Written with the prompts: it drives me nuts, 59 miles, Linda, a world full of lovely poems, tangy/yangy, hide in plain sight, electric lights, square yard, pink fuzzy lint, dead man’s boxes, feeling of peace, footprints in concrete, lost someone, peaches

The lint catcher in the dryer was filled with pink, and Melanie wondered at that.  It wasn’t the color of pink perfection camellias or trailing fuchsia blossoms, no, it was something akin to cotton candy.  Oh, she suddenly remembered.  She must have been no more than eight years old, begging her father to buy her some cotton candy at the Boardwalk.  He didn’t want to, but she’d been relentless, so on the last day of vacation he broke down and bought her some.  It was so pretty.  A pink cloud on a paper cone, pure sugar that dissolved in her mouth before she had a chance to stick a tooth in it.  Sticky and insubstantial.  He’d been right.  It was not worth whatever he’d spent on it for her, and she’d never ask again.

She stood in the garage wondering if such memories would assail her now like this, arriving unbidden at the smallest urging.  The color pink had conjured a week at the beach, the smell of salt water and caramel corn, the 1960s retro music, sand in her keds, roller coaster, ferris wheel, haunted house ride.  But here and now, cleaning out the garage, wondering how much they could get at the estate sale for the washer/dryer set, she was also wondering—why was the lint pink? Who was washing something pink in her widowed father’s washer/dryer?

There was a woman named Linda a few years after Mom died, back when Mel was still in college.  She’d come home one weekend to find the woman in a silk slip cooking scrambled eggs with cheese and salsa in the kitchen.  Mel knew then she must never come home unannounced again.  She’d been young and naive.  It hadn’t occurred to her that her father would want someone else.  She thought he was old, but he wasn’t.  She worried she’d scared Linda away, that she scared all other partners away.  But maybe, maybe there was someone, who wore pink, who threw a fuzzy robe or slippers into her Dad’s dryer.

Maybe she’d find some evidence in her dead Dad’s boxes of adventures he’d hidden in plain sight.  She had created a story that he’d been satisfied with his grown children and grandkids, his golf games, his experiments in beer brewing.  

She sighed.  She was looking for a feeling of peace, a sense of absolution, a world of lovely poems, but maybe she’d come to the wrong planet.  This world was a messy neighborhood, 59 square miles of crazy mistakes:  footprints hardened in concrete, jars of luscious, brandied peaches, but you can’t get the lid off, a yangy/tangy place that will drive you nuts. 

You can string electric lights along the fence and through the trees, she thought.  They look pretty, don’t they?  But they illuminate nothing but our own wishful thinking. 

Photo by Maxim Yuryshev on Unsplash