It's An E Kinda Week

The other day I dreamt about Shirley Jackson. I woke up and groggily attempted to relay this dream to Mr. Wing and he looked at me with his brows furrowed and his lips puckered. This is his confused face. "Have you read Shirley Jackson?" he asked me. "Ummm, maybe?" I responded, I really couldn't remember. It was either that or he read something and told be about it and now I've catalogued it as one of my own memories. And in fact, this is was the case. I don't know at what point in our marriage our individual experiences merged into one but whenever it was, I wasn't paying attention. Maybe I was distracted by something shiny.

I go through periods of superstition and because the other day happened to be one of those periods, I took the dream as a sign to read one of her books. Apparently, The Lottery is her most famous short story but we had We Have Always Lived in the Castle on the bookshelf; so I took this to be a sign as well. Without giving anything away, the book is told from the perspective of a young lady who lives on the outskirts of a small town. She visits the town twice a week to do some shopping and although this is a regular thing that almost everyone can relate to, I found that as I read, it felt eerily familiar. The way Jackson's character sees the world reminds me of the way I sometimes see things. The objects she notices and the themes she finds in a day or a week. She has days of stringy things and days of gray ones. These are things that I do in my head (shutter). This is particularly disturbing because she is a little off her rocker. "Am I a little crazy?" I ask my husband in the most monotone, un-crazy-like voice I can muster. He thinks a minute...."just a little".

That said, this week is an E week. At work, part of my job is to process applications. When I step back to find patterns in my day, I notice like things tend to appear together. For example, it's Tuesday and I've already received 3 applications for people whose first name starts with an E. Last week it was an N week and the week before that, it was an orange sticker week. When one of our clients passes away, we pull their folder and place an orange sticker in the top right hand corner of their file. One day I'll make a project of things with orange stickers; maybe I'll put orange stickers on totems of things that represent things in my life that have died. I like this because it seems more gentile than writing deceased and shoving them in a drawer. Orange is a lively, active color and I chose it because I like to think of them living on, in the filing cabinet, having tea with the other orange stickers.

I think tomorrow will be a day of things falling; Wednesdays often are.