I've had this image in my head a lot lately and it's too boring and maybe too much of a bummer to share in real life. There's no point at the end of this post, just the transmission of a thought to words. I keep thinking about two very differnt moments with a particularly scratchy brown and red blanket that was in my house growing up as far back as I remember. Truthfully, I always thought it was ugly. I think it was a gift to my mom from her on again, off again, but like a lot of my memories, most of the people who could verfiy details are gone. I fill in a lot based on old pictures and the swings of my perimenopausal hormones. It was usually on the back the couch, but when she washed it, Mom would drape it over two parallel clothes lines in the backyard, which made a kind of tunnel that was long enough to run through and dark enough to make a little girl's Indiana Jones games come to life. In my memory, I can feel that rush, imagining being chased and feeling relief when I got to the light at the end. I can only imagine what it looked like from nextdoor. "There's that little girl tearing ass through the laundry again." Many moves and couches later, she still had the blanket. Time changes all things, but it had forgotten the brown and red blanket, which was as stiff and scratchy as ever. When my Mom got very sick, it was one the blankets she kept on her bed. By the end, the bed had become a self-contained world with medications, old pictures, cigarettes, prayer cards and Amazon packages for two little boys she wouldn't know for much longer. On the day she moved to the hospice facility, I packed her bag like she was going on a weekend trip. I knew she wasn't coming back, knew she wouldn't need anything ever again, but I guess our silly humanness doesn't get too hung up on reality. One of the things I packed, as I'm sure you guessed, was the brown and red blanket. I laid it over the sterile white sheets where she spent her last three days. When she died, they came to clear the room and asked if I wanted it. I said no. In that moment, I couldn't imagine wanting anything in that room. As I said, there's no point to this story. Sometimes I wish I had kept the blanket. If I did, it would be the thing I had the longest in my life, which has to count for something considering how little connection I have to any people or places from before the age of about twenty two. I could put on the back of my own couch. On the other hand, it was brown and red and really very scratchy.