the little blue flowers have appeared again, taste-testing, unrolling
themselves, like pillbugs in the palm of a very still hand and you can
see them through the window in the kitchen with its curtains that smell
of cooking oil and have been untouched for years – throaty with dust
and keeping little moths of light within their folds. in the kitchen with grandma
I knead dough. breathing, swelling, rising warm and bloated like love-thoughts
and I let it slug through my fingers and get under my fingernails.
grandma has little patches of flour along her jaw and she kneads
the dough by pressing her entire weight into it and hums
songs I don't recognize.
soon the entire house is filled with the smell of yeast and rising dough
and we cover the five loaves with moist handtowels, like the foreheads
of sick children, and for an hour or so the bread murmurs and stirs
and lifts. the petunias that grandpa picked for grandma cluck in their vase
and poke their heads around curiously and I watch her hands as she picks up
the recipe cards and turns the dials on the oven – it is as if her hand has shrunken
under her skin, the cold bones growing closer together for heat, small
and ordered neatly, like teaspoons in a drawer. they shake,
and she talks to me about her family history, naming names of strangers, calling
them nanna and uncle lyle and talking about their love stories and their
small tragedies. I watch grandpa outside pruning the petunias, snipping their
grand, ballroom blossoms, surrounded by harems of bees, bees that you sidestep
and work around and talk quietly around. the oven and the loaves of uncooked
bread are ready and we place them in ovens and when they come out
they are lovely and warm and it is almost a sin to eat the fresh bread
with jam or butter, but only on its own, in thick slices, and plenty of them.
I sit on the porchsteps and I eat
and grandpa moves among the blossoms like
a neighbor among the quiet, useless antiques in a yard sale.
