Shirley

A Sighting   This was just yesterday—Saturday. I’d sat myself at the porch steps, I think to pull some burrs from Buster’s fur, but suddenly something on the coneflowers swam into view. What in the world. I stared. A cocoon, I guessed, but unlike any I’d ever seen. Straight out of Stranger Things , it had a solid, shiny black casing that even sealed off the creature’s apparent nostrils. I rounded the corner of the house, summoned my husband, led him to the porch. Look, I said. What in the world. He peered. Some kind of amorphous protozoan, maybe a slime mold, he thought. He pulled out his phone, snapped a photo. He sent it to his iNaturalist app. But the species that popped up on his screen didn’t even come close. His specimen lacked any features of an insect larva. His specimen lacked any features of a slug. That it might be an organism made no sense. Then he understood. I can tell you what it is, he murmured. I was still trying to get a good picture. Instead of going off f...

                                                     Apple raisin bran. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Murch. For Ladies With Muffins You’ve found some pants, high risers. Oh good. They’re stretch, too, also good, except stretch means exactly that—stretch. The pants give and give until they sag mournfully. You have to keep hitching. So here is the fix. You’ll need two safety pins and an old soft belt with the buckle cut off. 1. Where the two front belt loops of the pants are placed, but on the inner side of the waistband, rip a few of the stitches holding the waistband to the pants. Or if you prefer, cut two small vertical slits in the waistband, just enough to allow for the width of the old soft belt. 2. Attach a safety pin to one end of the belt and push it through one of the openings. 3. With agile fingers, move the safety-pin bump through the tun...

Snakery ( cont’d ) , or Here in Eden I saw it—the tail end disappearing up into the crack where the porch ceiling meets the wall. Now Creepy was in the house, in the void space above our downstairs bedroom. I scurried into the room and made noises and threw my husband’s slipper at the ceiling. Fat chance of that helping any. Next came the day of the loud encounter, when Local Grandboy Age 12 was here. Our dog was rooting at the small wood pile on the porch, not noisily, but then Grandboy and I took heed. Finally we saw it—or anyhow, a snake. It slid into the dark corner and coiled. Buster wouldn’t let up. He kept hounding and hounding, until—oh! We scrammed.   By then, Grandboy’s mother was here and he had to depart on other business. Later I sent her a message for him and a still from my video . See that shooting-out tongue (or whatever that is)? After I took Buster in the house he started up his barking again and there was the snake’s head at the door glass, peeking thro...

Hot Morning Think back in disbelief, your pregnancies in summer and no fans. Swollen you lay flat on cold linoleum where you rented or sat chilly in the tub. Were you that poor or nuts? Your babies exponented now and body drained to empty, struck with déjà vu, no, worse, you guess it never got this hot. The fans, the fans. Point them head-on at dried eyeballs, whirring wildly. Slat all the window blinds to upward, aim the air up to the ceiling where upstairs it’s baking, for a heat shield like those capsules come from space and coming down in flames. Just stay down here. Down here and wet your hair until it drips and put on garbing if you must. Must is better, come to think, to keep your flesh from rubbing, clamming up. Go for shapeless breathing thin, all wild and gaping. Forget the slip, who sees, who cares. Desperate times and desperate measures, cottonsheet your grainy itchy sofa, now you have a place to live. Unlike those who’ve cement highways going past, not some darkling gre...

To Grandgirl Going Out Into the World   I wonder if you know this brilliant thing you did. I guess so. You always have reasons. Over on the wall, I mean—your sewn petals, and behind, the bold duns and greens, rose peach, that spotty purple, on up into cobalt firmament. Blues like that? For real? Here the sky beyond my drawn-up legs, past the glass, shows only palest white, unglorious. And down below, my own coneflowers, Echinacea, spreading now in patches, bloom more a pink, not that beet shade. I think you made yours off on purpose. (My legs drawn up , I said. D rawn . I wasn’t even thinking. Not penciled painted. Just pulled up, bent, the way I’m wont to sit.)  My outside flowers, were I to pull some? Take them to that hijab girl, remember, who brought me jewels? Hard as she is on learning, I would press on her the wording, make her twist her tongue enough behind her thin bright line of lipstick. Echinacea p urpur e a . Eh ki NAY sha. Say the same s-h  as in su...

Framed-Art Tour, Exhibit 18   Youngest Grandgirl still loves dressing up, loves flouncing around in my poor scarves and drop ping them everywhere . Recently, though, when she was here again, I switched tactics and simply got her to stuff them into a bag. I was done harping and harping at her to put them back where they belonged. Much easier. Just stuff stuff. But unlike any ragtag scarf in my possession, the robe she has on in this photo from last fall, my junk-store steal, is more hers than mine by rights. S he’s the one with markings like those high-coiffed ladies’ on the sleeves, not I . I’m more at home in my battered old red-flannel thing with handy pockets. Th e gold-painted lettering running down the front, she says, is kanji— Japanese . Or, s ome is kanji. Those are Japanese ladies, she says, not Chinese. Even so, I’m mystified. I can’t tell what is what. I perceive the fine points in the pictures only vaguely, as other hemispheric, blinded as I am by my paro...