The Creative Nest

I am the careful one. Ask anyone who knows me. I have a spreadsheet. I have had this spreadsheet for two years. Same file. Same tabs. Same font, which is Calibri, because I built it in a hurry one Sunday and never went back to fix it. The tabs are color coded. Green is income. Blue is for fixed bills, the ones that come out whether or not I am paying attention. Orange is groceries. There is a yellow tab for things I could not sort, and that tab has been empty since March of last year. I think about that yellow tab more than a person should. The rule is simple. Every receipt gets typed in the same day. I made the rule. I follow the rule. My partner drops receipts in the canvas tote bag by the door. I pull them out, type the amount into the orange tab, and throw the paper away. Then the bag goes back on the hook. Last Tuesday I went to the store. I bought the usual things. Milk. The big yogurt, the one that lasts a week if I pretend it will. Two cucumbers, because the first one looked...

Lola is the smallest of my three dogs and the only one who has ever been asked to leave a grooming appointment, which is a story for another day. That morning she was in the back seat with her chin on the armrest and her ears doing that thing where one flips inside out, and I told her out loud that this would be quick, that it was a nail trim and a look at her left ear and nothing else, and that there was cheese in the fridge with her name on it. The new clinic is in a strip mall between a vape shop and a store that sells phone cases out of a plastic bin on the sidewalk. I pulled into the lot and understood within about four seconds that whoever striped that pavement had never parked a car in their life. The space I found was so tight that I had to open my door roughly eight inches, turn my hips sideways, and slide out with the leash wrapped twice around my wrist and my bag strap cutting into my neck. A flattened coffee cup sat in the spot beside me. Somebody had left a shopping cart ...

The box sat on the counter for two days before I opened it, because I am the kind of person who believes cardboard improves with age. When I finally cut the tape, the flap popped and a small cloud of recycled paper dust came out, the gray kind that smells like a library basement. Inside was the coffee pot, wearing a plastic sleeve, and next to it, in its own little drawstring bag, four paper filters. I want to be precise about this. The coffee pot has a permanent filter. That is the feature. That is the sentence printed on the box in a font that implies I have made a serious adult decision about coffee. A gold colored mesh basket sits where the paper usually goes, and the manual explains, in English and then again in French for reasons, that I will never buy filters again. Never. The word is right there on page six, next to a drawing of a smiling mug. And then somebody at the factory dropped four paper filters into the box. I stood there holding one. It was thin enough to read the n...