Overdue

I Was 40, He Was 36

    At the end, he wrote me a note that said "I never liked you anyway." It took me a while, but I realized I never liked him either -- I liked the idea, a man who took care of animals, was a veterinarian! A veterinarian who loved plants -- succulents and cacti. And all that time, looking back, it was me he didn't like.
    One time he took me to Bermuda. I guess he didn't want to go alone. I had a good time riding a scooter, scuffling through pink sand, smelling night-blooming cereus and spotting a century plant in a dark back yard. I never wanted to go to Bermuda, but I did get to go, didn't I? And I did see pink sand -- that was worth the trip.
    The day before we flew back to New York, I bought two things: a dish towel printed with a Bermuda Onion and a bottle of hot sauce; and I took a bar of soap from the little tourist hotel where we stayed. After thirty years, I'd given away the unused towel, used up all the hot sauce, and found the bar of soap in the back of a bathroom cupboard. I took the paper off so I could start using it.
    First, though, I think I need to find a spell, a little voudou, maybe a potion -- either that, or throw the soap away.

No Man Is an Island

Mechanical Curls for Little Girls

Combs Wrapped in Velvet

Canned Heat No. 4006

     When we moved from Memphis to Toledo, in 1945, we had never before seen snow.
Throughout the late 1940s, terrible winter storms brought down wires and trees by
coating them with up to an inch and a half of ice. I think of the hearts of trees pounding
and trying to keep their limbs from freezing and bending to the ground and breaking.

The electric stove was rendered useless.  My mother got 

a Sterno camp stove, and a carton of canned heat, and she
cooked candlelight dinners on the Sterno.

Holes in the Heart