Margaret did not want ruffled hair, nor ruffled dress nor a beautiful ring relegated to her crooked, small pinky finger, but she smiled because it was a gift, and she was, after all, a lady.

“I’m not sure how much longer I have on this earth. They say that youth is wasted on the young. I am not sure what is wasted on the old. Wisdom would be my guess. I survived all these years, garnered all this wisdom, and for what? To just wither away?”

We started advancing up the stairs yelling ‘bad bear’ at the top of our lungs.

Our world would change, but would anyone else’s? The pandemic would still come for us, elections would still happen. Can one small family’s big change change anything that affected the entire world?

This is a public service announcement: if the palms continue to spread; if Palmification continues, we will lose everything about our state that separates it from South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. We will lose our plants. We will lose our animals. We will lose ourselves

The ring on her little finger had my name engraved on it. I found it a bit ominous.

“Excuse me ma’am, when we landed my phone didn’t work. I don’t see an AT&T booth on the airport directory but your sign says communications so maybe you can help me?”

“Are you from another country?”

“No. I’m from Delaware.”

“Why did you call me ‘ma’am’? No one uses that anymore.”

The old oak trees stood like ancient women spreading their gnarled limbs protectively over the ground below.

My morning teacup would disappear from the kitchen table. I would find it later in the day- on top of the doghouse, or in the mailbox.

Beyond it was a rather faded couch and an equally faded woman.

The guy who called himself Bathroom proclaimed to Herman, “I saw a light at the end of the tunnel.”

“That was coming out of the bottom of the outhouse hole. Probably the fumes from previous visitors,” said Herman.

“I’m tired of this century before mine. I want to go home,” said Bathroom.

“So, jump into the light,” Herman said jokingly.

Bathroom jumped and disappeared into a green light.

You pass through a portal and travel forward or back in time and I discover myself looking back and forward at the man/boy who once had hopes, but always seemed to rotate around upon himself seeing again and again that he never made progress, only repeating the same — not stupid, nor ignorant — just baffled by why people were what they were and why so many seemed happy when the overpopulated world is in decline and will soon disintegrate into a mass extinction fictionalized by H. G. Wells.

Peering across the celluloid roadway, I sail toward a silver screen. I burst into a fine-lit fog. Swish, swish. January 1960, a white wedding. The bride and groom depart the reception in a classic two-seater, down a country road, into a dark and driving snow. Damn wipers. The groom pulls over, jumps out. Dashing, destructive, he breaks off the wipers, tosses them to the ground. They continue on, and the windscreen blurs. The bride leans out and wipes the screen with the sleeve of her gown.

Before today, all my days were an illusion,
I have no recollection of their pain,
No twists and turns, I feel anew,
Was that street even there yesterday?

I’ve lived in other people’s stories,
Blind to my potential,
The veil revealed my sunny street,
Or was my aptitude so blinding?

Jasmine twisted between the porch railings a perfect foil for the white posts.

We hugged, we stared into each other’s eyes and soaked in the sights.

Reggie turned back to the large boulder, no longer surrounded by the smaller stones, and noticed a ring matching the ring on her little finger jutting out from a spot near the top that she reached out to pull.

I should have given myself more time to read a book for the monthly book report. Truth is I’d forgotten all about it. When she called my name after having listened to two other girls report on classics: Anne of Green Gables and To Kill a Mockingbird, I reluctantly walked to the front of the class doing a perp walk. When I got up there, I told her the title of my book, One Hundred Flavors of Men. Now I was only 13 years old. There was no such book.

I moved closer to examine the carving and the buzzing in my spine grew stronger, moving up in waves, into my hair, like fingernails lightly scratching my scalp. It reminded me of being a child and lying next to my grandmother as she ran her fingers through my hair. It was the most comforting feeling I had felt in years.