The Wheel

We sat on the floor of a spare bedroom in my grandparents' house. The walls were yellow, the bedsheets and curtains decorated with a matching rose-patterned fabric. I could hear the sound of the dryer through the wall, its suggestion of warmth and cleanliness. From a glass cabinet, alongside countless other items, a ceramic figurine of a German Shephard looked toward me. The ceramic dog, a banal emblem of my father's childhood, was the tallest figurine on the shelf. It loomed, simultaneously ambivalent and innocent. I thought about my grandmother in the seventies, walking her German Shephard to the Pacific Ocean, trying to forget. I thought about the olive trees.