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Angie Estes

Lieu de Mémoire: Family Home

It is impossible, Ruskin says, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture, but Leonardo tried to capture with anatomical accuracy the muscles, skin, and bones because he believed that by learning to draw the grieving face, one can know sorrow. I’ve heard that you can flatten a paper drinking straw to create a beating reed, place it into an ancient Greek instrument called the aulos, sometimes found in archaeological excavations, and play the opening notes of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” At first, we didn’t have a car so didn’t need a garage, but later when we could afford one, we built a garage as large as the house and kept it very clean and empty like the nest we took down, filled with perfect hollow, streamers of dried milkweed loosening the air, then found the next day on the now bare, flat shelf of the eave, one egg, robin’s-egg blue.