Memories

 

Welcome to The Spot Writers. The prompt for this month is to write a story that involves a tomato, a cloaked individual, and a missing shoe. Phil Yeats wrote his week’s offering.

In April 2024, Phil published The Body on Karli’s Beach, the third book in his Barrettsport Mysteries, a series of soft-boiled mysteries set in a fictional South Shore Nova Scotia town. For information about these books and The Road to Environmental Armageddon, his trilogy about the hazards of ignoring human-induced climate change, visit his website: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/. His latest book, a novella titled Starting Over Again: A Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy, was published a month ago.

 

Memories

Phil Yeats

 

I rose later than usual. When I arrived sleepy-eyed in the kitchen, my wife said, “I’m off for the day. I’ve added tomatoes to your grocery list, but it’s raining rather hard. Do you want me to fetch them on my way home?”

I laughed. “I grew up in Vancouver. A little rain never stopped me then, and it’s not stopping me now.”

She shook her head before stepping outside. “Suit yourself, but it’s more than a gentle shower.”

After breakfast, I carried my second cup of coffee to our living room. The rain was pouring down. I shrugged my shoulders before gulping the last of my coffee. I collected my wet gear from a decade ago when I last played golf and the oversized, hooded, black cloak I wore during drizzly winter days during my university years in Vancouver from the furnace room. It was large enough to protect my backpack and me from the rain.

Upstairs again, I crouched in the front hall closet, reaching for my rain shoes on the floor under the shelf I made for our everyday shoes. I found only one.

Where was the other one? I focused almost immediately on our neighbour, a blustery woman who’d arrived a few days earlier with her constant companion, a friendly, if a little barky, white dog. She treated the animal like a grandchild and would never contemplate leaving it outside tied to a porch railing. Inside, she let it run free, never asking if that was okay.

Her dog must have found my missing shoe and taken it who knew where during their brief visit. That meant another trip to the basement to fetch my bright yellow sailing boots because I didn’t have time to conduct a search. They would be better protection from the inevitable puddles but less comfortable during the twenty-minute walk to the grocery store than my black rain shoes.

Off I went on a trip down memory lane. The yellow boots represented my teenage years, when sailing was my favourite leisure activity. My cloak reminded me of my university student days as a long-haired hippie who distracted himself from his studies by reading too much medieval fantasy. That brought me closer to the present, when golf, and its very lightweight rain gear, filled the empty hours I had after our daughter left home. Now I’m retired and focused on simple tasks like grocery shopping and writing silly stories.

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The Spot Writers:

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com/wicker-chitter/

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com/

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.com/