The Spare Room by Adrienne Jones
Here’s another one by Adrienne Jones, from Written in Stone.
The Spare Room By Adrienne Jones I slept for months on the floor in the lodge. It’s a large add-on with a big sectional couch a tv and native American decor, private and sonically detached. I’d vacuum the rug set up the airbed and hunker down. That was the year of two-hour commutes to band rehearsals and visiting with mom as her world shrank out of existence. Some nights I’d half-sleep with the door ajar, on edge to hear her bell. It doesn’t seem like a month since mom passed but the house has changed. The birds are in the lodge now, with the ring of metal cages and busy squawks. Mom’s room is spare again and the hospital bed is gone; the little daybed is back. I don’t want to sleep there. It’s not that it was the place of her last struggling months; it’s not that her clothes still dwell in the closet or that her ashes are in the pretty box on the highboy. I just want to sleep on the floor again like Crocodile Dundee. It’s one thing I can be sure of: the ground is always there. |
