I would not see my husband again until October. We were impossibly broke when he left, and I knew that somehow I had to hold it together until after the end of herring season when he would finally get paid. We borrowed money from his sister to buy a can of paint because my daughter could not stand the lavender walls left her by the previous tenant of her bedroom. The bathroom chickens got older and began to lay eggs. It was mend-and-make-do time. Smelly and mice infested or not, the couch and other abandoned furnishings were what we had. I felt a bit bad for the mice when I evicted them. They’d been cozy and safe there, despite the run-down surroundings. Vacuumed, cleaned by hand, and with an old bedspread tossed over it, the rotting sofa became the main seating in the living room.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I suppose it occurred to me that my children were now much like those mice had been. Tough as things were, we now had a place to call our own. And, I hoped, my kids had good folks who would see them through.

Did the lavender walls have anything to do with the story that would be written, years later, and feature that opening line? Who knows?

It’s all grist for the writing mill.

We grew up like mice nesting in a rotting sofa, my sister and I. Even when I was only nine and she was an infant, I thought of us that way. At night, when she’d be asleep in the curl of my belly and I’d be half falling off the old sofa we used as a bed, I’d hear the mice nibbling and moving inside the upholstery beneath us, and sometimes the tiny squeakings of the newborn ones when the mother came to nurse them. I’d curl tighter around Lisa and pretend she was a little pink baby mouse instead of a little pink baby girl, and that I was the father mouse, curled around her to protect her. Sometimes it made the nights less chill.