Autumn 2021

A beam of sunlight breaks through the window as the coffee drips through the filter into the glass, and as the light strikes the coffee droplet the color—deepest, richest brown—leaps through the air into his eyes. That color, her color, the particular shade of brown where the deep emerald moss meets the loamy black soil and the color of the last of the autumn leaves had been soaked through by the brisk rain. She is the palette of the earth after the harvest and the promise of a long, hard winter tempered by the future of a bright and beautiful spring where the clear bubbling water in the brook flows over the rich riverbed. She rests, her eyes shining as a stirred and steeped brew, the heady aroma of dark black tea sipped over a book about star-crossed lovers, knees up on the couch under a blanket as children laugh on the floor nearby. She looks up into that same sunlight and her eyes sparkle with the promise that someday he will be there to look into them with his own.