A Rainy Saturday Afternoon

I meant to go out, but it started raining at two, so I stayed in.

I made a pot of tea, dragged the balcony chair over to the window, and finished a short story collection that had been sitting on the shelf for months. It is a thin book, a dozen or so stories, each about something small: someone moving house, someone waiting for a bus, someone who can’t find what they came for at the supermarket. Nothing struck me while I was reading. After I closed it, a few details kept coming back.

The rain never let up. Downstairs, someone was walking a dog under an umbrella. The dog was not convinced, stopping every few steps to shake itself off.

Tidying the desk in the evening, I found three unfinished posts in my drafts folder. I got one of them into publishable shape and left the other two for later.

That was the day. It was a good one.