After Dinner

I've been watching you for hours. It's been years since we were born. We were perfect when we started. I've been wondering where we've gone.
                                                                              --Counting Crows



The rain is cold and plants
itself on the windshield, spreading
blisters of water across the
glass. In the dark the interstate
sprawls ahead lit by streaking lamps
at intervals along the pavement.
I say I am happy. And he smiles,
a silhouette of sadness in the
way his lips imperceptibly part. There
in that space is an expanse of time
before this rain, of silence and strain
against dreams falling like stricken
stars, of hands almost touching, and
fingers wrapped around loneliness.
I say, I like talking to you. He nods.
The rain throws pellets
harder at the earth. I turn my
attention to the radio.

Pillows

I am a fool for pillows. Pillows who have no other purpose but to look. Well. Pretty. Pretty pillows to bring out a color in a room. Pretty pillows I found at a flea market, made of blue chenille, extraordinary in their three dimensional knobs of stitches. Pillows my grandmother made, limp as days old lettuce leaves, but breath taking all the same because I am aware that her tiny fingers bound the pattern on the pillows together, sitting in her rocker, working by the light of the thin paned window.

Outside that window was s snowball bush, which shed its petals like a storm of white rain, and my grandmother sewed with back bowed over a quilting hoop that is now sits  alone in my attic.

I have the quilting hoop because I would piece quilt squares with her. I'm not sure why I pieced them, perhaps a way to pass time in her house (where time barely moved, as slow as still moving beads of water on an imperceptible slope), or because sitting next to her was solid, a steel line between a girl and her grandmother, and it felt good to be attached to her her, a rock in the middle of the shallows of my life.

I must tell you, she had black hair, bound in a bun at the nape of neck, but it wasn't bound tight; her hair swooped in a wave in the front before collapsing together among its constraining bobby pins in the back.

There are pillows everywhere in my house. And my children like to make forts out of them. They stack them, then knock them down. They scatter them in rooms where they don't belong. Pillows wind up in my kitchen, islands floating just below the refrigerator. I pick up the pillows and deliver them back to the sofa from whence they came. I expect the pillows to stay put. But they don't. Ever.

The cycle of repositioning pillows goes on and on.

I painted my daughters' room pink. Pale pink and demure. My oldest daughter asks me daily if we can repaint it, PURPLE, she exclaims, like I am ignorant to not have suggested a room color change before. But it is wearisome to me, to change everything to PURPLE. Everyday, I dig pillows out from underneath my daughters'  beds. Nothing in there is PURPLE. But I always pull out the pillow my grandmother made me when I was a girl. She always gave us hand made gifts at Christmas. And I loved them.

This pillow had on it, I think, a pattern called Flower Garden. My mind might be making that up, but the pattern looks like octagonal flowers, bound in the back with thin pink cotton material. It looks like a flower garden to me. I could fold that pillow in half, it is so flimsy and worn, but I always put in on my daughter's bed like I am placing china in a cabinet. I see my grandmother's hands working the thread through the fabric. Her stitches were small and efficient.

The cycle of pillows. The cycle of things being thrown down and built up and displaced and made whole. The cycle of disarray and order, of chaos and sense. Everyday, several times a day, I rearrange pillows. Pillows that bring out the color in a room,

Our the memory of my grandma and her hands.

My children don't understand the meaning of pillows. To them, they are barriers, or jumping posts, or roofs to a castle.

Because of this, I am constantly returning pillows to a place of belonging and symmetry. Because a Flower Garden does not belong under the bed with the discarded Barbies, and because momentary order can buy you an ounce of peace.