Making Lace

The Saturdays get cooler, and pass more easily: in quiet, eager attention to MLA style; in copying and pasting and annotating; in small, pleasing cyber-errands; in smug advisories to old flames on the quenching of new flames; in frying too many potatoes for one and fanning the insistent smell of burnt onions out the back window. I put the fan in the basement. I avoided reading Clarissa (I hear she dies).
I am winding my life, which had been wound around one solid, happy spool, around a series of small anchors. It is a task like tatting, patient, intricate. It can absorb if one calls upon it to do so; it can also be done with one eye on an open window or the flickering of old, recorded images. One must sit still and calm, and it seems to silently reproach any outbursts and flingings with the mess one has made of the threads and the measured time it will take to reweave them.