unhappen

It's like knitting, she thinks. That unraveling that allows her to start over with the same yarn, pulling, stretching, wrapping it by hand into a tighter ball called the different day. Delay their waking a little longer,stir the porridge slower, go up the stairs to kiss them rather than calling them down to the morning table. Or have it rain, a storm to flood the fields, or have the cow begin to calf early. Or the boys wake with fevers and they stay home. Anything that keeps the tractor in the barn, the steep ditch empty of their crushed forms.