A Palmful of Cinnamon

 The cinnamon is already measured when the feeling arrives. Not a schedule, exactly, and not a rule. The new moon has been up for a day or two, or will be soon, and the house has gone a little still in a way that is not restful. Rooms hold their air. Tasks wait without urgency. I notice the stagnation first as a mild pressure behind the ribs, then as the ordinary impulse to do something small that has been done before.

I take the jar from the shelf. The spoon is the same one. The front door is the same door it has always been-no new paint, no altered threshold, nothing that would mark the gesture as different from any other month. Outside, the light is whatever the season has made it. I stand with the cinnamon in my palm and the words come without rehearsal. They are never identical. In high summer they lean toward the long light and the open windows; nearer the turn of the year they ask for warmth that lasts and for money that does not vanish between paychecks. Always the same cluster: love, peace, prosperity, joy, laughter, and the plain fact of enough. I do not polish them. They arrive already shaped, close enough to what is needed that further revision would only slow the hand.

The cinnamon leaves the palm in a short breath. Some of it catches the screen and stays. Most of it crosses. I stand for a moment longer than the action requires, then I breathe once, fully, and the particular tightness that brought me to the door is already thinner. Not gone in any dramatic sense. Simply less insistent. The day is still there. Dishes remain. Whatever work was waiting has not changed its nature. I close the door and go back to it.

I have missed the new moon more often than I have kept it. Some months the stagnation does not announce itself, or announces itself and is ignored. Nothing in the house appears to register the omission. The practice survives the gaps because it was never required to prove itself by continuity. It returns when the feeling returns, and the feeling returns often enough that the jar stays on the shelf.

What the cinnamon does, if it does anything beyond the brief scent and the scatter of brown across the concrete, is not a question I press. The excitement that rises while the spoon is still in the jar is real enough in the stomach and behind the eyes. The words are real in the mouth. The slight lifting that follows is real in the way the next hour moves. Beyond that, the gesture remains what it has been for years: a small interruption to ask for it.

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