freeze alert
the morning light
slow to arrive

At 4 a.m. I wake up with cold air pouring from the ceiling vents. After daylight, I call AirServe and the answering service tells me the repairmen can be out in three hours. As I hang up, I hear sleet peppering my windows. In a few minutes another call comes from the service. The men are on the way.

“No, no,” I say, “I don’t want anyone driving on dangerous roads.”

“The guys are probably half-way there. They work in all kinds of weather.”

“Tell them to come in the back door as my front porch is iced over.”

My heating unit is dated and my biggest worry is lack of parts. At least I have an emergency sleeping bag. Soon there is a knock at the back. Within ten minutes the technician replaces an electrical switch and makes out the invoice. When they are ready to leave, I hand the younger one, hardly more than a boy, a twenty-dollar bill, but he looks confused. Then I give the older man another twenty, and say, “I want to buy you breakfast.”

delayed maintenance
my computer search
for a good realtor

Lynn Edge

lives in South Texas. She has written haibun since 2004 and has numerous works published in Frogpond, Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, and other online and print journals. She has written a collection of haibun entitled Unsaddled.

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⚡ Year of the Farrier, haibun story by Lynn Edge in Issue 20 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (September 2023); nominated for the Red Moon Anthologies 2023, and selected for inclusion in Contemporary Haibun 19 (Red Moon Press, 2024)