The bed spread was blue with white checks and didn’t quite reach to the foot of the bed so Kenai had made up the difference with an old Mexican blanket she bought in the 70s, still improbably bright and cheerful 30 years later. The pillowcases matched the bedspread, the royal blue that was her favorite color and that she’d spent weeks looking for, rare and precious in a bed set. During the summer she strung a line across the lawn and sat in the kitchen doorway smoking her pipe and watching the pillowcases snap and flap like pennants. The pipe was handmade and painted like a kabuki clown; she kept it in a little wooden case in her night stand when she wasn’t using it. Most of the furniture she built herself, that being easier than waiting for the truck to make the 40 mile trip from the airfield, except for the desk which she’d brought with her at great expense from sunnier days down south. The desk dominated the house; she’d designed the other furnishings around it, not the art of it (which was beyond her) so much as the feeling. Winters she’d spend days at the desk, smoking or writing or just sitting and watching the short daylight sliding down the wall.