Empty Rooms, Full Hearts
In her bedroom I can still smell the scent of her shampoo; I run my fingers along the top edge of the Dutch door and remember seeing that little face laughing out at me in the middle of the night. At that time I was more emotionally than physically tired from trudging up and down those stairs for any one of a million reasons, and for nearly as many times. Sometimes on those trips I’d have to negotiate things that had been ripped off the walls and tossed out the door and down the stairs. I’d crawl over pictures, bedding, clothes, diapers, and confront a half-dressed, hysterically laughing face. Pure delight, largely on her part. Now I look at those stairs, that door, the pretty pink walls. I look at the window that I’d replaced after the night I heard glass break and ran up those same stairs to see a little hind-end pointed at me while her upper-end leaned out the window and joyfully ripped flowers out of the flower box, laughing as she dropped them to the dark ground bel