Spring has left me restless, as it always does. This first hot day, I pushed the eighty-year old windows of this house outward against their winter stuck. I sat on the back porch until dark, drinking wine and watching the cats prowl the cracked concrete alley. A plastic garbage can lid scraped across the ground and the wind carried new smells: faint rotting garbage and fruit trees blossoming.
When I can’t sleep, I walk across the wood floors of the bedroom, the office, the stairs, through this stone house of narrow floorboards scratched and worn and warm under my bare feet. All night, there are sirens somewhere.