Bohemian Rhapsody

Before dinner Sabrina came upstairs and asked for an old shirt, a smock, in which to paint my Christmas present. I told her I had taken most of the shirts I no longer wore to the second hand store, but took her to my closet, in the bath area. I would find something.

"Is THAT your shower?!?" she asked.

"Yes," I replied.

"Is that the shower door?" she asked of the tan cotton draped across the inside of the keystoned doorway, concealing yet revealing the mottled brown stone walls behind.

There is no door, I told her. Just the curtain. "Don't you remember when we got the curtain rod and drapes at Fred Meyer?" I asked.

I watched the memory return, of the three of us in the curtain aisle of the home improvement section, selecting the rods, thinking about color. I watched the memory fit itself into the present, the pieces falling into place. "THAT's why we bought those?" she asked.

"You have to clean shower doors," she finally said.

"I will throw that in the washing machine," I replied.

I showed her the strange shower heads. The stone. She laughed her laugh of surprised joy. "I SO love this house. It is SO the red string," the abbreviated reference cementing K.C. 's metaphor into our family lexicon, that this steel sided barn house is a red string in a box full of gray string.

As to metaphors, K.C found another one in the truck after we left the coffeehouse on 14th Street late this afternoon. Laura the barista had made the girls some nice drinks, much better than the awful ones we had gotten earlier at the strip mall. Sabrina's Chai Tea was especially a disappointment, thin. K.C. said it was skim milk instead of whole milk.

"You mean really made with skim?" I asked her. She said no, just that it had no flavor.

I told her she had just come up with another metaphor, and she said, "I did, didn't I?" So on the way home we looked for cars that were skim milk, the Malibu's and Accords, and noted even people could be skim milk, or strong coffee.

We talked of people who were easy to see through, as though they were hiding in a water glass. K.C. laughed hard and sudden when she got that one.

The girls put up the lights and ornaments when we got home. K.C. said it was kind of cool having two trees to decorate.