Oh, to Grandmother's house we go!!

The sleeping woman had never seen her flowers lit by a midnight moon, but they stood before the sleet-gray flood with faces upturned as if this were nothing. This whole place of deep, soft carpet and Parisian floral scents had been similarly neglected, and still its ethereal shapes wore on into their existence. From the streaming light at the wall-swallowing window, the room's only furniture was revealed: the form of a tiny wooden chair; the outline of a delicately curving vanity, itself bathed in the semi-light of its looking-glass reflection; the dark queen bed, furthest and harboring the sound of thick breathing—all these things dressed scarcely in silver and shadow.

To abandon this room through its squeaking, sliding door would be to embark along a corridor that doesn't end past the dark wood suddenly lining the walls. Rather the tight, column of space is further emulated by the back of black sofas and the face of dark desks. With each imagined step the wooden floor beneath feet would whine a painstaking sigh in their course through the room and lead to a tiled kitchen. Only the impression of the hulking furniture would remain in a further venturing of the lightless house, and the dusty cold would seem an everlasting scent. Eventually, the single light source infiltrating the glass pane of a lumbering door, set away in a northern corner, would prove too overwhelming to deny.

Stepping outside, the undulating wheat grass was brilliant as it swayed protectively from the glowing walls of our house to the lofty barn a few hundred yards away, reaching beyond them to disappear into the hollow skyline. Only the warm smell of the trees, succinct in the cold darkness, bearing both fresh and rotting versions of avocados, figs, tangerines, and kumquats, tolerantly mingling with the almonds, walnuts, and pecans among them, gave witness to the whispering of the endless fields. These sights, here under moonlight, were the house's idea of a neighborhood.

From the stars' perspective this house would not appear distinct. Only a few acres beyond it was another, and past that one, still another; strangely boxy things stretching out into the hundreds. Each was free to fancy itself alone, masked by its own tall grasses, and virtually all of them do during these quiet hours. Together, their mistaken claim on township is made nonetheless in earnest.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (4/15/07)