Lamplight memories

Sometimes I yearn for yesterday's yellow lamplight.

Puddling over a full living room where people spill off the furniture and onto the floor.

And an old German Shepherd lies shedding on the carpet, his tail sending hairs flying through the air.

Where my brother sits tangled up in my mom's lap, his shoulders crunched up against hers in the wing chair in the corner.

And my dad slouches from chair to footstool, reading his paper and smoking a cigarette.

My sister and cousins perch on covered radiators and thread bare carpet while my other brother defiantly takes up the couch, his head pillowed on one arm crooked up underneath a smocked corduroy cushion

And I sit tentatively on the lap of my date in the last chair, showing off in studied silence.

All of us tethered to a television whose revolving horizontal lines on black and white pictures measure the rage of a snowstorm on the Illinois prairie.