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SENSE OF PLACE |
The kitchen floor was his place of solitude, a place where he could think and not be bothered.
SEEDLINGS by Jennifer Robinette
H
e says he remembers lying on the kitchen floor as a kid, staring up at the white textured ceiling, the coolness of the tiles seeping through his T-shirt. His mother
would step over him on her way to the refrigerator, phone to her ear. He lay there so often that she barely noticed him, which was perfect. The kitchen floor was his place of solitude, a place where he could think and not be bothered. Somehow he was invisible there, immune to his older brother’s misdirected rage and his parents’ arguing. Words like “family meetings,” “group counseling,” and “divorce” could not touch him there. He tells me this as we lie side by side in a corner of our own kitchen floor, bellies and knees pressed against the dirty linoleum. We are propped up on our elbows, peering down at our rows of peat pots, arranged close together to give the illusion of a tiny plot of earth. We planted the seeds a few days ago, and some are already beginning to sprout, mint-green and fragile, barely visible, pushing up from the artificial soil. They all look the same now, but in a few days they will already have begun to distinguish themselves. And in two months, when it should be warm enough to transplant them to our backyard, they will become what the labels on their packages, each now resting on the floor next to its proper row, proclaim them to be: lettuce, tomato, cucumber, larkspur, morning glory, and gourd. For now, though, it’s spring break, and six inches of snow cover the ground outside. From my position on the floor, I can see dusk out our front window. The bare, black tree branches criss-cross endlessly in front of the faux-Victorian 6
