Framed-art tour, exhibit 4


I don’t quite know what it means. Fly? See us fly?

Our young children? In the doorway, rubbing sleep from their eyes, their pajamas drooping around their butts, worried that if we don’t flap around fixing their lunches they’ll go hungry at school?

Our children turning 40, 50? So we’re supposed to get out of the way? Flutter off to the blue yonder, leaving more room for them? Go before we’re so old they get stuck with wiping up our drool and changing our Depends and can’t dash around frenetically living their own lives? (Dependses, I think, technically.)

Alta had folded this in half and tucked it inside an envelope, thus the crack running across the beak-y nose of the bird person in jailbird pants. That crease—the wornness? All the more reason for matting the picture and putting it behind glass. “Just recycling old cards,” Alta explained in her note on the back.

“Stay well & sane,” she wrote, too. It’s what anybody’s best-in-the-world friends hope for, right? If mine think I’m crazy for cherishing what looks like junk, well, I can think of more alarming kinds of crazy.

 



 



 


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