Shirley

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September 26, 2026

Applesauce, Shirley Kurtz, illustrated by Cheryl Benner, Good Books, 1992 Applesauce (cont’d) Because things change. It’s a different century. We’re mostly limping along by ourselves. No house in West Virginia anymore, backed up to a hill. No outsize garden meant to feed a tribe. The boy and the sister and the little terror of a brother all have families of their own. Three decades on, on a Sunday in September, we’re just two tired old heads. That night at supper, goes the story, they ate the last of the applesauce. All her jars were empty, the boy’s mother said. It was time to make more. Our cupboard’s not bare—we’re not Old Mother Hubbards. We still have applesauce. But we’d hate to run out. The very next evening, when they were on the way home from town, going up Knobley Mountain, she told the father to stop the car, quick. Over there where she was pointing, in somebody’s yard, was a tree. It’s loaded. It’s neglected. Free apples? she wonders. “May...

September 04, 2026

Going By the Lady “ And that’s it,” says the lady . “That—right there—is mascarpone. Ten minutes, two ingredients. I told you it was easy.” You watch over and over. The spoon coats. The bubbles bubble. The whole big puddle pours down into the sieve lined with cheesecloth . HELP, you text the lady next day, because you cooked some but your sieve full seems too limp. You dripped it all last night in the fridge. How’s it cheese? “ You put in the lemon juice?” she ask s. Y es, y ou did. “Maybe too many cheesecloth layers?” you say. “Stir it around,” she says. “Then let it drip some more in the fridge .” It drips, drips. It makes another middling pond in the bowl, like before. But it doesn’t much stiffen. And the lady doesn’t have any you can borrow, when you ask. Your sad lump is your only hope. You take it over to her house—the whole thing—the bowl, the sieve, the draggy cloth, your so-called mascarpone. The lady pushes it around with her spoon, slaps her lips smartly. “Yep, t...

August 26, 2026

It’s not impossible, says the woman to the man in Kate’s poem —a beautiful ceremony followed by a lifetime of strife. How bad it gets isn’t clear. Just, he’s not inclined to ply her with sweet nothings, empty praises, libidinous gestures. Instead, she tells the man, you park out in our backyard, wind rifling through your branches, while I, ever the romantic, sleep safely underneath. 1 Which leaves me mulling . For it’s in a wo ods m y husband and I abide, thorned and prickly, somehow persist ing . “ You’re too chop happy,” I sometimes accuse , because h e’s forever culling, obsessed by the canopy. ( N ot enough of it? T o o preponder ant the shade? Which? Would I know?) He’s jealous for the fledglings wanting sun, I get that much. When a giant in some thunderstorm, trunk ripped, goes roaring to the ground, he’s elated. The sound, the massive crack, the tragic swish of branchery descending in slow time—for him it’s theater. He balked, though, at bringing down our yard maple...

August 09, 2026

Piggy Pink By the time we reached Pittsburgh I was enough stuffed up to crash. I looked around for the tissues box, my husband found me a wastebasket, and giving myself up to the sofa, there I mostly stayed. I kept to the one end, so as not to blow my germs on anybody, and as much as the head fog allowed, I chattered along. But you know children. They want to crowd closer and closer. In the evening, I guessed if Youngest, who loves her picture books, retreated to the area between the sofa and the wall, behind my head, I could read some stories. Then I guessed if she could get her teeth brushed and get herself to bed, I could read a little more. Upstairs, though, I didn’t slip into the bed with her. Sitting on the climb-up-to-her-bunk steps, the bed railing serving as our barrier, I read parallel to her. The other sofa in the living room, across from mine, allowed my husband and me our own infirmary suite that night. I could hew to my space. In the morning, though, family wafting to...

August 04, 2026

Photo courtesy of Zachary Kurtz Safe Skin, Safe Knuckles They keep snatching him. I don’t get much of a chance. It’s not that they don’t trust me, I don’t think—except one night when we were crowded in front of the World Cup, when I had Great-Grandbaby on his tummy on my lap because he liked my skirt, its soft big red flowers, they started yelling. Did they honestly think I’d let him push off, like a runner does when the gun goes off, and ram his head into the lamp and knock it over and bang onto the floor, himself? The trouble, now, is that everything goes into his mouth. In the beginning it was just his cushy wee lips making the ravishing hunger sounds or little pipsqueaks of contentment. Now he babbles to beat the band and chomps down on people’s knuckles. I’ve seen him gnawing his mother’s face, too. Faces and knuckles are good because he can’t choke. So what’s most safe, for now, is skin like that, and his cotton ...

July 26, 2026

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...