Heartbeat, Lovely, Infallible - March 31, 2011

This spring, we will handcraft our home.
   
    We’ll start with a library. The shelves will be made from the wood of the dead trees in the backyard. The trees where the holes are deep and hollow, hiding owls and worms. Holes large enough to hide you if you wanted the solitude.  You can saw them down tenderly, your apologies with every pull of the blade. We can leave flowers on the stumps, so they have company when their branches are bracing our books. And on the shelf, we’ll place the lions and wardrobes, a yellow-brick road. On the shelf, we’ll keep a wizard’s seven souls, a sleeping Mortimer. Literature of childhood.
   
    I’ll sow a rug of mismatched socks to lie on. The one’s that were found at the bottom of the basket with no mate. Lonely socks with no use for our feet. I’ll bond them together with yellow thread, you’re favourite color.
   
    You’ll make snow globes out of the empty bottles of past celebrations and fill them with sea water from the pacific. Where you promised we’d go when we were greener, richer. I’ll shake the globes and they will rain eyelashes. Every wish we’d ever made.
   
    We’ll lay the floor with your laminated notes. Things you swept under my desk in school. Post-it’s you stuck to the refrigerator in the mornings before work. Letters you mailed to me the months you were gone. Maybe-when she learns to crawl- she’ll learn to read by sticking to these floors. She’ll learn all the words her father said. Especially, permanent, curses, lonesome, imperfect, heartbeat, lovely, infallible.
   
    In the summertime , when the birds are finally singing and the flowers are making you sneeze, this house will be finished. Winter will have been long forgotten.

The End

-Kortnee Tilson