Visitation

I put the laundry in the dryer like a robot. No thinking, no feeling. Nothing but the motion then I think of the effect it will have on my 100 year old mother sitting in her wheelchair by the wood stove, her little dog on her lap.

“We don't get this every day,” she tells me as I walk by.

Outside the window the steam from the dryer dances up, up and away looking eerily like spirits coming and going if you don't know the source. She watches with delight, of ten children the last alive.