china

There is a white china cup that sits on the wooden table. A pile of papers lie to the right, their edges softly blowing up in the breeze. Apart from these, a china cup is the only object sitting on this scraped old wooden table, with its legs that wobble, its planks that heave with cold. The china cup is shaped like a small well and it gleams in the morning sun filtering through the open bay window. It leaves a ring in the unpolished surface.

I mark my seasons by the white china cup. April is for green tea, flowers in the top, floating. Summer is for sweet hot apple cider, straight from the piping urn. September is berries and darjeeling, taken black. Autumn seeps into flavours of licorice and anise star, hot water doused cardammon, cinammon sticks, cloves, milk. December is cracked ice, Baileys poured over.

I live the seasons like this, until the winds drift over and March appears, a blighted snow drift on the horizon. And the drinking stops, the china cup is filled with lighter hue, which hails, in its thin lipped taste of biting white, the onset of a distant Spring.

This is the month where the china cup sits empty on the wooden table. Where I lie on the moth bitten sofa, with its Japanese throw and its smell of jasmine and pink wafer, and I watch, as the cup tows its empty china through another cycle, its life, a bequeathed rim of silver, to another year.