Taxes

Oh good, it's still morning. I'm planning to do my taxes today - Easter Sunday. I should be celebrating the resurrection with marshmallow peeps and creme eggs and chocolate bunnies and jelly beans nestled in green plastic grass, but I'm on my own today. Yesterday was family day - mother, three siblings, a brother-in-law, two children. We talked family history and the general decline of the world as we usually do. Always finding a way to end on a hopeful note or with wry humor. Despair's not why we get together, after all. I cannot help but counter stories of my step-father on these occasions with tales of mistreatment. Even now, at the age of fifty-five. Remember how he used to lay down in the grass with his arm across his face for five minute naps during the farm's crazy work pace in the summers? Yeah, and remember that time he threw a claw hammer at me because I wasn't working fast enough? My mother maintains her high spirits better than I do. She always has. With church and the Hallmark Channel and selective memory and a big orange cat and her siblings and her granddaughters. It's a real skill. I've not managed, myself, to keep beliefs intact or to allow a dream to live without dissection or negation. Last night I dreamed a woman's touch. Sitting behind me, not quite fully formed, she came over me like a shadow. Only the suggestion of a touch. The sensation imagined and savored.