Seed Across Snow

Keeping Words

26 Keeping Words It stopped their bickering cold in the back seat, when I turned, fingertips on temples, and screamed, “My god you’ve got to stop! You’re giving me a splitting hairbrush!”we laughed all the way through Georgia. But a few months later, during spring cleaning, my husband stood in the dark mouth of the attic and stared below in disbelief. What? I asked sharply, just hand down the damned bird cage and let’s get on with it. The bird cage! I bellowed and stamped at his lack of comprehension, then gently, he dropped into my hands the scalloped and pink, twostoried , iced like a birthday cake, Barbie dollhouse. Thanks, I huffed. Sheesh! My doctor says it’s nothing, that like a lot of women my age I do not sleep enough to find the right words, that I should accept a birdcage as a dollhouse, take solace in the fact I know she’s not a plumber. and I do. and I realize, too, that the stainless steel halo screwed to my neighbor’s head is not a halo, 27 nor is it an astronaut’s helmet, keeping her safe for her next airless journey, nor is she placed here merely to prove someone’s worse off than me. and ketchup is not blood though it is rich and sweet, and a key is not a pencil, though they both waggle in crooked places. and the small green pond at the front door does not hold fan-tailed koi, but cheap goldfish who are not in a womb. and my newly teenaged son was not, cannot, will not, but is actually magnificent, and my daughter did have a dollhouse, beat-up and crayon stained, and dragged to the curb where it slumped for three days, not like bird cage, not the sort, anyway, that I’d want to keep her in. That cage would be painted purple and have a safe trapeze. and my body is not a temple, but asylum; though my home is a church and when I wake in the morning and look into the face of my husband, he is my lover, for who could not be mad about a man who resignedly handed down a dollhouse when his wife demanded a birdcage. when I look at him, I remind myself to make labels, stick them 28 in my favorite books, in a jar of precious saffron threads, on the watercolor of Matisse’s view over nimes, a clean and tidy attic, all those and other gifts he’s given to me. The labels will all read husband, husband ...