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Elizabeth's HouseMy grandmother on good mornings taught me phrases like "hunter green" the color of her dense carpet, wall to wall, and the shade lighter -- avocado, of the sweeping fabric drapes tugging, relentless, at the curtain rods layered in brassy gold. The upholstery she chose for the living room couch, that's textured ivory, she’d said -- patterns of tiny white blisters, little knobs of fiber, tightly woven like love letters in Braille like something sure and never-changing against my palms. But beyond the living room the dining room even the embroidered hand towels and matching wicker accents of the bathroom beyond all this -- small, brown plastic bottles with white ribbed lids lined the kitchen counter green and black pills to calm the nerves and other colors and reasons I don't remember. the oven timer buzzing and buzzing, the sign, the signal, the bottles of vodka perfectly cold. And the stained recliner hidden, in the den where she sat for years, staring out onto what? oil wells pumping livestock prices climbing money pouring in. Yet she drank her days well into her nights, her home decorated with balls of wadded tissue around her feet, everything wet walls absorbing sadness darkening soaking in finally turning alabaster gray into a cloth of simple black.
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