Lenses

There was one pair on the dining room table. Adjacent the small kitchen through a small door, parallel to the large window overlooking the garden and the high wall that kept the freeway out of view. 

One pair laid near the recliner that stood in the living room. The recliner swivelled: entry hall to television to unoccupied sofa and loveseat. Crochet covered worn armrests.

Then, on the small shelf in the bathroom with all of the expired tooth brushes. They perched above the tower of curling magazines on the toilet tank lid.

The sewing room, of course. They were on the table, beside the machine and a solar system of stick pins. 

In the small room on the front of the house, that’s where I found the strongest prescription, lying on the small dresser that spanned the space between the wall and the edge of the narrow, single bed. Everyone slept in that bed eventually.

Damp patch

Now there are clear mornings. When I pull back the drapes from the corner, the window that opens reveals a lightness in the sky that we never see. There is no pink as the sun rises. No orange, no heat. The ink of the blue only thins on the horizon. Like the runoff from that indigo pot.

I thought of it yesterday when I was talking to her about doing things you aren’t sure you should do; like going to live in other places for a while, with other people, in the hopes that new things can be made. Of course you can make things in the place where you are but there are moments when invitations can be answered for journeys to be taken. She said that the house she was given was unbearably cold—a confrontation in a cold January—being cold made her tense, she said. She wrapped my shawl around her waist; she wore one pair of pants atop another. The situation I dreaded before arriving there was that I could not sleep. They provided me a private room in the shared apartment across the hall from the shared bath. It was comfortable and clean and directly above the town tavern that stayed open until the early morning. I thought about leaving but that was before walking up hill, before breakfast with strangers and before the runoff from that dye pot. 

I just found a damp patch in the corner of our bedroom. It’s right near the floor, where the east wall meets the south. It isn’t a leak; it’s developing from within. The cold that comes with this new sky has altered the possibilities in the interior and there is even a bit of mildew growing. Last year the conditions just weren’t right, I guess.

Cutting with a dull blade

Don’t think that pressure will change things. It won’t.

It’s hard to remember the last cut. Certainly on those two tables pressed together in the dining room bay window, light in the morning if there was any to be had and through the funnel of the rear hall in the afternoon. That cutting mat was taped down to stop it from sliding. Pressure was a problem then too.

It’s easier to remember all of the actions made to bind things together. At the sewing table in the window that overlooked the island of stones, overlooked by the boughs of the cedar that got scary in the wind—edges round, straight, smooth and rough—then standing with the machine atop a makeshift box in the bay window again. Better light when there was any and a lighter bodily burden too.

There are two extra blades left in the box even thought it looked like one, bound together with grease applied to keep them apart. Remove the time with the grease. The blade beneath is still fresh, its body intact. Up to the task. Pressing threads apart until they break.

Just now the cutting mat slid a bit. The new meter stick has its own backing but the mat just takes it along. It’s the pressure. I applied too much.

Sleep story

We had no mattress when we got there. We left the old one behind in the apartment made of glass. The new owner was hurrying us out. The old mattress needed transport to the dump. I have a van. I’ll do it. My renter wants in. It was lying there on the floor when we pulled the door closed for the last time. Years of sleep or the equivalent.

The small house was unbearably hot when we arrived so it wasn’t so terrible to sleep the floor. We had an air mattress but it was precarious. He leaned in to kiss my forehead and gave me a black eye. We went to the store with the nice mattresses shortly thereafter. This was what I would spend the prize money on: a mattress made of latex that I would have for life. This is what my accomplishments could afford me: sleep at night. Rest for my left hip and his right shoulder. A mattress made of latex with a merino wool cover that resisted dust mites and bedbugs. Protection from calamity, awake and at rest.

I slept beautifully on that mattress. Truly, it was the best I have ever slept, even while waking life escalated daily with absurdity in the name of education. Our bodies sank into it at the end of each day and remained thus, unconscious and undisturbed until we heard cardinal song or commuter traffic. While we worked, it quietly re-established its form, expanding to fill pits born by our heaviest and pointiest parts. It was always remade by evening.

When I was pried from that house in late September, the complimentary mattress bag provided by the movers was insufficient. It was thin, foggy and had obviously been used to hold inferior mattresses. This isn’t good enough I said before driving away and crying in a parking lot. I hope you survive this a neighbour said before waving goodbye. On the other side of the country, at another small house the mattress reappeared as resilient as ever. That bedroom was cold and damp but it proved resistant to this too. It held its form but never the dust, even as I laundered a hundred meters of unbleached cotton. He propelled himself through one bad job and two better and I made soft things for long journeys. We always slept well at night except that Christmas Eve but it wasn’t the mattress’ fault. This is a mattress for life, I told myself. You earned it with your accomplishments. No one can take that away from you.

Of all the things left behind, this is the heaviest burden.

Endnote

Actually, it was hardly manageable. 

When the delivery truck arrived, the driver—knowing, cheerful—used his hydraulic lift and a dolly to steer it towards the front porch. There, the compact package pitched forward like a tall cedar and he shoved it—firmly, forcefully—up two shallow steps. Then he left. 

We pushed it together from the porch door, through the kitchen on its side and steered it to the bottom of the staircase. We were damp from effort and the unexpected resistance but still enthused because finally, it was happening; finally, we’d have something we wanted and worked for and desperately needed. Finally we’d have relief from everything we’d put up with and more than relief, we would possess something of real value. But we couldn’t get it up the stairs. 

The weight was surprising. I pulled. He pushed. It demanded further accommodation. We removed the railing from the staircase. We both got under it. We put on our shoes. We each used a shoulder against its rolled end and entire mass and climbed one tread at a time. We pressed our arms against the walls like braces. We rested, stuck in the shaft of upward motion, unable to control it or get out of the way if we lost our grip. It took so much time. There was investment in every step. 

We tipped it—finally—up like a lever onto the respite of the top floor. This was where we intended it to be. We slit its bindings carefully and stepped back as it unfurled in space, taking over the area we had dreamed of it filling. Silently, it expanded for two days and two nights. We watched together from our inferior position on the floor, coveting fulfilment but wary of its capacity to crush and bruise.

Perspective

I see you.

I looked and there he was, framed by the highest window.

Hard of hearing

I heard the harmony again in the chorus. On the inside of my ear, not the outside.

No one taught me to sing harmony. I could just hear it, but then suddenly it was gone. It was around the time that we lived in the place with the front porch that I loved and the peonies whose hearts bled fuchsia. They exploded out of the ground almost as soon as the snow melted but that was the way that it was there: a tyranny of ice followed by a tsunami of sweat. When I try to recall the moment I stopped hearing the harmony inside of my ear, it’s that street that I remember: seven houses long on our side with the small apartment block on the end closest to the river whose surface burst in the spring. They laid dynamite all over it.

I am walking toward the river when I realise for the first time that I am hearing everything differently. I’m on my way to do the thing that I was convinced was mine to do and I felt—wanted—willed that this was the way to do it but I couldn’t find harmony anymore, inside of my ear. Not with my headphones in the heavy heat nor teetering up the ice. Not while working in my studio with the stereo up loud, alone or close to the others. You’re having a good time in there, the undergrad painter said without any envy. I was having a good time but I couldn’t hear harmony.

All this time that I haven’t heard harmony on the inside of my ear, not the outside, I’ve been apologising for things that weren’t worthy of apologies or criticism, like earnestness, ambition or enjoying the colour pink. Ten years of apologies, building up like a sheet of ice. It’s so thick that it looks like it’s frozen all the way through. I get that people think that but down below, at the bottom, there is movement. The workers who lay the dynamite know it. They know when they release the charge that there will be something left to carry away the pieces.

I heard the harmony again on Wednesday afternoon. On the inside of my ear, not the outside. It was the low register, the one the never strains my voice. I was washing residue out of the kitchen sink. Chunks of cauliflower had created a blockage. I picked the big ones out with my fingers and let the inconsequential disappear in the current.

Endurance

The laundry smells of stale sweat when it’s damp.

It started at the old house.

Subsequent washes cannot make it clean.

Dry heat

And now the air is thick. Just yesterday I said that it hadn’t changed. It was still fluid, like water rushing in a spring thaw but now, it has density. I am pushing it around in the ways that I know how, trying to thin it out.

I remembered this now. After decades of dry heat in a house without air conditioning, she told me that the solution was closure. Closure as long as there was daylight. All of the openings must be shut. Windows. Doors. Skylights. Vents. Everything must remain dark within a house until darkness arrives without. A household in the heat of summer must ignore the day until the night. Then it can open up.

Last night it was light until past 11. Darkness retreated again before 4. Four hours cannot dissolve what twenty has thickened.

Cuttings

No one needs ten cuttings of the same plant. Eleven if you count the tiny stub. Yes, they’re all living. I cut them with my new Olfa blade.

Their raw edges are healed now. If I place one in a glass of damp soil on the window ledge, white filaments will appear in ten to fourteen days time.

But honestly, that’s more than I can manage. I don’t have ten glasses.