New Hobbies

I've taken up baking cookies recently. Today I'm trying out chocolate chip cookies with pecans and coconut flakes. Should be good!

I'm watching Whip It for the second time. Love me some Ellen Page.

The Last Vase

It was the end of March, and so the beginning of spring. He had rearranged the living room furniture and vacuumed the rug. He was taking things off of the mantel and bookcase to be dusted. Lydia was upstairs folding laundry and Adam appreciated that.

When he heard glass break, his mind made a list of possibilities as to what could have happened. When he made for the kitchen, he decided that the dog must have bumped into a table nosing around for a crumb of human food, since Lydia was in their bedroom. But he had walked in only to see Lydia standing opposite him, behind the counter, tears wetting her face.

Then Adam covered the distance between them and looked down at the jagged remains. Strewn across the floor like tiny yellow diamonds were fragments of his mother’s vase, reflecting shapes of amber light onto the white linoleum. He had moved it from the fireplace mantel to the kitchen in the midst of spring cleaning and forgotten to put it back.

His mother had given him the vase at Christmas a few years ago, before rheumatoid arthritis took away her creative abilities. “It’s my last work of genius,” she had said.

Adam found Lydia’s tear-filled eyes with his; they were hard on hers.
He signed “What did you do?”
She responded with rapid-fire hand gestures.
“It wasn’t my fault.” What Adam could convey with words, she could only say with her hands.
“What happened?” Adam asked. Lydia didn’t answer; she just wiped her face on her sleeve.

He did this a lot: overlooked the fact that Lydia had to see his lips moving if he wasn’t going to sign his words. He’d always faced her when communicating, until a few years ago when he didn’t have to anymore. He knew reading lips wasn’t something all deaf people could do, not automatically anyway. It took time and effort. It took courage; a quality Adam admired in Lydia.
He asked her what happened again, signing this time while she watched.

“I don’t know.” Her hands paused as if they were waiting for Lydia to finish her thought, as if they were like they were interpreting her thoughts like extensions of the mind. “The dog was standing behind me and I couldn’t see her. The next thing I knew she ran out in front of me. I was holding the vase and she startled me. That’s when I dropped it.”
“Now what are we supposed put our flowers in?”
“We can buy another vase.”
“I don’t want to keep on buying them. That didn’t have to be the last of the two that came before it.”
“I don’t do these things on purpose.”
“What were you doing with it anyway? I thought you were upstairs folding clothes.” His hands overlapped one another.
“I wanted a drink. When I saw the vase on the counter I picked it up. I love your mother’s work.” Adam balled his hands up into fists and let out an audible groan. Lydia could only study his clenched fingers.
“Shit, Lyd!”
“It was an accident! I can’t exactly help it.”

If Lydia said this, Adam would have heard the aggravation in her voice. Instead she had a set of hand gestures: a pivot of the wrist or sweeping hand that traveled clockwise and then pointed straight at you.

Adam knew she felt bad about breaking another vase and badly because he was judging her. He knew she would feebly plead with him to stop.

“We’ve been over this enough, Lydia. You have options.” He adjusted the piece of plastic in his ear. “The dog used to startle me too.”
“We can afford another vase, ten more if we need.”
Adam shook his head. “Why? So you can break those too?”
“You’re such an asshole.”
“Oh, give me a break. I’m only being honest.”
“I mean it.” She signed each letter this time. “A-S-S-H-O-L-E.”
“Please, Lydia. Help me out a little,” he said.
“You can help me…clean this up.”

Adam got the broom and dustpan, and Lydia brought the dog upstairs so she wouldn’t try to eat the glass. With each pass of the broom he thought about his mother. Emptying the last of the vase into the trash, he thought about how Lydia should listen to him more. Then he stared at the bits of yellow glass swallowed up by the black trash bag and thought that they looked like stars in the night sky.