Living in My Mother’s House While She Lives in Her Mother’s House

I moved the yellow bowl to the dining room. I put it on the
bookshelf in front of the Atheist books. The bowl has a flat
bottom like a dog bowl. It is soft yellow like the time before
television. On the front, there is a black silhouette of a couple
sitting at a table Maybe they are eating.

My mother comes to get winter clothes and sees the bowl.
For my mother, the bowl is her grandmother’s porch swing.
Her dead brother. The year they integrated schools.
The bowl is a cold war. Everything she can’t say to her father.

She can’t believe I would just throw it on a bookshelf.
Someone might hastily grab a book and knock it to the
ground. It could shatter and be gone. She would have
nothing left of her childhood except the other things in
the house.

How could I be so irresponsible? She is holding
the bowl against her chest and swaying back and
forth like she did when I was a small precious thing.
She clenches the heavy, thick edges like her
mother holds the rails of her hospice bed. She is
rocking. Like everything could be over soon.