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aggravating Aggie can be.

FIVE
    Ordinarily, Aggie likes sitting at the front-room window, where she has various ways to spend the day: reading, eating, and watching. She knows a great many things about a great many people in this town. Prepared to dislike it, and finding it strange when she came, she has grown fond with sixty years of familiarity. She knows so many stories, snippets of drama, that have originated here. Many of the people involved, of course, have left or are dead. It’s lonely, to have so few people left with whom to share memories — or, if not memories, at least pieces of history, certain events. How many remember the First World War, even as remotely as she does?
    Oh, it is shameful, ignominious, to end up an old woman peeing the bed.
    It is both more of a disaster that it has happened again, and less of one. Worse because now it is no longer a single, arguable lapse; and better because the second time it is almost familiar, not such a shock. She had no trouble identifying what was wrong, and spent no time trying to think of what to say to June, because clearly there was nothing to be said.
    She is eighty years old, and of course things must be breaking down. What could she expect? She has rewarded her body with pies and cakes, and punished it with flesh. There are fires in her belly some days. There are times when it feels as if it may erupt.
    If she has to die, she would prefer to explode. Mere disintegration is a horror. The best way would be to eat one cookie, one muffin, one cupcake too many and just blow up, with the taste of the last treat still on her tongue.
    But she doesn’t want to die.
    She doesn’t want to be an old woman peeing the bed, either.
    And George will come, poking and probing, and Lord knows what June has in mind.
    How queer and frightening, not to know what to do. There was a time when she was full of ideas. She was the one, back home, who suggested games, and found an old curtain to turn into a dress for Edith to wear to the church young people’s meetings. She was the one who led the others up the rungs of the ladders into the hay mows, and leaped from away up there into the soft heaps of straw, while they hung back, peering at the distance down. She was the one who climbed high into a maple tree and hung from a limb, catcalling at her younger brothers, who could not reach so high. Later on, she may have been, for all she knew, the only one whose body sometimes burned, wanting — something or other. Even with so much work to be done, she had time and restlessness left over.
    â€œWhat do you want, Aggie?” her mother demanded. “Why can’t you be still?”
    Well, but it got to be time for things to happen. Some secret things already had begun.
    She went to church young people’s meetings, and with her parents on Saturday evenings visiting neighboring families, or with her brothers and Edith on a community hay ride, and regarded the boys. They were as familiar to her as, oh, boiled potatoes, or lemon pies.
    What happened was, the girls of the area married the boys of the area (who were called the boys, distinguishing them from their fathers, until they married and began to produce another set of boys) and moved onto nearby farms and began to recreate in those fields and kitchens and bedrooms what they had known in their mothers’ homes.
    It was a matter of waiting until the one involved made himself evident. Then there would be a period of courtship, involving a degree of chaste romance, and then the day, and freedom. She would have her own house, would make her own decisions about what to cook and bake. It would be her own floors she would be cleaning, and her own clothes, and her husband’s, she would be washing. She would have her own children. Her life would be her own.
    Meanwhile there was a kind of jigsaw puzzle of a man, made up of bits and pieces of familiar men, broad-shouldered and hefty, too young to have grown beefy