They bloomed for thirty-eight years.
And every morning, Harold drank tea on the porch.
Not coffee. Tea. Earl Grey. With honey and a splash of milk. In a blue mug I bought him at a craft fair in Tubac in 1986. He sat in the same wooden rocker he built himself. He drank one cup before he left for school.
On weekends, he drank two.
The second cup was the important one.
He told me that once. Early on. A Saturday. I asked him why he always made a second cup on weekends when he only drank one on weekdays.
“The first cup,” he said, “is for waking up.”
“And the second?”
He looked at me over the rim of the blue mug.
“The second cup is for staying,” he said. “It’s for when you’re not in a hurry to be anywhere else. When the place you are is the place you want to be.”
