Lovey

I brought a potato into my bed tonight because I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about the crusted soil and the mica flecks and the warm sun on the necks of my children as we harvested it. I even drought the paper bag, torn flat and made doubly useful to cure my precious potatoes. But the basket, trying to contain laundry all needing to be folded but put off and forgotten so now it ought to be ironed, stares primly from the foot of the bed. I know what it's thinking: tasks put off multiply.

Cliche.

My knee is being corrugated by coloring books. We have stacks of coloring books. Pre-formed imaginings. I had planned to put them in the basket with the rest, but we have so many my oversight doesn't matter.

A butterflies and bubbles blanket, lies on the corner of my bed almost covering my first outfit of the
day. An energized pocketed sheath dress I discarded it for an extra large t-shirt that reads, "Hey, Let's Go Do Fun Stuff." I should have. Done fun stuff, or at least less stuff, because my four-year old wanted that blanket when I hustled her into bed, and I was too played out and weary to care.

"I want my soft blanket." She howled in a voice that would curdle milk.
"Ok, Annabel. If I see it, I'll bring it up." I snapped--just like curdled milk.

I didn't look for it. I was anxious to be done so I could craft elegance about my snotty, home-grown #homeschool potato.

My grandma made the blanket. It's flannel and horribly mint and mauve. Well, it was. Now it's fading to the color of a thousand nights of reassurance. The short seam Grandma hand sewed after she turned the "right-sides together" out to face the world came loose a couple years ago. Probably before her funeral.

Turns out, I can't really write about the potato, smelling of our fill-dirt life or describe the rollicking joke it was to find the huddled potatoes hiding under the tangles of tired, yellowing leaves, because I really must take this bubble gum pink monster-shield up to my tiny girl. She's asleep already, but I'll whisper my sorry to her and maybe tomorrow we will find time to remember the garden snake that made us giggle and dance around the second potato plant. Just us girls.