reVision

A few months ago I pulled out my journal and wrote:  I’m changing my life.  I’m not even sure I knew what I meant when I wrote it, I knew it didn’t mean anything earth-shattering, but I could sense a shift coming.  Every once in a while things just click into place and you find yourself moved from one space to the next.  Around that time I got rid of my smartphone. (Best decision I ever made, truly.) Since then, a friend and I started working our way through The Well-Educated Mind.  I really committed to running. I recalibrated my writing goals to make them both more consistent and more manageable.  I started outlining a new novel.  I let go of some restrictions I’d put on myself that weren’t serving a good purpose.  I got rid of time wasters (like watching Netflix/movies at home) that were cluttering my creative process.  I started working on projects I’ve been procrastinating for years.  Somehow, without thinking too much about it, I really did start changing my life.

*

For our anniversary, we rented a house overlooking a tidal bay on Puget Sound.  In the mornings, the sun shone off the water and osprey circled overhead, cormorants rode the low air streams.  Later in the day, the tide lifted its skirts and left a mudflat behind.  The herons moved in, dozens of them, joint and feather, long gray necks snaking into the silt to find clams, a luckless fish.  We made coffee on the stovetop, dark and gritty, sat by the big windows watching their strange high step across the muddy plain in fascination.  Hour after hour, water returned, the herons waded, their long legs disappearing inch by inch until they lifted their wings and fled.  The low lands filled in, the flat became a stream again, a river.

On the second day we slipped our kayaks into the high tide and paddled toward the ocean.  The air was scented with brine and rot, that particular tang of the sea.  Jelly fish floated around us, yellow, orange, a skirt of white – giant eggs poaching under the surface.  I have a bit of thalassaphobia. (I came to kayaking partly to confront that fear.)  So while my husband was delighted, I thought, oh my god, if jellyfish, what else is under there?  That’s all it took for the panic to rise up.

The value of being afraid in a kayak over a body of water is there’s nowhere to run.  I had to force my mind to reason, force my arms to paddle, my breath to slow.  It wasn’t long before the anxiety had passed and I had gained that small accomplishment, the vanquishing of a fear, to take with me for good.  It occurred to me later, tucked back into the house, scrubbed of sea salt and sweat, that changing your life in any way at all hinges on facing down fears.  (As a perfectionist, my fear often involves failure.  Better to never start something at all than to do a poor job, or to quit midway.)  You have to take yourself in hand and risk it.

Sometimes changing our lives though, is really about changing our thinking.  I turned 47 this month, and the last of our kids graduated high school in May.  Cue midlife angst. Halfway through your life the doors start closing.  For almost five decades I have made choices, traveled a path, and that creates natural limits.  For example, it doesn’t really make sense for me to go for that college degree at this point (too much money when I’m already doing what I love and don’t plan to change it.) And there are other things – big things I thought I wanted earlier in my life that are unlikely to happen now.  There’s fear involved with shutting those doors – will I get to my deathbed and regret?  (Probably not.)  But I’ve been working on facing those insecurities, redefining the idea of “success”, changing my language, being confident in the direction I have chosen for myself.  It takes just as much intentional work to do that as it did to paddle through a bay of jellyfish

.I’m someone who believes fully in the value of a small and focused life.  It’s a constant challenge to own that in a big, splashy, motion-forward culture.  I keep refining, letting go of the things that tangle me up, make me feel inadequate.  Some of those are outward things – the smartphone, social media, the television – but there’s an equal amount of self-talk, intangible expectations, perfectionism, and discontent that trap too.  If I’ve made a goal for 47 it’s to deal honestly with the interior struggles as well as the outer struggles.

June 19, 2018:  I’m changing my life. (Ongoing.)

the silence has become beautiful

It is spring.  Lovely, soft, unpredictable spring.  The Grosbeaks came back only yesterday, even though the Stellar's Jays have managed to hatch and fledge a whole brood of black-capped miscreants already.  The young Jays take turns tipping the edge of the bird feeder and squawking at me through the window.  With my characteristic unreasonableness, I adore them.

Spring often feels like a mere blink of petal and color but this year it has slowed down.  I've noticed things I've never seen before, like the gradual transition from catkin to helicopter on the maple trees, and the daily transporting of sticks and debris by the hawk couple, the incremental brightening of the days.

Awhile ago, I broke my smart phone.  The days right after were quiet, unusually efficient.  I found myself entering the same peaceful, zen-like state I remember from the pre-internet era when we didn't own a television set.  It was restful.  I began to have ideas about never fixing the phone, about a life totally disconnected.  But eventually, reason, and the need to text my family, won out.  I took it to the repair shop and handed it over.  While I waited for an estimate in the chilly shop, I fantasized that the phone was beyond repair, that the middle-aged man with the Dwight Schrute-shirt was going to come back out from behind the curtain looking downtrodden and tell me "I'm terribly sorry, there was nothing we could do..."and I'd be free, truly free.  Liberation!  But the curtain parted and my phone emerged in the palm of the smiling repairman, and I knew it wasn't to be.  $10 later I was out the door with a fully functioning phone.  It felt heavy in my purse, and loud, though I hadn't even turned it on yet.  I sat in the parking lot and thought for awhile.  The decision wasn't hard.  I turned on the phone, went to the settings and started deleting apps.  When I was done, I had dumbed my phone down to phone, text, camera, and a photo editor.  Everything else was gone.

That was back in March, before the equinox.  Spring has unfolded for me in its own space since then, unphotographed, recorded only in my memory and in the few lines I jot down in my journal.   I have watched the rhubarb grow from a wrinkled knob into its open-armed beauty, day by slow day, and never mourned the lack of telling.

Awhile back I read a book of essays on making a simple life.  One woman wrote that she and her husband had given up the radio (they'd been rid of the TV for a long time.)  "For over a year now we've lived without voices in our home save those of the real, live people who live here or those of visiting friends."  She does not feel lonely, she claims.  Rather, she has learned to love silence, and the music of her own world.  Just now the breeze is blowing through new leaves and the ducks are chattering about some disturbance up on the pasture.  Chopin is playing on the stereo.  The rocker I am sitting in creaks patiently.

What I've noticed most is the absence of strain.  No anxiety, no anger or irritation, no feeling of missing out.  I used to be so full of ideas that I didn't know how to start.  Every day my mind filled up with more and more until I was bloated and unable to move.  I feel slimmed down now, clear-headed.  The things I am responsible for are manageable and I have space to deal with them.  Alone with my thoughts, I can breathe.  "The silence I was always compelled to fill up has become beautiful to me..." says the woman with no radio.

Says the woman with no smart phone.

Pax.       

neighbor

The neighbor had his gun.  Alice watched him put it into the glove compartment of his minivan while his wife was helping the children into their seats.  He carried it with them whenever they left the city – for protection, he’d said one afternoon last summer when she’d been walking past and he’d come out of the house carrying it.

“Protection from what?” she asked, a little stunned to see it in his hand like that.

“Don’t you watch the news?” he said and turned his back on her.

Ever since, she’d kept her eyes on them.   They were a strange couple, private, reclusive.  The children were a little strange too, pale, dark-haired creatures that barely ever saw the light of day.  If they did come out into the yard, the mother came too, sitting on the porch with a book in her hand, talking to them in her soft voice while they organized piles of trading cards or picked dandelions apart with their fingers.  The oldest one, a boy, had received a bike for Christmas and sometimes he rode it in a wobbly circle around the perimeter of the yard.  Alice watched from her living room as he learned to ride it, assuming he’d take off down the block when he had it mastered, but he never did.  He just came out occasionally and made the circuit of the yard, unable to get enough momentum going for a smooth ride, walking the bike back to the garage after a few minutes effort.

Today the children were waiting in the van while their parents traveled back and forth from the house to the car with blankets, a cooler, the badminton set.  Alice put a leash on Daisy and went out for a walk.   When she got to the street, her neighbor was putting plastic bags of food into the back of the van.

“Nice day for a picnic,” she said loudly.  He turned and gave her a nod.  She let Daisy wander into their yard, so she could have an excuse to talk to him.

“Going somewhere fun?” she asked.

“Just out to Hopper,” he said, slamming the back hatch. “My brother’s kid is having a birthday party at the park out there.”  He was a big man, with a full beard and thick arms.  He crossed them over his chest while they stood together which made him appear even bigger.  The bulk of him was intimidating and she couldn’t help thinking he liked to make people aware of it.

“Hopper’s a nice little town,” she said, pushing the button to reel Daisy’s leash back in.   “It’s good to get out of the city sometimes.”

He scowled.  “Bunch of idiots out there.  Place is getting taken over.”

She’d heard this from him before.  His work at the water plant was being taken over by females.  The school his kids attended was being taken over by illegals.   She didn’t know what was going on in Hopper, but she understood the idea.

“Well, the park should be fun anyway,” she said, waving to his wife as she came and stood beside them and scratched Daisy’s head. Natalie was pretty, long-haired and delicate with grey-green eyes.  She looked like she could be in a Waterhouse painting, crimson-robed, draping her long, smooth arm into a lilypad pool.  Alice smiled at her.  

“It will be nice for the kids to be able to have space to run and play.”

Natalie nodded and smiled politely and Alice took that as her cue to say goodbye.  She‘d walk down to the park, let Daisy chase squirrels for a few minutes.  She’d almost reached it when she saw the minivan go by.  What was it like for those children with parents who were so defensive about the rest of the world?  Her own kids had grown up in the neighborhood and had the run of it, riding their bikes up and down the streets until the sun set, playing ball in this very park.  She thought of the boy on his wobbling bike and felt a wave of compassion for him

.Later that week, when the neighbor was gone to work, she went across and asked Natalie if the children could come over and help pick her grapes.

  “I’ll be with them,” she said, when Natalie stood up to come along.  “You could get a little alone time.”  Natalie hesitated, but after giving the children some low-voiced instructions, she agreed.

Annake and Beth, the younger girls, and the boy, Aiden, followed her across the street and into the house, hesitating inside to look at her things with solemn eyes, taking in the art work, the baskets of yarn, the drawing table.   She offered them cookies and cups of milk to help them relax and then showed them the backyard garden and the grape arbor she’d had built.  She told them to go ahead and go under the canopy, which they did hesitantly, the girls clinging to each other’s hands.  She stood outside and listened as their whispers turned to happy chatter.  It was cool and dark in there, a space that longed for children.  When they had come back out again, grape leaves clinging to their clothes and hair, fingers sticky with the grapes they’d eaten, she showed them how to choose the ripest bunches and cut through the stems, lay them neatly in the basket she’d brought from the house.

After they finished picking enough grapes, she brought them back inside and they made juice, pulling the fat grapes off their stems and cooking them down in a big pot.  Annake poured in the sugar and Aiden stirred it with a wooden spoon while she and Beth wiped the counters clean.  They were eager learners, quiet and attentive, willing to work.  After a couple of hours, Natalie came to check on them.  Alice gave her a bowl of grapes and poured some of the hot juice into a bottle for her to take home, told her that the children had been a great help and she meant it.  Standing side by side, she saw how Aiden and Natalie had the same frail air, the long limbs, the unusual beauty.

“There will be more grapes in a few days,” she said, surprising herself.  “Would you all like to come back?” And they did, picking the grapes until they were gone, then the figs, then helping her tidy up the garden, harvest what was left of the late summer produce.  Natalie often came with them, sitting on the back steps with her book in hand while the children talked and worked with Alice.

The children were back in school by this time and they chatted to Alice about what they were studying, their classmates, the elaborate rules of the playground.  Aiden was lonely, she could tell, but Beth and Annake seemed to fit in fine.  Only once did they complain about a teacher – that was Beth, who had begun second grade and was dismayed at the amount of writing the teacher, Mr. Lasko, expected from her.  Annake, who was in the fourth grade, and the most outspoken of the three, said matter of factly,

“It’s because he’s a Jew.”

Alice was so taken back she nearly dropped the bowl of beans they’d been picking.

“What does that have to do with it?” she asked, a little sharply.  Annake’s face took on a sullen look.  She was most like her father, Alice realized, intelligent, but quick to blame, quick to be defensive.  She was about to say something more when Natalie left the porch and joined them.

“Beth,” she said gently, “tell me something about Mr. Lasko that you do like.”  She began to help Annake with the beans.

“He doesn’t yell,” said Beth after a while.  “And he doesn’t let Nathan Banner take cuts in the lunch line like Mrs. Perry did.”

“Does he still have the prize jar if you finish your homework during the week?” asked Aiden.  He was deadheading the flower border and there was the peppery smell of marigolds in the air.

Beth nodded.  “It’s mostly just stickers and candy though.”  She twined a bean tendril around her finger and pulled it out to examine the spiral she’d made.

“I like Mr. Lasko,” said Natalie, and she smiled at Annake before looking at Alice.  Not frail, Alice realized, there was strength there.

After that, she began to notice all the ways Natalie worked with the children, redirecting their conversations, listening to what lie behind the words, bringing them to the conclusions she wanted them to have.  It was done so neatly that the children barely realized they were being guided.  For the first time she considered what Natalie was up against every day, and how she resisted it.  The children were remarkable, really, when she came to think of it.  She thought of Aiden and his bike. He was carrying the bowl of beans into the house and she watched him with a surge of affection.  There was persistence in them, a kind of defiance she hadn’t known to look for.

She stood and wiped her hands on her jeans, said, “This looks good.  Shall we be done for the afternoon?” They gathered up the tools and put them away, coiled up the hose, locked the garden gate.  About this time of day their father came home, and the children were always anxious to greet him.  He was not unkind to them, she’d learned that much at least through their conversations.  They washed their hands at the spigot, trailed out through the backyard gate and across to their own house.   Natalie followed behind, turning at the edge of the yard to say “thank you” as she did every time she came.    Did she realize what Alice had thought of her and the children all this time? Probably, she decided with some dread.  She thought of the first afternoon she’d invited the children over and imagined what Natalie had said in that low-voiced conversation:  

“Mrs. Inman is very kind.  What a nice neighbor to invite you all over.”   Alice’s cheeks grew hot.

“Thank you,” she said quickly, pushing the gate closed.  “It’s been so nice.  Really.”

Natalie stopped and asked, “Would you like to come to dinner sometime?”

Alice hesitated, imagining eating dinner in their house, her neighbor’s heavy presence across the table, the inevitable discussions that would make her burn and have to bite her tongue, and she began to make an excuse, find some way of permanently delaying it, but then she caught Natalie’s gaze and she understood what was being offered, what was being asked.

“Yes,” she said, gladly. And she meant it.  

a good deal

The house was ten miles out of town, a hollow clearing inside a shelter of trees that thickened into deep woodland as it neared the river.  Mr. Brook, the property owner, said it was small, a succession of rooms that faced the wrong way, shunning the sun.  It had been built by the foreman of the old copper mine - another dark cave for his retirement.   There were gardens though, haphazard as they were, following the path of the sun around the yard.  Jay stepped gingerly around the remains of a bed sprawling with bolted lettuces, kale stalks thick and bending under their own weight.  She pulled off a leaf, turned it over to find clusters of silver aphids huddled in the crevices.  Everything would need to be pulled out, buried under layers of straw and leaves for a year.  They could get rabbits, spread their droppings over the mulch.  In a couple of years they’d have meat and vegetables.  More than enough.   They could build a coop under that elm tree, have some chickens, too, eggs.  She watched Charlie and Mr. Brook examining the pump for the well.  Charlie primed the pump, worked the handle a few times, the muscles in his thin brown arm straining against rust and disuse.  After a few minutes a gush of water spurted from the opening and he put a cupped hand down to catch some.  When he’d brought it up to his mouth he looked at her and grinned, his black eyes disappearing behind the folds of his cheeks, the space where he’d lost a tooth showing darkly against his otherwise white smile.  He raised a fist in mock victory.  It hadn’t been easy finding a place to buy, even though they had the money in hand.  No one in town would even consider selling to them, but Mr. Brook’s son had been in the war with Charlie.

Jay left the two men discussing the well and followed the faint sound of water into the woods.  There was a stream somewhere, Mr. Brook had said, though the beavers had dammed most of it further up, and not much water got down this far any more.  She pushed through fern and salal, a forest of mahonia, its sharp-edged leaves scratching at her bare ankles, until she found a thin trail – a deer path, probably – and the first sight of the stream.  From there it was easy to follow the water all the way to the beaver dam, a large conical structure of cut branches and debris massed against a tree stump.  Jay got as close as she could to it, kneeling on the bank, waiting for any movement.  She heard a splash near the opposite bank, but saw nothing. She imagined coming down here in the winter with Charlie, bundled up, watching for warm beaver’s breath to come through the vent in the top of the dam.  Mr. Brook said the property ended at the river and went to the rail line on the western side, so all this would be theirs -forest, trees, mahonia, stream, beavers.  She found herself hoping the privy was workable, the roof sturdy enough for Charlie to say yes.

She returned to the house.  She could hear Mr. Brook’s voice coming from around the back, near the privy, so she pushed open the front door, sneezed under the sudden assault of bird waste and dust.  A mourning dove startled and rose in the air, making an elegant escape out a window to her left.  Mr. Brook must have opened it before they’d arrived in hopes of airing the place out.   She was standing in the main room, a large space, divided into the kitchen and living area.  The kitchen consisted of a sink and a wood stove, a single set of shelves along the far wall.  At least there was a window above the sink so she could look out over the garden while she worked.  Charlie could build a counter so she’d have more space.  The living area had another window, a fireplace, room for a couch, a couple of chairs.  And they could put bookshelves in the corner.  She went through to the back and found two more rooms, a bedroom and what seemed to be a large storage closet.  It was the only room that held any clutter – a metal folding stool, a pair of well-worn boots, the tire from a small tractor, a pile of fabric – a shirt, perhaps - covered in mouse droppings.  Mr. Brook had said the miner was a pack rat and there’d been a lot to get rid of after he died.  He’d been lonely here, she suddenly knew.

When she came back into the front room, Mr. Brook was saying he’d give them some time to think about it, they could stop by his place on the way home and let him know.  Charlie was standing in the middle of the room, staring at a dark spot on the wall.  She hadn’t noticed it earlier.  There were more spots, smaller, traveling up the wall and onto the ceiling.  Mr. Brook cleared his throat, said he knew it was a hard decision.  Jay watched him, his big face going red, his eyes blinking.  He nodded, touched the brim of his cowboy hat, ducked his head to back out of the door.  She looked at Charlie, so slight in comparison, his denim shirt bagging, the sleeves rolled up over his forearms, the cracked leather belt cinched tight to hold up the khaki pants he favored.

“How did he die?” she said when Mr. Brook’s white truck had pulled away.  “The miner.”

Charlie turned to look at her.  He had an expressive face though he had long ago learned to hide that around others. She could read the story there, as well as his reluctance to tell her.

“The house is good, Jay,” he said.  “The roof, the well, the foundation.  He built it strong.”

“Was it here?” she asked.  How had she not noticed the stain at first?  It was so prominent against the pale wood.  She went to touch the edges of it with her finger.

“We’ll paint,” Charlie said.  He wasn’t trying to convince her.  They both knew this was more than they had dared hope for - their own house, land to grow vegetables, raise animals.  She nodded.

“Mr. Brook is a good man,” Charlie said.  “He’s giving us a good deal.”

“Because no one else is desperate enough to buy it,” said Jay sharply and looked away.  They were silent then.

After awhile, when they had taken it in and accepted it, and the quiet had begun to fall over their hearts again she said, “I saw the beaver dam. And there is a lot of mahonia in the woods.  I can make jelly this summer, tea for the winter.”  An image came to her mind of white walls, herbs hanging in the kitchen, rows of canned goods lined up along the shelves next to the wooden bowls her mother had brought over from Japan, Charlie in the garden tying up beans.

They walked through the rooms once more, made a list of things to buy at the hardware store, closed the windows and locked them.  At the door, Charlie turned back and made a deep bow to the interior of the house.  Jay could feel the gratitude he was offering flowing through the rooms like a cool breeze.  This humility was how he had survived, how he had made a life for them.  She reached for his hand and bowed herself, sending out her courage, her willingness. Home. Happiness began to rise in her like a dove.   

a shard of orange light

At first it was only flashes of color, a light show behind the eyelids.  Sky-blue when the woman spoke, green when it was the man, a tumble of browns and yellows when the other woman came near.  She touched his hand sometimes, whispered to him, and this was orange, a bright shard of it.

Green was the doctor, he learned later, when he could open his eyes and make sense of the images.  The first time he’d opened them had been a shock – a flood of bright white, a flurry of shapes moving faster than he could track, shadows and flickers, a stab of black, then dark red.  He’d closed them again just to keep from throwing up.  The sky-blue woman had leaned across him to adjust his pillow.  She smelled of chemicals, sweat, a brush of floral when her hair swept across his cheek.  The nurse.  Eventually he learned there was a succession of nurses, all of them sky-blue, some of them male, all quick and gentle, sweat, antiseptic, floral.

He slept most of the time.  When he was awake there was a throbbing at the front of his skull.  He imagined his brain shrinking and expanding, pushing up against bone, retreating again.  If it was quiet in the room he could travel inside the rhythm, let himself be buoyed by it, a wave, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, until he fell asleep again.

Often, he was woken by the burst of orange light.  This was always the first sense, then the smell of lemons, soap, something stale.  After that he would register the touch.  Her hand on his arm, or a brush across his forehead, delicate, tentative.  Sometimes a movement across his groin, down his leg, slower, more sure.

Some days he would feign sleep until she left.  Others, when the throbbing in his head was not so bad, he would peel his eyes open slowly, see the rounded, soft shape of her and will himself to focus, but she never crystallized.   Once, while he stared at her, she rose up and loomed over him, all soft brown and yellow, touched her mouth to his.  He could smell coffee on her breath.

After a few days he understood she was saying his name. “Eric.  Eric.”  A low voice, nearly a whisper.  That was all.  He didn’t respond.

When his eyes began to work again, when the blurred shapes became people, faces, he sorted out the brown ponytail, the pale mouth, the glasses with their lenses that reflected the overhead lamps, making it seem she had lights instead of eyes.  She came close, rubbed her thumb briskly across the side of his face, as if he’d been crying, as if there were tears she had to wipe away.

One day he woke and she was standing with her back to him, her shoulders hunched up, holding something to her ear. 

“Well, he needs me now,” he heard her say and a memory flashed before him of her standing in a room – their room, he suddenly realized – her body turned away, her hair bound into a pony tail by a black elastic band, wearing a yellow sweater, just as she was now.

“Jody,” he tried to say, but his voice would not work.  She hadn’t heard him, didn’t turn around. The nurse arrived, and his eyes closed.  He fell asleep.

Other people came.  His father, bearded, grayed, who stood at the bedside with his coat on and cried when he asked, “Where’s mom?” His sister, who looked strangely aged.  She talked with the nurses and gestured a lot and when Jody was in the room, spoke with a loud cheerfulness that even he understood was a lie.  Gradually he came to understand he’d lost time, maybe as much as a decade.  The things before were there – he remembered his childhood, his siblings, high school, the year off to travel the country, coming back home, the job with Uncle Dennis, finding he was good at construction and that he liked the work, meeting Jody at the church he’d visited once or twice.   She looked the same then, hair always neatly brushed and pulled back, the calm gaze, the smile that took her from pretty enough to noticeable.   He remembered their wedding, the apartments they rented while they saved enough for a house, dinners around the thrift store table they’d bought, cooking together after work, the succession of burnt, dry, tasteless meals they managed until they learned how to cook.  He remembered that.

Gone was everything after.  His mother.  She’d died of breast cancer, his sister said, eight years before. But he was sure he’d seen her recently, that she’d been at the apartment.  She’d been wearing that silly baseball cap, the one they got at Joshua Tree, a gray top, white stripes. He remembered pouring her a cup of coffee, sitting across the table.  Last week, maybe?  The week before?  His head ached and he retreated behind his eyelids again until the lights dimmed and the room went quiet.  They’d come again the next day with more of their memories, feel they were doing something helpful by telling him everything he’d lost.

When the doctor came the next morning on his rounds, he feigned a migraine, asked for darkness, silence.  The nurses turned them all away.  Except Jody.  She came in noiselessly, carried the room’s only chair into the corner and sat there, just outside his peripheral vision.  He never turned his head towards her, she never spoke, he didn’t understand why.  It was worse, almost, to remember only the falling into love, unable to remember the falling out.

Later, after he’d been discharged, gone back to make a life in the strange house they owned, he would wonder when she’d become this way, if the calm and poise he’d taken as contentment and self-possession, had really been lassitude, a disinterest in the world.  The only things she seemed to take pleasure in now were the hardships he was causing her – the time off from work to take him to therapy several times a week, buying him new shirts because he’d stained the old ones with his clumsy hands which were still unable to bring food, or a coffee cup, to his mouth without trembling, the extra cleaning because the nurse would be coming by the house.  She recited these burdens to him in detail whenever he asked how she was, becoming suddenly loquacious, voluble.  He would have to close his eyes then, and this too she collected.  He imagined her preening over his offenses while she worked, polishing their edges, gathering them up to be presented to him each night the way other wives brought home armfuls of groceries, a bouquet of flowers.  He grew to dread the sound of her tread on the porch that signaled her return from work.  It was autumn now.  When she opened the door, the sun would be beginning to set and he would see her as he’d seen her first in the hospital, shadowed, dim, soft.  Behind her the sky would be changing its clothes, a flash of purple and pink, the underside of clouds rimmed in yellow, where the sun was sinking, a bright shard of orange light.