The noticing

Mom and I walked out before dinner. Dad was finishing a meeting in the car. The bookstore we wandered through before heading out to the windy vastness was quiet; smelling like fire and full of summer reads, Christmas gifts, handmade cards ready to be written and sent.
Outside there was a jasmine bush that smelled so exquisite, Mom and I stuck our faces in the branches. I drank a peach cosmo in a booth upstairs, we wandered through the aisles of Giant looking for the perfect dessert. When we drove up to the house it was cloudy and quiet, November stretched out above the roofline in a cape of chimney smoke and darkness like fur. There was a single light lit on the porch so we weren’t completely encompassed in darkness as we entered. Once inside, we sat and ate cookies complaining that they were too crunchy. I felt my siblings there, though they were not physically-a different kind of light left on.
I go to bed these days thinking about if I am going to be the kind of women who only has jewel toned velvet couches or a blue and white striped couch with floral pillows. I don’t know yet what it will look like. But I think I will have a sweet dog who sleeps on a big pink pillow. She doesn’t bite and she wears a collar with a little gold name tag. She loves to nap next to me while I read. And I have bookshelves full of books upon books and Boston ferns. Perhaps there’s a big wooden kitchen table with oddly shaped vases, Twinkle lights and easy rugs. A front porch swing, a back patio, my childhood dollhouse sitting in the front window facing out and a light on the inside to welcome me home. So the darkness doesn’t completely encompass me before I get to the safety of inside.