Cash paradise

A day after our seventeenth anniversary, we sipped coffee on the backyard patio,

my mug the one I’d stolen from work, hers the one she’d designed, quoting the kids.

Above us the high sheltering hands of the elms laced their green fingers together,

magpies whined like machines winding up, and the resident wrens warbled and burbled.

The air above that canopy or bower burned purely cloudlessly azure and

the myriad engines of the neighbours all still slept mute as winter in their garages.

On her phone she pored over the registry for a cousin’s wedding we’re going to. “What

about bed linens?” I said we should get those for the couple if they’d hang them

out the window after the wedding night, “because tradition.” I was puzzling over the

weekend paper’s crossword poetry—girl from Glasgow: lass; psychic glows: aurae;

hearing-based: aural; “haven’t you been listening to me”: hello—but I had been listening,

riffing—as her laughter testified—and recalling Johnny Cash’s answer to Vanity Fair’s

Proustian question—When and where were you happiest?—with six words that described

us just at that sonnet of a post-solstice moment: this morning, having coffee, with her.