09.02.2002 - 11:18 a.m.

On Saturday, after a two-hour drive in the rain, I was standing over the bed I grew up in. It's still the same two-sided comforter, spread pretty-side-down to hide the ink stains and that one blue smear of oil pastel, but it has guest sheets on it, now, and I've lost my good pillows to brothers. Instead, my bed has become the repository for the four or five reject pillows from the rest of the house, all in white guest pillow-cases, all somehow flat and lumpy at the same time.

Leaning up against them, arranged like magazines on a coffeetable, were two packages of underwear.

It's the right size, (moms always know your size) but the wrong cut. It's the kind that comes up inches past the top edge of jeans to the belly button, the kind that sent me on furtive solo trips to the mall once I had my licence and it became clear that my mom and I were not the only people who would ever see my underwear.

I can't ask her to return it, though. It just isn't done. Yes mom, you got the size right, thank you so much. How did you know I was running low? And she smiled, and I smiled back.

I am twenty-three years old. I have not lived in my parents' house for five years. My brothers are in the process of deciding whether my space would hold a pool table, and I think it will.

My mom just bought me underwear.

Family is the precarious stretch of elastic and yellow cotton rolled down four times to maintain the mystery: rosebuds or hearts?

-stonebridge

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