Monday 10/16/23
Doesn't get better than this.
"Two white poplar trees stood outside of Dot’s window at the facility, on a lawn that had no others. They were the sentinels that had grown about fifteen feet apart from each other and looked like rakish, arbor-themed football goalposts. Dot viewed them as the spiritual embodiments of her parents in deciduous form. She spoke to them often, lying in her bed. She didn’t read, she sat, she thought, she conversed with the trees, believing she was reaching from this world into the next, or that people from the next who understood who she truly was, were reaching back to her in her dwindling here and now. Maybe she thought about those trips with my mom when my mom was a girl. She had a lot of time to think.
"After she died, there were scattershot stories about things she’d said to people in our family, but those quickly went away, though you always hear Grammie stories. It was like Dot had become a mere annotation. Dot had become a dot. And when I would wonder, and when I still do, if it matters that people knew she was a good person, or it only matters that she was a good person, I see the entire world differently. People I know, people I think I know, people I will never know well enough."
* From "Dot"/There Is No Doubt: Story Girls
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