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.

Fractions

What’s your strategy, he asked, not noticing the difference between the piles distributed over the ironing board and upstairs railing. There are no more wholes. All of the wholes became halves. This was essential, to move it away from the thing that it was toward an unknown other future thing. Some of the halves were enough; they did not ask for more so those halves became a pile. Some of the halves were more demanding; they could not remain as halves. It was clear they would make trouble in pairs, or worse, they would do nothing more than lie around. So the lie abouts, they had to become quarters.

Some of these quarters are so well behaved. They are all together, congenial and relaxed. These are the modest pile closest to the water heater. They are content there, pressing one another’s seams flat in indirect light. But the rest of the quarters—too many of them, frankly—are on the worktable, in the workroom where the door can be closed. There is no where else for them to be. They won’t stop shouting. They won’t relax. They certainly won’t cooperate.

So here is the strategy: there are halves and quarters and now there must be some eighths.

New Year

I imagine one without strength to go outdoors. I imagine another watching the electrical box outside her studio window. I see one, looking from great windows into boreal forest, waiting for it to be consumed in white. Another, in a suburb with a long commute, calculates the accumulation in extra time while another—older, earned—cashes it in for sleep and books.

The epiphany was that we each have our confrontations.

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.

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.

Confession

What is it, I asked.

We’ve been sleeping on your mattress.

Stemless and leafless

She was folded into the rear corner, the one where the courtyard window and the china hutch meet.

May I use your eyes, she asked, holding out a small plate. What do you think of this painting here in the centre. I think the colour has been applied over the glaze.

The plate was a small, modified square, its corners docked and gently rounded. Along the edges were small flourishes, slate grey applied on bright white. I ran my fingers over them and detected a subtle relief.

No, she said. That was there from the beginning. I mean the flowers.

The flowers were simple petals in an assortment of ceruleans. The centres were rendered with dark dots, stemless and leafless. They floated across an invisible horizon. False colours on false forms. I ran my finger over them. I felt nothing of substance and said so.

It’s clear to me that someone painted these flowers over an existing, completed plate, she continued. At first I thought my eyes were playing a trick but I have my glasses on. I can see very clearly that this was a diversion. Someone added this. They weren’t content with what was there.

I said that I found it charming, especially for so little. She retreated to the corner.

I don’t care about the price. I’m just wondering who had the last word.

Sleep talk

I keep talking to you in my sleep. Last night I was trying to explain to you that it was my crippling self-awareness that did this. I don’t have any naïveté about it left. I lost that a long time ago but it took longer for the optimism to vacate. When you have a good rest and the sky is clear on either side, optimism grows but it’s a bit like pond scum. The sun made it from the miracle of micro-organisms but what is pond scum really doing for you? It hangs out where you wish it wouldn’t. It takes the reflection out of the waterline. It obscures where grassland begins and ends. It can make something look solid that isn’t. It can diminish a healthy fear of sinking.

This is the thing I was trying to make you understand during our sleep talk. You kept looking at me like I was choosing wrong, that I was killing something that deserved to live. When I woke, I looked up the number of grasses that grow here and found that there are more than 150 varieties with exponentially more variants. They are all blooming now and their pollen collects on our window screens and ledges. It’s residue with promise.

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.