Seeds

 

My sister in law eats sunflower seeds to feel like she's back home. She talks to her parents in a foreign tongue, in high pitched tones and her voice chirps most nights via Skype, while I'm trying to sleep before opening shifts at a coffee shop I work these days. I feel my blood boiling when I can't comprehend why she has a particular place for everything, why I don't seem to clean a dish quite well enough, why my brother ever wanted to get married in the first place, why the word grateful doesn't always reverberate in my mind. I watch them come home from their weekend errands to Ikea or Whole Foods or an Asian market and I watch the filling of their house with a delivery from Amazon daily, a new TV, curtain rods, a rice cooker, a sweater for their cat.  And I watch her cook, what seems to be the same three ingredients every night: meat, something green, and gallons of oil and I watch my brother do the pile of dishes afterward, and her scuttle around in her inside shoes as I stare at my bare feet, too stubborn to respect her tradition of covering them and I don't understand what I feel is pulling at my own heels, telling me to let my toes roam free. I simply step back outside to settle somewhere else for the evening. And I think about this making of a home and how I've watched it before and it's not about the TV or the start of a garden growing out back or the food in the fridge or the meal itself but what's created by simply doing these things.  The TV will break, the garden will freeze, and the meal will be gone, the dishes done. Upon returning and watching her crack those shells I feel something, stopped in my tracks as I remove my shoes at the door, and ask, "Do you feel like you're in China today?" and she nods. I ask if she'd like to try a blood orange I picked up at the corner fruit stand and she does and I watch her peel it quickly.  I don't know what it means to feel closer. Perhaps this is it, the closest I can come for now, seeing her with her cats and that orange and a pile of seed shells by her side, home settling somewhere in her belly.