MISSING JAMES

Winds of Change, by James Aschbacher

How do I miss thee?

How do I not?

You pop up in the strangest, most mundane places. There you lurk every time I grab the red tube of Chapstick in the bathroom cabinet. Every Christmas morning, one of the little  packages wrapped up in a scrap of old holiday paper and tucked into my stocking held 3 or 4 tubes of Chapstick, Scotch-taped together. Enough to last me all year!

Now, I have to buy my own, not to mention that Santa doesn’t come to fill my stocking anymore. (Ditto the Easter Bunny, the Valentine’s Day Bunny, or the Birthday Bunny, who used to pile up an assortment of Ferrell’s Doughnuts on my breakfast plate!)

Vitamin time. You used to set out my daily dosage on the counter above the kitchen sink at breakfast time — in a little aluminum dish that once held a tea light. The empty dish sits there still, neglected, because by the time I remember to take the vitamins, I just pour them out of the bottle into my hand and gulp them down. Another domestic ceremony lost. Another little nick out of my quality of life.

The quiet. When I come downstairs mid-morning, there’s no longer the clinking of your paint brush’s metal collar against the water glass, the distinctive sound of my Art Boy so industriously painting away. “Pee time?” you’d ask, as I came galumphing down on my usual routine. “Or tea time?”

(Not that I have time for a second cup of tea, most days. I’m too busy dragging myself off to the store, to the movies, to yoga, or texting for rides for all of the above — all things I so blithely used to let you do for me, without even thinking about it.)

Plum season. Lucky enough to have bought a house on a property full of fruit trees, we often had to give away excess pears, figs and limes by the basket if we couldn’t eat them fast enough. But not plums. Sweet, juicy, wine-red Santa Rosa plums were your favorite fruit!

It was an event every summer when you found the first ripe one that had fallen to the grass; after that. you haunted the tree like Marley’s Ghost every morning, picking the ripest ones for breakfast. And you never wanted me to “waste” them in a tart, which is where most of the extra pears ended up. Plums went directly into your face!

The 25th of every month: it only reminds me that another 30 days have passed in the ever-widening gap that now separates us.