lakið

Dozing between waking and breakfast I dream more, of my grandmother, of her picking up a dark, shawl-like cloth, burgundy or black and covered with hundreds of red-dyed mother of pearl buttons of different sizes. Some of them had fallen off, but the broken thread-ends showed where they had been.

It was her conception sheet, she said, and I understood that to be the sheet on which she had been conceived by her parents. I understood that it had been saved, decorated, given to her by her mother when she had married.

And then I wasn't talking to her anymore so much as seeing, first and briefly, her parents, a married couple from such a different age than the present one, and next and in more detail the society that saves and passes down conception sheets, that has, no doubt, a better, native word for them than that. A people who might have felt they knew with certainty on what sheet each child had been made. The men are away a great deal in seasonal labor, perhaps away in fishing camps, twelve to a hut and twelve to a boat, only home for brief periods. Their wives would know, would save the cloth and wash it, sit with the other women and talk while sanding the shell buttons and sewing them on.