The toilet angled sideways, the doorways hung low. The door sagged on its hinges and the old wooden beams that made up the ceiling, they were slanted too. Everywhere you looked, there was something to see: a white patterned fabric on the windows, a collection of prints along the walls. Copper pots, old wooden clocks, the dining room table that was hard to move and the spinning lazy Susan with its lace and its pepper grinder, chocolates wrapped in foil. Everywhere the past, met by the unbearable richness of the present. Creaking floors, crinkling sounds of wrapping paper and bows. The lushness of life surrounds us moving meal to meal, some napping too. A coffee with Eberhard in the morning before he goes, showing me X-Rays of his back on the phone. No more staying up all night drinking whiskey and beer, playing guitar. A lemon in my water is as far as I go. A walk past the church as the clock tolls and then the cemetery, studying the names on the rocks. Down past the school, a young family by the playground slide, the little girl crouched at the top looking down—and me not looking back but grinning to myself thinking, this drawing of life.

Categories: prose, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, Memoir