The Two Chairs On The Lawn

The night I could not sleep

I lay awake that night and I will tell you what I thought about.

I thought about Donald’s fifty dollars.

Not about me, not really. I have been overlooked before and I will be again, that is the ordinary weather of being somebody’s mother for a long time. You stop expecting the fuss.

But Donald counts his pills in half. And Harold’s nephew remembered a trailer hitch from twenty years back and wanted to say thank you with two twenty-dollar bills. Those people had reached into thin wallets and handed my children money in good faith, and my children had taken it and told them the old folks were too tired.

That was the part I could not lie flat under.

Around two in the morning I got up, because there is no use fighting a bed that does not want you, and I went and sat in the dark kitchen. And I looked at my kitchen chairs.

We have four. They came from Harold’s mother. They are plain oak, the seats worn pale where fifty years of us have sat, one of them with a wobble Harold keeps meaning to glue. My chair and his chair and two that mostly hold folded laundry.

I sat there and I thought: we do not need a lodge.

We did not get married in a lodge. We got married in a plain little room with a plank floor, and I wore my aunt’s dress taken in at the waist, and my bouquet was mums out of my mother’s bed because it was October and that is what October gives you.

We did not need three thousand dollars then. We had promised each other the whole of our lives on nothing but our own two voices.

And I thought: I can still do that. Nobody has to give me permission. Nobody has to book a hall.

I went back to bed and I slept like a stone.