Calling Home

Yesterday, I called home. Perhaps the ringing echoes of that dial tone stirred the gingham curtains of autumn-leaf and rice-paper hue as it merged with the waltz of the wind. Perhaps those trilling notes scattered over the time-worn varnish of the parquet floor where life, life, life used to tread. Perhaps the sky beyond the windowpanes were impossibly blue, impossibly, impossibly—for colours change in memory. Indeed, I could hear no dial tone when I called. Silence bridged the spaces of time, and in that silence my mother, her hair still black as ravens’ wings, wiped her hands on the front of her speckled shirt and left the golden, olive pears bobbing in the kitchen basin to answer the phone. Her footsteps padded softly across the wooden floor; she was careful not to step on the creaky panels for I—small, hand curled by my cheek—was asleep on the green leather couch. Perhaps my mother smiled, wondering how the ringing phone had not woken me, or perhaps she was thinking only of the pears still bobbing in the basin. The phone stopped ringing. Slightly perplexed, slightly bemused, my mother shrugged and turned away, eyes flitting over my sleeping form to see that my blanket was still tucked over my shoulders. Indeed, the phone had stopped ringing because I, hearing only silence on the line, had ended the call. I did not know if I had expected an answer. Perhaps yes, but then again, no. Yet silence had suffused the veil of memory, stirred the winds of time. My eyes were misty under the winter sky, half a world away from where that house used to be, and a lifetime away from home. Indeed, the parquet floors had been torn up, the curtains no longer billowed in the morning wind, and no pears would grow again in that sunlit garden behind the kitchen, for like those mornings, house and home had ceased to be long ago. But no, that was not quite right. Not quite right, I mused, eyes sparkling, for I had just called home.