Stripes

As early as I can remember myself reading, this memory is wrapped in cloths. Spotty swaddling cloths made into pillowcases, similar motley sheets and covers. Curled in bed with a book among the soft medley of cloths, this has always been my best embodiment of happiness. This custom has been engendered by my mother and grandmother, often scorched by my grandfather, not for the reading itself, but for the rosy entourage of meekness and careless self-indulgence, unbearable for his vigorous bodily discipline of a soldier and a pedagogue. The duty of reading then, as if forever appeared to me enveloped in a pinkish patterned cloth; black lines of text in the double spread of a book coincided and laid upon the thin vinous stripes of a duvet cover. The rhythmic pleasure of the text, the flight of imagination, were conditioned and protected by the pervasive pattern and caressing texture of cloth.