?” he mused, remembering how much work had gone into measuring its parts and slowly putting them together properly.
“We need a table: have you made the legs?”
“I finished the slatted top years ago that would shed rain, and cut the trestle pieces but I have yet to decide how best to join them…”
It had taken time as any sturdy project did, but when he completed it soon, it would be right.
***