Shirley

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...

I’m telling you—these Instagrammers, the way they catch me up. First Economikat , and now Iléna. I t must be the glasses. All the puff pastry recipes , though, not just her puff hair , Iléna has me worried. A person can’t subsist on puff pastry. Also I don’t get her egg salad . There’s no reason to be using a blender! In effect, e gg salad is just deviled eggs without the deviling—no having to scoop the y ellows from the whites, m ush with a fork, mix in the mayo, and fit the tedious tiny mound s back into the hole s . If you want egg salad, all’s to do is chop the whole, boiled eggs and add the mayo. Except y ou might want to say stuffed eggs, if devil isn’t a word you want coming out of your mouth and attracting the demons. I used to think along those lines, myself. S o I can sympathize. The d emons and devils, drifting in their netherworld, always shadowed us. We just couldn’t see them. We couldn’t read about them in the news. Evil somewhat hid its face. ...

When the Marbles Go My husband tells me somebody just died. He saw it in the newspaper. No, I say, that man died way back. I know this—we skipped the funeral. Whoever was supposed to send in the obituary just procrastinated. Another day, home from town, my husband tells me he locked himself out of the car. He had to borrow a screwdriver from someone to get into the spare key’s secret compartment he installed a long time ago, at some vague spot on the car’s undercarriage. “Uh-huh,” I say. I never liked that hiding place. I can never remember where it is. “It’s time you found somewhere better, not so complicated,” I say. He says, “Oh, I can just keep a screwdriver in the car.” I say, “No, then you’ll lock the screwdriver in, too.” Ho-ney . And then out in the garden, when he’s pointing out all the wonderful new life—the strung-out, brave lettuces, the ridges for the sweet potatoes he’ll plant, the raspberry canes’ new-fledged leaves—I see a strange, small plot by the garden’s edge...