Alfred and Janie

They built the house themselves
back in the early fifties.

Little attention was given to decorative details
but the structural ones were subjected to the highest scrutiny.
There's not a loose nail in the place.
No creaks. No squeaks. No cracks.
Every joint and every seam is perfectly flush.
Every board in the house
was hand picked,
measured twice,
and cut once.

Every piece of furniture is still in the same place.
The same painting of the barn in the country hangs over the mantle
which also serves as a perch for the same porcelain birds.
Out in the shed, it still smells of damp, packed down dirt and sweet grease.
The same sturdy tools
hang against the same peg board, their wooden handles
rubbed smooth over the decades.
The handwritten labels on the drawers of the tool chest
haven't changed since the day were so neatly crafted,
all caps on tiny fragments of index cards,
and the shelves still house the rows of mayonnaise jars
which hold so many parts and assemblies
soaking in oil
like organs in a lab.

The swing set still sits in the yard,
without a speck of rust,
anchored by concrete
on all four corners,
another monument
to Alfred's war against chance.

All of these things are the same,
but Alfred and Janie
aren't quite.

Another evening settles over Fairburn,
and the streetlight slides in between the slats of the blinds
that cover the eight-foot picture window.

Their thin soft bodies pad through the house,
cleaning, arranging, and moving without segue
between observations about belongings in the house, the vegetation outside of it,
and recollections of meteorological events;
that storm, this chair, that tree,
as if the concrete nature of those things
gives comfort
even as the differences between them
start to fade.