MargenMy mother left me a single note before she died, stuck to the wardrobe in her room: "Never open the bottom drawer."
I held out for forty years. Every time I cleaned that room, the drawer looked at me, and I looked away. The seasons went by, my hair turned white, I buried my husband, and the drawer stayed shut, faithful to the promise.
The day I turned eighty, alone by then in the empty house, I decided that an old woman owes obedience to nobody. I pulled the drawer open.
Inside there was only a yellowed sheet of paper, folded in four. I opened it with clumsy fingers.
It was the same sentence, "Never open the bottom drawer", but written in my handwriting. In the shaky hand I have now, at eighty.
I never knew when I had written it. Nor how many times I had already lived this same day.