“It’s going fine,” I whisper, fiddling with the lace cuffs of my shirt. It’s
one I made myself from vintage lace I found in a thrift shop, adorned with flowers bursting with petals. The day I was happily showing it off for the first time, Dad laughed in a nasty way and said, “Who wants to go around wearing an old curtain?”
Me. I do. This lace probably once hung in some frail old lady’s living room, and when she died her daughter or granddaughter washed it, folded it, and donated it to charity. Long before that, the old woman was a young woman, and she was in love with someone; she must have been to buy such romantic lace. She thought of the person she loved while she sewed the curtains and peeked hopefully through them, waiting for her beloved to call on her. She admired the lace flowers against Henson’s gloomy sky. I’m dressed in her happiness and her heartbreak. I’m dressed in her hope. There’s so little of it around lately that I’m desperate for every scrap I can get my hands on.
