I shouldn’t have said biddies. It's not an all-female flock. There’s a vain crower. He swaggers around bossing and imposing his DNA. Were the wives allowed to loll atop their eggs for long, enough to get hatchlings, he'd think himself the lord of all. The lunker here, the hen must’ve had a rough morning. It sat in the fridge for a while because we wanted to show it to the grandchildren. By the time they came, though, this past weekend, it had developed a hairline fracture, so I said no eating it. Still, look at that thing. Didn’t we feast? Wrinkles! A wrinkled egg! The anomalies were what captured our affection. I’m not the only one who gravitates toward what’s flawed, and thus, spectacular.
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Framed-art tour, exhibit 3 Boy oh, those beady eyes. Pat doesn’t sign her work when she’s copying other artists’ renderings. The signed paintings had to come straight from her brain. But do I care? From wherever sprang her birds, these I begged for, she’s who dipped the brush, muddled the pigment, dabbed it on. Also their strut is the right amount of spindly gawkiness. There’s just enough smear and disarray here—chaos—to satisfy my standards of [im]perfection. Watercolor demands disorder. Beady, too, is good—glittering, greedy, discriminating. Or anyhow, when it’s chickens we’re talking about. The biddies I know, my husband’s, are constantly scrounging, peeling their eyes for their garbage. They reject the banana peels and citrus rinds, pointedly, but other than that, dear God. They’re cannibals. The bones and skin from the chicken soups I make from their Perdue relatives go whizzing down their crops. The human eye—its sharp, minuscule pupil and teensy orb of vitreous humor—...
Framed-art tour, exhibit 2 You maybe recall Becca’s prints , back when? The gem below came willy-nilly through the mail from Julia after a visit she and Mike paid us. The honest-to-goodness thing, oh! Paper raggedy edged and bumpy from the colors puddling: the blues melting into greens, the carmine seeping into crimson and then coral and finally white-y pink. Blooms wafting and frail, as in life, and stamens spider-leggy real. I’d wished for red poppies—ours are orange. Julia didn’t know.
P.S. Why we went to Japan was the wedding—Zachary and Akiko’s. At the shrine, where we sat with the other guests on side benches, altar maidens in kimonos flitted like birds and bowed and lifted up silver pots of sake. A priest spoke, too. He wore a fez-shaped hat that tied under his chin. He waved a pompom-like wand, fluffy white. We couldn’t understand a thing, but when it came time we held up our little saucers for the sake like everybody else and swallowed. We’d been instructed, prior to the ceremony, on how to perform the green-branches offering. Somehow we got through. Here’s the part I loved— Zachary had memorized his lines for the bride-and-groom recitation. Akiko had written them out in phonetic English. Now, standing up there like a robber baron in his pleated kimono, alongside ravishing Akiko, he began bumbling through. How off he was, how badly he was mangling the Japanese, we couldn’t tell, but from both of them laughter began bubbling up. You know how it goes. It’s co...
Bunny trail, part 3 And then down there in the bottom of the tub, little shreds of something started peeling off. What? What in the world? RED MEANS LEAD™ said the packet of test swabs, and sure enough, at the spots where Paulson rubbed, brown-ish blood-ish smears bloomed. Not candy red. Not like the piercing streak of raspberry red on the Covid tests nobody knew about, yet. That monstrosity of ours got pant-pant-panted back down the steps and trucked to the recyclers. (Do they melt off the porcelain for the iron, or what? Does anybody know?) Now there’s an acrylic one—or maybe fiberglass—upstairs below the windows. A drop-in, no feet. I didn’t putt-putt to Home Depot by myself to pick it up. I didn’t yank up the floorboards and fashion them into a deck, griping at the chore. But I had to endure my husband’s muttering and drive myself batty over every minor hitch. For us both, the overhaul was a messy, thumping headache. Who can say, now, what nanoparticles of doom seep from ...
Bunny trail, part 2 I didn’t come home from Japan dreaming of a Jacuzzi. We were building our house in Virginia, and for upstairs, an old-fashioned clawfoot tub was my idea of perfection. I found an ad for one in Staunton. Before I went off in the truck Paulson threw some cargo straps in back. Make sure it’s down tight, he warned. Get them to help. In the strangers’ yard sat the tub, bona fide cast iron. I gave it a look and they loaded it (somehow enough people were around). They agreed with me about not tying it down—beastly heavy as it was, it wouldn’t go anywhere. Afterwards, wanting to stop by my niece’s place—Karen’s—to say hi before heading back to the house, I got a little lost. Trying to make an unexpected turn, I jammed on the brakes and heard a horrific explosion behind me, like a gunshot. The tub had slid and crashed into the back window, Chiclets of glass spewing everywhere. The tub sat a while in the carport. I scraped off the layers of pink and green paint on ...
A bit of a bunny trail, here. Reading in the bathtub isn’t high on my list, to be clear. Mostly I step into that tub you saw, the one with the green shampoo bottle sitting on the rim, only to tend to the plants at the window. Go upstairs right now and you’ll find, down in the bottom where you’re supposed to sit, ugly brown-tipped leaves I unceremoniously ripped from their spider mothers, plus a pile of excised, pathetic fronds from the potted fern. I’m too driven, I guess. The shower downstairs seems the easier, speedier place to jump into and wash off the world. The tubs in Japan—the ones I remember—positively forbade any such get-down-to-business do-what-you-came-for approach. An elephantine one in a hotel, wooden, the chest-deep water idling in wait. And in Akiko’s parents’ home, the tub just as much at the ready but modern. In a small laminate-walled room, its tiled floor outfitted with a drain, after you soaped all over in front of the mirror and hosed yourself off (no worries ...