The Curtains Came Down

For as long as I can remember, I have seen things in designs. My grandmother's tile in her bathroom was particularly colorful, but unremarkable. The design was little multi-colored squares, strewn about in no discernable pattern.

And yet, when I visited her bathroom, I would find people and objects in the linoleum. I even talked to them.

Along the bus route, I found a dinosaur in a tree stump and visited with it every day as we passed by. How sad I was when the following year I realized the stump had been removed by the landowner, and the dinosaur was no more.

It is like finding shapes in clouds, something most of us do as children, only I tend to see them in places where they do not exist - or are not supposed to exist. I see lines that, if I could draw, would magically become art. A unicorn here, a sobbing woman there, a guitar elsewhere.

Nothing with a design is safe from my imagination. As a child I feared electric sockets not because they shocked me, but because they had a face - two eyes and a mouth. When we built our house, my father, who was helping us wire it (you could do that 32 years ago), asked if we wanted the receptacles "monkey face up or monkey face down." I immediately responded "monkey face up" because when the receptacles are upside down I don't see the face. At the time most things were two-pronged plug-in items anyway. How was I to know that in the not-so-distant future most everything would have three prongs, and sometimes the monkey-face-up thing can be a pain?

Anyway, this ability, if one wants to call it that, has followed me into my middle age (Is 55 middle-aged?). The new tile we put down in the kitchen has no obvious designs in it, yet I see a woman. A dolphin shows itself in the tile in the bathroom. Even the new hardwood floors has little critters in them. Fortunately, I only seem them in passing, fleeting images as I walk over. If asked, I could not find it again.



Do you see the woman in this tile? Or maybe it looks more like a bird.

And so it is we come to the curtains. I bought them about two years ago at Lowes to replace some aged ones that had faded. They were a solid dark blue and I thought it made the room look dark, too. The new curtains had a huge initial problem: they were supposed to be 84" long but were only about 78" long, so that my sheers were too long. (Yes, I use sheers. I see my reflection in the windows at night and it scares me. So, sheers.)

The new curtains were a nice shade of dark blue in design on a whitish background. But they weren't up long before I realized there were faces in the things. Everywhere. And not nice faces, either. Evil faces.

Do you see the multiple tribe of people in this design?

I ignored the faces as best I could, but finally I decided I couldn't deal with it anymore, and the curtains yesterday came down. They've been replaced with an aqua blue solid (and they are 84" long), and I told my husband that there would be no more curtains or bedspreads or anything else with designs in them in the bedroom.

He thinks I am silly, but I am glad to be rid of those curtains.