I had my grandmother’s ring on my right hand, worn every day because it was left to me specifically and because I am in fact very sentimental, which has always been true and which my family had never known because they had not been paying the kind of attention that would have told them. I am sentimental about the glass bird and the ring and the ornament from Iceland and the cold morning I stood watching the sky move with light. I am sentimental about all of it, all the evidence of a life I built carefully in the spaces available to me, and I keep that evidence close because it is mine, because no one gave it to me, because the building of it was the argument and the argument has been made.
I drank my coffee. Outside, the day was cold and clear. Inside, my house was warm, and the tree had its lights on, and the glass bird turned slightly on its branch in the way it always did when the heat came through the vent, a slow half-circle and back.
That was enough. That was, in every sense that mattered, exactly enough.
