Excerpt from Feathers by Raymond Carver.

I tell her I fell in

love with her because of her hair. I tell her I might stop loving her if she cut it. Sometimes I call her “Swede.” She could pass for a Swede. Those times together in the evening she’d brush her hair and we’d wish out loud for things we didn’t have. We wished for a new car, that’s one of the things we wished for. And we wished we could spend a couple of weeks in Canada. But one thing we didn’t wish for was kids. The reason we didn’t have kids was that we didn’t want kids. Maybe sometime, we said to each other. But right then, we were waiting. We thought we might keep on waiting. Some nights we went to a movie. Other nights we just stayed in and watched TV. Sometimes Fran baked things for me and we’d eat whatever it was all in a sitting.