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Those Geese...
by Michelle McMillan-Holifield Their demure necks, ribboned in cornflower blue, dampened from crisp white to buttery yellow. Geese-bedecked dish towels that hung in the windows of my mother’s kitchen for over a decade. Eventually my father asked if it was time they bought new curtains. When we talk, my father and I, we talk about my mother. Some new task she’s set before him, some meal she refused him so he had a spam sandwich. He can’t finish a sentence for himself— she finds the words he wants. I chide: you’re going to have to put your . . . Foot down, he agrees. Once in my teens I told my mother to shut up. She shut up. Her controlled decorum not defeat, but wisdom that the memory of her silence would one day be worse than any beating. Last week, we found those dish towels in a feeble-bodied box in the attic. She hung them up, folds feathering over the sill. I whispered to my father: what about those. . . Geese? he finished. Oh, I guess they’re . . . Where they belong, she agreed from the other room. |
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