Keeping House So softly comes the snow now--each bough bowed with the long night's collection. You throw the curtains wide upon it and carry mugs of coffee back to bed. I watch you watch the weather and sip, silent as you or it, the whole house abrim with quiet in the absence of our daughter. Your long glance asks me how I am. I rock my hand, reluctant to cross the inches between us with speech. Words slide out from under feeling the way flesh fails to prove love however we try our poor tools of communion. Proof, if needed, lies elsewhere-- in this quiet perhaps, that serves to bind us now. If we are not made one, still we have made one, this girl who begins to move beyond our orbit. Such a mongrel of all our flairs and faults, she could be nothing else but the fruit of this long collaboration, all our collisions of body and mind made one. All that need be said is said, in her. Watching snow until the windows steam, we rise together and pad barefoot to the bathroom, gathering warm armloads of laundry to spread upon the bed. Will we come someday to silence absolute?-- the way we need no words to fold these sheets together, just so--our house all in order the girl has gone woman out into the world. © Dale R. Hobson. All rights reserved.