Mug
A mug for that three-in-the-morning coffee, with the portrait of Gavino, a long-eared bat watchmaker from my Animal Kinhood series, where the animals dress and live like people. His face straight on, the bow tie and the herringbone vest, on a ceramic mug for home or for work.
Foto: Mauro Mucedda / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)Plecotus sardus
A stopped watch isn't dead. Most of the time it's just lost its pulse for a moment.
Endemic exclusively to Sardinia; Mediterranean forests of holm oak and cork oak on limestone terrain, with refuges in inland caves (Supramonte, Gennargentu).
His wife, Bonaria, weaves by day; he fixes watches by night. They're almost never awake at the same time: they cross paths at dawn and at dusk, in the kitchen, fifteen minutes and a coffee. Twenty-five years of marriage that fit, above all, into those two daily coffees. She leaves the pot ready for him when she goes up to bed.
*A bellu a bellu*, he says — slowly, slowly — when someone's in a rush or when a part won't give. A mug is the moment to stop before going down to the bench, not a place for haste. Made to order.
