When a moment in time is going to last forever, you just know it. |
Smoothing the clothespin wrinkles from a crisp cotton sheet that smells like damp grass after a violent thunderstorm, I lie in the crook of my husband’s arm on a sunny Saturday afternoon. All urgent pressing chores, they disappear and it is as if we’ve built a sphere around us, just the two of us, and the cat who lays under the dust ruffle sweeping under the bed with her tail as gris as the lambent shadows she paints on the gray weathered floor boards, playing with the tail end of an tangle of yellowed extension cords. You know, a mere moment in time that seems to last an eternity, that you produce from a few intangible seconds, just before you fall asleep, The kind of space you create with walls as substantial as gritty gray cinderblocks and the air so thick that even the ringing of the telephone can’t permeate, but the humming of the air conditioner can, rocking you to sleep as gently as a warm summer breeze in a smoothly swaying hammock suspended by hummingbirds. Sure, the roof needs mending, the garden needs tending, mail needs sending, money needs spending, because bills are pending, but this story, it has no ending. I breathe in his scent and burn it to the hard drive of my memory, a task and test to which there can be no failing. For 36 years I’ve laid in this very spot, watching my muddy brown hair turn gray, making reservations for this same indentation for ubiquitous eternities more. Sure, in the future we may be separated for a while by that black ditch of death, but I am confident that if we were to meet a hundred years from now, my gray hair stuck up in a bun, and my gray cat on my arm, my long gray skirt dragging the gray dust, wandering the murky gray twilight, on some unpaved, overgrown backwoods road, deep in the hills of West Virginia, where so long tarried my love and I, and I were deaf and also blind, still… his aroma would rekindle a spark of remembrance of this very moment in time, and I would plant a kiss square on his lovely lips and place into his outstretched hand what he’s been waiting for so long, the returning of his rib, so we could sleep in peace. |