The entire house, every nook, every corner smells like roasting pork. The sun is pouring through the curtains and early in the morning, he rises up mumbling about needing to put the pig in the oven. I have a foggy memory of yesterday’s purchases; one roasted pork with gandules for us and one to prepare for his friends at work. This is his area, the preparing of the meat and the rotund pots full of gandules (rice and beans) and the plates of thinly sliced tomatoes and the deep fried tostones with the ketchup and mayonnaise sauce. It’s his home away from home and I partake of it gladly.
Early mornings are time to savor rich strands woven into our life’s fabric. I pad around the house, searching out books, pens and a notebook and the slippers which forever elude me upon first seeking. They have a world of their own, these slippers. On occasion, they rest under the couch watching the news or listening to our conversations. Somedays, they wander off to one of the upstairs bathrooms having been tossed aside after the owner’s shower. They hear the neighbors outside, the two little ones playing at being pirates in the backyard, even though the children are small and fragile as blond glass and live as harmlessly as the tiniest white butterflies still flitting around the edges of the windows, after our first frost. They are hopeful creatures, our neighborhood pirates, my slippers and the butterflies.
After the hard freeze of Friday evening, he states with sad conviction, “It’s time to get out the flannel sheets”. The air is brilliantly cold and I slept the deepest sleep in a long while. We relish deep rest which comes from sleeping in cold air. It is difficult to describe but it is delicious. It is security. We doff our caps to outdoor creatures soon seeking similar shelter under woodland covering, bundles of hay, weeping willows and for the smaller creatures, the safety of small rocks, wet and mashed leaves and the fallen log. Covering is woven tightly into my mind and spirit and experience.
One summer when visiting family in Hawaii, I was shown my bed and aside from the fitted sheet, it was bare. I was informed I had no need of any blanket or even a flat sheet. I could not understand it. “Surely I will need at least a flat sheet?” My cousin, having been raised in Michigan, understood my reluctance and in the end, gave me a top sheet which I duly flung aside by early morning. She was right. In that tropical climate, there was no need for covering. I did not need the warmth but all the same, I felt unattached and disconnected. The temperature readings on the weather report were the same, varying perhaps a degree or two for days at a time. I stepped outside the home and saw a variety of creatures clinging elegantly to the stucco walls and I knew that everything was in an upside down world. They sought cover underneath their bodies. I needed it on top of my limbs.
I am sorry to launder and pack away the ocean blue linen sheets. They performed splendidly in the summer. I lay awake and pretended I was in the Caribbean watching lizards on the wall, eating pineapple freshly cut, believing the temperatures would remain the same for the next ten days. Now I have re-committed to flannel. Autumn leaves and branches are woven into the fabric of this bedding and soon the kitchen candles change from pineapple cilantro to pumpkin harvest and homestead apple and another page turns in our book and I will be more savagely on the lookout for errant slippers and a thicker robe.
690 Saint Paul 