When she sits at the kitchen table while she talks her hands seem to balance in the air faithful at the level of her words; she is careful what she says. The morning sun through the window strikes her skin, shows how the faint lines in her palms will come to deepen like corduroy cloth to fit the weather of her age. Still a young women, she has to work the grave yard shift, sleeps what is left, then wakes to get the kids to school. It must be morning when she dreams. Peering into her coffee’s surface she looks back from it’s depths, her hands caught holding an implement, a fossil of her life: Alabama born, feelings huddled north, these steel cities this cold month, her dark soul twisting into fingers whose motion at this brown angle is the slow fall flight of leaves through time. And she rises with the gesture, and the oil in her hands is necessity’s sweat: each hand on the tabletop a work cloth rubbing the other fine wooden one.
These steel cities, this cold month abandoned and left to rust and the men and women who gave them life and vitality cast aside like the slag and scale from the steel they so proudly made.
Have a great weekend family Peace, Tenthltr2u