but of course, there's brooklyn

But of course, there is Brooklyn. And then, there is summer in Brooklyn.

     I was sitting in the sunbeam on the armchair, muddling in a friday heaviness; sleepy with sad. Katerina was sitting on the couch, dejected from her job search. “Bah,” I said, legs over the side of the chair, a scrooge in the sunshine.
     “Hmm,” she said.
     “Boo,” was my response.

We sat there a while longer in the thick heat, not saying much else. Katerina looking at something on her laptop, I looking at nothing.
     “You know what we ought to do?” she said after a while of this, after I had sighed twice and scowled out the window.
     “Burn some sage?” I said without looking up, my eyes closing a little at some new pessimism.
     “Burn some sage? I was going to say go to the beach.”
     “Oh…” I rolled over like a cat to the other side of the chair. “We could do that too.”
     “No, let’s burn some sage,” Katerina said in the way that makes me love her. “I like that idea.”

     “Wait, what are you going to do?” Zosia asked later that afternoon, while we hovered around a sauecpan piled with fresh sage from the grocery store.
      “We want to get rid of the negative energy in the house. Past roommates and our own sadness and stuff.”
     “Oh. Ok...” I could see her mulling it over. “Do I need to clean my room?”

     We opened all the doors in the house, the kitchen cabinets, the closet doors, then crouched on the floor in Zosia’s room and lit a match. Nothing happened.
      “It’s magic! “ Zosia laughed.
So we shoved the pot of fresh sage into the fridge to let it dry out and went around the house closing doors.

      Five days later, we found ourselves in the same place.
      “Boo,” I said from my spot on the armchair.
      “Hmm,” said Kat from the couch.
      “Bah,” I grumbled.
     “You want to do the sage thing today?” Kat said.
       I sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

       We opened all the doors with much less vim the second time around and brought the saucepan into Zosia’s room. This time the herb caught fire right away, and delicious tendrils of smoke curled around the pan. We wafted the smoke around the closets, into the cabinet drawers, around the corners, taking turns holding it.
       “It smells like pot,” Zosia said.
     “You know we really should be using a feather,” I said.
     “Where are we going to get a feather?” Katerina waved the pan behind the shower curtain.
     “This is like college!” Zosia was laughing.
     I took out Marlow’s blue cat-toy: a giant over-sized feather, string still attached.
     “Oh my goodness, I love this house,” Zosia said at the sight of me, serious-faced with a saucepan full of sage and a giant blue cat toy, wafting pot-smelling smoke into Katerina’s dresser drawer.
     “Shhh,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Don’t tell anyone that we did this.”
     “You know, it’s cool that you want to burn sage and everything,” Zosia said. “But I really love living here. This is the happiest place I’ve lived in a long time.”
     So then there was a brief pause in the sage-burning while we “awed” and laughed and hugged and then finally put the saucepan outside to burn off outside our doorway.
     “Do you feel better?” I asked Kat. We looked around at our freshly saged apartment.
     “I don’t know, I think so.”

It was the very next day that Katerina found the bird.