The Sandbox
You spoon 42g of ground Columbian coffee into the French press. You then pour boiled
water to the base of the brand name; La Cafetière.
You bring the French press into the sitting room and set it on the coffee table between
the two armchairs. You return to the kitchen for the two cups containing a small fill of milk
and scoop a half spoon of sugar into one. In the sitting room, you pour the pressed coffee to
one centimetre below the rim of each cup. This is the process your father used, and it’s still
how he enjoys his evening coffee.
“Did you remember the sugar, Cait?” he asks from his fireside chair.
“Yes,” you answer with a smile, happy he has remembered such a minute detail.
“Good, and you made a cup of tea for your mother?”
“Yes,” you say, sad that his episodes of paradoxical lucidity are so brief.
You pick up your cup and walk to the bay window, coffee steam rising like ghosts of
shipwreck. You see your childhood sandbox in the garden, its weather-eaten wooden frame
against the ever-green lawn, sand writhing in lonesome Atlantic squalls. On a window seat
cushion, your mother’s knitted blanket rests folded. You remember the winter she spent
engrossed in its tedious creation. You see it sprawled for garden picnics and laid across her
legs on nights she fell asleep on the sofa. You feel it comforting your shoulders as you sat by
the fire the day she passed. It is her eternal embrace.
You run the blanket over your shoulders, squeezing a fistful to your nose. Her
bergamot scent survives in its fibres, the nostalgia and warmth of youth and vitality. You
breathe her in. You remember her standing at the window watching you play in the sandbox,
the blanket draped across her shoulders. You would dig and build to impress her, each
creation bolder than the previous. She would come to inspect your designs and carry you
inside as evening began to lay its heavy hand onto the land. After a bath, she would wrap the
blanket so tightly around you that to take it off was to ballet. You think of the day the
sandbox fun died.
“Mary? Where’s Cait?” your father asks, returning you to the room.
“Sorry?” you say, searching his perplexed face.
“Where’s Cait? It’ll be dark out there in a minute.”
You process his confusion and look towards the sandbox. Beneath the grey sky, you
see yourself constructing the imaginations of childhood with plastic buckets and shovels. You
are digging and building for your watching mother’s approval and affection. You smile at
her, and she smiles at you.
“Mary? Where’s Cait?” your father asks again, “Isn’t it time she came in?”
You nod and caress the blanket as you watch the sandbox.
“I’ll give her another minute, John,” you say, “She looks so happy.”
Gene Murphy