21 and completely legal

It's getting harder to remember this poem date every day, and yet it's getting easier to write the poems once I light here.

What's up with that?

It's gray outside but the temperature is fine. Why do we always ask about the weather? When Dad was alive, on the infrequent times we'd speak over the phone, he'd always tell me what the Pittsburgh weather was like and then ask me about Wisconsin's. And weather segues to health. It all goes downhill from there.

Today's prompt I'm making up. Use these words in a poem: quilt, whine, bell.

*

Quilting

Grandma Schorr made quilts from old fabric that smelled
of mothballs, and stuffed each square with dry-cleaning plastic,
sewing the pieces together by hand, until she'd made a thick
heavy cover like a massive God hand to lie over you
in your hot Louisiana bed. It was a rented bed, the top bunk,
in a rented room in a rented house, filled with other peoples'
furniture. One night you woke to the white light of lightening
rocking the rented dresser pulls into stinging vibration and
you thought perhaps you might die. Your mother told you
not to whine but you couldn't help it -- you were nine,
and the girls at your public school giggled and whispered
behind their hands at the fact that you were wearing pants,
weird Yankee, and you were failing math, and your language arts
teacher despised your "written expression," probably
because your handwriting was ugly and your spelling creative,
and your penchant for fantastic imagery and magic came across
as uppity. Or maybe it was the cross-eyed Jesus you drew
for one of your stories. That was a lonely year. When the doorbell
rang, you knew it wasn't for you. And down the street behind
a thick wall, the splash and scream of the country club kids
rose up like the faint song of an invisible tribe.