Shirley

Being Used   A big huge party, you say. It could be at their apartment—Curlytop Grandgirl and her sister’s. They shrug off your idea. Too hard to pull off. They’ll get everybody to send selfie greetings, though. They’ll get Uncle to patch these together for a birthday video. Mom’ll love that. Well, they’re her girls. Who are you to run things? The slipping-out hard little head, and the squally rest of her—poof, that was 50 years ago. This is now. People are supposed to send in their footage by September 18. The deadline hovers. It’s painful. For one thing, your phone belongs in the dump. Recordings are always tinny. Your husband puts a chair on top of the picnic table, for propping the phone, but you get two mangy heads too far apart, backed by generic leaves. The bathroom might hold more potential—the towels’ colors, the beet-red shower curtain, the glimmering washbowl mirror. But even in the best of light you look like a pair of sad hangers-on, plus your mouths move on behin...

Framed-art tour, exhibit 14 It’s just there, always at his back, taking brainless note of his moving elbows, his bent head, his tap-tapping laptop keys, his words and numbers jiggling onto and off of the screen. Or, in bits and spurts, his Nuna tsiaq News s crolling, or the Guardian’ s or New York Times’ s coverage of the shredding of a nation—the blinkering, shattering reports. (Or in the evenings, very late, some howling rock band some 40, 50, 60 years ago.) That’s if he’s there. Stuck on the study wall like it is, opposite his desk drawers and the spindled back of his desk chair, it can’t keep track when he’s gone. During the day my husband might, instead, be out in the actual off-the-art-paper forest. He’s g etting away, calming his nerves. M aybe doing woods patrol, as he calls it. He’s combed the whole place for nonnatives. He’s decimated the beebee trees and the trees of heaven. He’s taken out the Japanese honeysuckle, the beefsteak plants, the garlic mustard, the mult...

Framed-art tour, exhibit 13 It was very elegant and thrilling. It was the very first time we bought a piece of art off the wall at a show. Grandgirl’s paintings had to stay up for a month or so, afterwards. So the one we leaped for, not until September did we get to see the back side—her trademark Noemi Salome label and the Frame Factory sticker she signed in silver. She says she’s glad we bought it, because now she still gets to see it. This bird, anyhow, won’t crash into any windows . Perpetually, night and day, near where we sleep, it flies north ward toward the woods.   I think the NS could be more splashed across the front, don’t you? But maybe she wished not to detract from nature in all its glory. She gave us just the soaring goose, the green hills, the moon, the salting of stars. She didn’t want her mark, the mention of human contrivance, botching the purity. Not that nature is all glory, especially now that we’re demolishing, with our weighty carbon footprint...

Framed-art tour, exhibit 12 We return, here, to our series I’ve long neglected. Nothing since last October — no mention of what’s on the walls. You’d think I’m always looking out windows, taking in the sights, spying bears and snakes and things, but no. Walls are opportunities.   The piece is easy to miss, hanging as it does between two shelves of our rickety bookcase upstairs. Plus the room it’s in doesn’t get slept in a lot. Mostly nobody’s even up there. If they are, the person has to be wanting a book, looking for a book . Otherwise they won’t hit on my sign. And then they’re maybe just having an insomnia attack and aren’t much interested in taking out a library loan. Conversely, should they actually help themselves, they might forget about returning the book until some faraway day when my husband and I are both dead, in which case somebody else would be living in our house. The new people would’ve disposed of our junker furniture and books and would have no interest in some b...

We had a death in August. The hummingbird, who hit a window, now lies beneath a rock in my only flowerbed, along with the ripe red raspberry Grandboy plucked from our patch in her honor, now, surely, eaten by ants . Scooped up from the ground, she lay tummy side up in his hands, her twig legs paddling frantically, but within minutes she succumbed. He did the inscribing. Two days later, as I sat reading on the porch, a wee brown wren flew into the edge of a different window, one cranked open. This time, the collision wasn’t fatal. But the wren , changing course, catapulted nearly into my face. I narrowly escaped my eye getting gouged. Moments later, not blinded, I was able to catch sight of another Ruby. She was b uzz ing above the wash line, maybe looking for her sister. Danger always lurks. We have every reason to savor our hours—you and I and every small singing, whirring, fruiting thing.    

Things I Did in Pittsburgh Besides Guffaw My Way Through a Story 1. I reunited with my Bear That Heard Crying . Grandgirl said I could take it home. We listened to part of it, hunkered on the sofa bed, and because she insisted on me looking up another book she loves, The Bad Seed , that one too, just as spellbinding.  I hardly think a person’s decision—resolve—gets them out of their soda can, but what do I know. (You can skip the pink glasses, if you want, by starting at 0:50.) 2. I tried very hard to copycat Grandgirl’s TikTok dance moves. I failed horribly. 3. I got to see the rose. Grandgirl had been given it at school. The severing had been an accident—her brother had taped the wound. She thought it might heal. I laid the patient, already fading, on a bookshelf to dry, but whether it’s still there, I don’t know. 4. I played Smell. Grandgirl Older’s upper head swathed in her furry sleep mask, I lined up her many-hued scent bottles on the sunshiny windowsill like ladi...

Dear Kirsten (again), So what do I think of the rest of the book ? You wanted to hear.   For one, the 15 stands. Your Doctrine of Chicken could serve as the next Mennonite confession of faith, I think, as we good church people may be more birdly than we know, even in the way we worship. The chickens you once tended, who thought you to be God, hollered to you, called, caroled. Their joy in you, as you put it, was wholly connected to what you could offer their stomachs. (I’ve lifted this right off the page—see that?) Elsewhere, your words to the unattributed Mennonite pastor who said that children are for martyrdom pierced me to the core. Brother Pastor, have you given your body to grow life? Has th is man conceiv ed twins, carr ied them to term, and then pour ed out his milk for them? How do you feel about needles? you ask him. Your IVF experience was torture. I hope you have, at least, delivered a casserole, you tell him. Y our own congregation, protective, not the kind ...