Patterns

A few years ago we remodeled our entire bathroom, which meant that we got rid of the old blue stuff around the old bathtub. Todd grew up in this house, and he confessed that he always used to see pictures in the patterns on the wall, and still saw them every time he took a shower.

This reminded me of when I was a kid lying in bed and I would see patterns in the textured well next to me. This also made me think of the patterns I still see in the old brown paneling in our bedroom.

Our bedroom is the only room in the house that has not had any work done to it since we moved in, and there is still this ancient 1970s brown paneling on the walls. While lying in bed I can find patterns in it. I noticed many years ago that there is one pattern that looks a little like a baby's head, but only if I turn my head to the right and look at it just right. And it's actually kind of a deformed baby's head, and a little bit of the shoulders. But somehow, that's what it looks like to me.

On the weekends Grace and I sleep in and we wake up together and spend some time laughing, talking, tickling and cuddling. She likes me to scratch her back. This past Sunday we were doing this very thing and I said something about her being a big girl, and she said, "No, I'm a baby, just like that one," and she pointed up at the ceiling where my deformed baby head is.

Today while in English class the students were reading a Native American story, but I was in the back of the textbook re-reading "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. It reminded me of this incident, which is why I am writing about it right now.