A dizzy state of multiple dimension consciousness

Sheets, two under-sized, four sheets on the line, all white, half stolen from lost boxes, one like muslin, one linen, one is of a number of single soft almost woolly cotton with a diagonal grain originating from my grandmother Elizabeth’s “bottom drawer” 1929 [stuff that women collected for when they got married] On the other line, a crocheted bedspread also white with a few holes, that my grandmother Ruth had gotten a female acquaintance to make for her because she had admired the very much finer one that my mother had rescued from the burning of her Great Aunt’s effects and during my early life, it covered my parents’ bed. I was fascinated by the interconnecting web of strands of the finer version (now lost) and my age five exploration of it involved snipping through one of them with my mother’s nail scissors! Penetrating chastisement had come my way from my mother, who had no idea why I would ruin the thing, no understanding of how cutting one of the connections enabled me to feel the thickness and strength, the unravelling of fibres revealing something of how they had been interlocked and the sudden slackening of the patterned structure. I realised that in the “snipping” act, I had risked the peace of my own life and had tried to hide the scissors and cover the hole but soon she had caught me and I couldn’t tell her then, I believed her version that simply meant that I was wicked, I was deep in shame and forgot my own reasons and now I’m not going to bring it up because she will still be living in her definition of what happened and will trumpet the words “You were a Little Bugger!” and my explanation would be completely lost on her.

The following day finds me carrying the plastic washing basket across the road with the newly washed and dried bed-sheets and mattress cover, to the room – now guest room, with notions of Grandmother Ruth, who knew the cardinal importance of bedding in creating a professional room for paying guests. I have only surmised this because Gran told my child self, “I absolutely ALWAYS change the bedding between guests!”, I also remember her purchasing a roller iron specifically for bed-sheets, which was a thing like a huge electric heated mangle (there is something like it for finishing photographs) so the bed sheets went through and came out crisp and flat. There had been a discussion with my mother at the time, who was aghast at the thought of ironing bedding and must have missed the point of creating an assuring impression that the guest was about to enter sheets that had not been in contact with bodies of unknown others – since a very stiff washing procedure!
So I thought of my small Gran Ruth who spoke in an attempted gentrification of a cockney accent, as I tried to do a smart job of making the bed, though unlike when the actor came, I had not ironed the pillowcase and knew that Ruth’s job would have been harder, smarter, tighter and quicker than mine. However after laying her crocheted white bedspread (also washed) on top of the duvet, I decided to sew up the frayed parts where the crocheting had come undone or broken. I left and returned with white cotton, needle and scissors. I had realised that it would be possible to hone down upon the actual detail of the pattern and almost as quickly as an indiscriminate sewing up, I could reconstruct the pattern that had come undone! The three holes that I had at first noticed became about eight holes as I carefully traversed the surface. And yes, I was able to match up the pattern, which when finished and I looked at what it actually was, almost sent me into a dizzy state of multiple dimension consciousness because the tessellations consisted of four diamond shapes around a crossed intersection of horizontal and vertical lines, which ran the whole length of the plane of bedspread. In one way of looking, each four diamonds were wider than tall, but shifting to the next up by half a four cluster, the arrangement was four diamonds that were taller than wide! The shift was in a perceptual frame of reference and the only way to see a firm “reality” was to see the quilt as made up of squares (which is how it actually was constructed) and along the edge line internal to each of the four sides of the square, lay half a diamond!

Bus

Standing aside the dry sodium yellow empty road, harshly cold and quiet but for the wind, in dreaming time before the sun. Watching the body being awake and ready, watching another body’s journey wait. We look and listen into the distance. The tantalising light beyond the brink of the hill repeatedly suggests the presence of the bus, but this anticipation fails at least twenty times, looking and not growing into the familiar towering shape with lights. So many miss-registrations that the worrying idea that we are already too late pulls parts of the body that hold memory and thought-poisons into different configurations. 
We watch the light patterns of the hill for absent telescopic changes and try to keep hope’s integrity as the time feels like iron sheets banging and the iron in our blood is magnetic with breath-baiting about missed trains, missed appointments and lost money.
Then just beyond lateness, vision and sound growl together from beyond the hill, the yellow top windows emerge, rolling certainty, the orange number one and the morning lower windows rising and roaring and surely the whole bus is nearing, comforting with morning workers bundled in their drab newspapery start, saying – we are the real world, the safe world of ordinary, the bus is here with its grimy floor, and carpeted seating, electric power and hydraulics. Its doors open and she steps aboard, the doors close and it roars away to town, road and bus as one, diminishing into her future and my past as I am here, on my legs.

Breathing again, turning the corner into silver light, birds know that it should be spring, twittering in the dark that begins to blue above the horizon, as I return home to bed.

Blanket

The blanket lay in a cardboard box in the bay window of the room that is part museum and memorial to her aunts / part storage of film equipment of her grandsons. One of Aunt Agnes or Aunt Marge’s effects. Fluffy yet housing case-baring moth larvae, plaster grit and several weevils. It had been lying there with once swish, cream suitcases of photographs twenty years past, since the last aunt’s effects were temporarily accommodated.

I was in the party that took it for covering a car in the sub zero temperatures last week, then after the thaw I rescued it from the mud. I set it off in the washing machine on a wool programme. I had never used the wool programme before – so intermittent were the turns of the drum that I changed it for a normal wash.

I must stress that this blanket had been fluffy with a buoyant air-trapping texture, cream with a mauve triple stripe at one end, (apart from the embedded creatures) it looked new like a lamb! Whichever aunt had owned it, she knew how to care for a woollen blanket, back in the days before continental quilts caused this knowledge to be tossed aside.

As I hung the blanket on the washing line in a brief euphoric snap of post-snow sunlight, a strangely intense soap flake aura was released, overwhelming the Daz that I had used!
The name of the smell was Lux, there must have been twenty washes worth of Lux held in the blanket, to release such a powerful ghostly narrative smell!
Unfortunately my bad wash has felted the blanket stiffly.