Housekeeping

The rising of the spring stirred a serious, mystical excitement in him and made him forgetful of her. He would pick up eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp’s nest. He would peer at each of them with the most absolute attention and then put them in his pockets where he kept his jack knife and his loose change. He would peer at them as if he could read them and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket where I keep my reading glasses. At such times he was as forgetful of her as he was of his suspenders and his Methodism. But all the same, it was then that she loved him best, as a soul all unaccompanied, like her own.

Marilynne Robinson Housekeeping

Artist/Peter Siddell