Four Days

A magnolia blooms for about four days. Less, in an Orlando August. It opens the color of heavy cream, and by the second afternoon the petals have started to bruise at the edges — that soft rust-brown that means it’s already leaving. By the fourth day it’s on the ground. The tree makes another.

There’s a pile somewhere in your house. I’d put money on it.

Little canvases. Two by three, thereabouts. Finished in a waiting room or a carpool line or on the back porch in April, and then set down. You knew exactly what you were doing while you stitched it and had no idea what it was for when you tied off the last stitch. So it went in the bag. And the bag went in the basket. And there it has stayed, with the others.

This is the year of the mini. Everyone painted them, everyone stitched them, and nobody said what happened next.

I don’t think that’s a small problem. A finished canvas is hours of someone’s attention. We let those hours go into a drawer.

So: a buckle.