The Blue Coat

The coat was not fashionable. It was blue the way a bottle is blue when you hold it to a window, and the buttons were the sort that look like coins if you are a child and still permitted to think so.

My mother stood behind me in the hall and did them up. She began at the bottom, which I thought was backward, and worked toward my throat. I can still feel the last tug, the small correction that meant I would not be cold and she would not be blamed for it.

We walked to the store that sold thread and envelopes and, if you were lucky, rock candy in a jar. I was not allowed to run. The sidewalk had a glaze that made grown people walk like they were practicing.

I do not have the coat. I have the memory of being enclosed by it, and by her hands, and by the idea that winter was a problem someone else had already solved.