Knots
Not sure how a forty-year-old blanket
survives,
but it does —
its outer pastel print
enveloping
thin layers
within itself
that still hold.
You see the layers
when you raise the blanket up
and a lamp reveals
the patchwork of its soul.
Bright cartoon faces on
a child’s old bed sheets
washed and stored by a grandma
who knew their worth, even
when my brother moved on to spaceships.
Because she knew moving on
is not about the
senseless shedding
of memories —
ones that warm you and anchor you to this earth.
With bent fingers, she sewed the layers and
knotted them tight
with soft pink yarn
to keep everything in place.
A portable piece of home.
I packed it up before I left.
Just be careful at the university, mijita.
You might meet some handsome guy who takes
you away from here, she said, grinning. Mischievous.
How did she know?
The blanket became his for a time.
He needed it.
It would travel rolled up on the top of his pack,
a pastel oddity in the rain forests
where we started.
Odd—
but even warm places can have a
chill during times when there is no light.
It traveled year after year.
Apartment to apartment.
Finally, to a house where it
wraps our daughter
in its hidden faces.
Now she is the one who holds it up
to the light.
My grandma is gone,
but she is here because
the hands that made
our bread, our chile, our spaghetti
secured the knots in the blanket
to make each one stronger than the winds that
came down
from
the mountains
and blew the sagebrush this way and that.
To prepare this blanket for
the miles ahead.
