“As with many illnesses, the cure is simple, once perceived.” Watership Down, by Richard Adams, p. 112.
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As with many illnesses, the cure is simple, once perceived. To begin with, Sharon needed a sturdy table. And one morning–after scuttling the kids out the door to school, settling for wet hair and a shift dress, and heading for the train–the universe provided her with one. There, two houses down and across the alley, was one of those giant wooden spools for industrial cable, propped against a chain link fence an a utility pole. It was the sort of thing college kids would use for a coffee table. The girls Sharon had shared an apartment with all those years ago might actually have had one. She had a vague recollection of it, strewn with ashtrays and bottles of cheap beer.
Sharon approached the thing for a closer inspection. Then, looking first one way and then the other down the alley, she gave it an appraising kick. Nice. Solid. She hastily rolled it across the alley and through her back gate, depositing it in a forgotten corner of her yard. For good measure, she covered it with an old paint-streaked tarp before glancing with alarm at her watch and tripping off once more to the train.
Getting the thing into the basement the next day did not go at all according to plan. The “controlled roll” she had envisioned was, as it turned out, a physics lesson waiting to happen. As always, between gravity and things wheel-shaped, all was dispatched with no undue delay. There wasn’t much left for Sharon to do but stand back and, later, plaster over the rather large depression in the basement wall.
A week later the makeshift table was ensconced in its own little corner of Sharon’s basement, next to the dust-furred hulk of her husband’s old rowing machine and stacked milk crates full of memorabilia from track meets and dance recitals. The table was covered in an assortment of textiles, found objects, inks and dyes, adhesives of all kinds, and sketchbooks–stacks and stacks of dusty old, elastic-corded moleskin sketchbooks, each with the year printed neatly on the inside cover.
And it was in this way, like iron shavings dancing in the path of a magnet, that the scattered bits of Sharon Belthower began to collide and adhere to one another. An old energy stuttered to life and flowed, once again, up and down her arms, pooling into her fingertips, stiff and lethargic; fingers that had almost forgotten what it was to create.