I sat, extended an arm behind
me to the roll on the wall, which
spun freely but did not release
the dangling end that makes

it easy to grab and pull and tug
off as many squares as necessary.
Instantly, deep in my brain,
I heard my dead mother snap,

Who put that on upside down?
One of the many things that
irritated her easily irritated self,
the age-old question of which way

to install toilet paper always
prompted the anecdote about
a long-ago guest at our house
who (the nerve!) repositioned

the TP roll so that it came off
the back, which could still get
my mother’s dander up
decades after it occurred.

And they told me that they’d
fixed it for me, she’d fume,
insulted, because, she insisted,
everyone knew that the end

should always hang in front.
Unless you had little kids who
liked to spin the roll, creating
a TP puddle on the floor

that some beleaguered mother
had to respool. Then backward
was an option because you did
not waste perfectly good TP.

Sitting, remembering, I figured
the roll in my bathroom must’ve
been turned around by plumbers
working on this old house,

but I could feel her reaction flow
through me like, well, water through
new pipes. The direction of the roll
has never much mattered to me,

though I now realize since she
vanished into the wherever—where
certainly TP must not be an issue—
that mine has typically cascaded

like a tissue waterfall off the front,
one more lesson I unconsciously
absorbed, despite her longstanding
belief that I didn’t listen to her.

Oh, Ma. I did. I so did.