This is an old sheet my kids wanted me to keep because its sentimental to them. I've been in a fit of cleaning up, cleaning out, cleaning through. Cleaning through what? Time. Cleaning through time. How can we clean through time? I can't answer that question. I can only say cleaning through time is an inevitability. It happens and will continue to happen whether you resist or attempt participation. Still, I'm sorry I put this silly fragile clearly worn-out sheet in the trash. Because of what my son said. Not the funny thing he said about the sheet representing eccentricity. The touching thing he said: "Smell it." Mom, go ahead and smell it. It smells like home. It smells like home while you're standing in the middle of home, in the middle of the time where your home is still around you and you are not away from it. For a thing to accomplish such a feat is extraordinary. In the same way the sound of my husband snoring can occasionally drive me to extremes of exhaustion and frustration such that I think about death. Yet my dog snoring now at my feet moves my heart in a tender way, almost to tears, knowing she is getting old in this time in this home. And we won't always have her. This is the phenomenon that dogs me, dogs all of us. We can't save anything. Hoarding everything won't improve anyone's life. Time will take as much as it gives, an eternal expression of quantum electrodynamics.

Except the hole inside the sheet. Time can't take the portal through which our hearts glimpse love. That is what remains. The hole animates the material, indicates value. Allows us the opportunity to see truth.