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so soft-bodied and vulnerable. It would be easier to swat them if they had some sort of shell. When a spider dies, it curls up, draws its legs under it, and shrivels. It seems actually to grow smaller, as if the air had gone out of it. That’s why I don’t want to kill them, because I hate to watch them do that. And yet they often possess a painful bite, and if you see them magnified you’ll notice their horrible faces.
    Also in the basement, interlaced with the spiders, is all the stuff we moved out of Mama’s house. I can’t understand why we thought she was likely to
ever
want any of it. They accumulate all this stuff, treasures and mementos and so-called useful items, and the next generation comes along and sees that it’s just a pile of rubbish. Looking at it strewn across the basement floor, I couldn’t help thinking about the passage of time and the paths of glory leading to the grave, etc. Standing there, holding the spoon in one hand and Mama’s college annual in the other, the word “detritus” rang in my head like a bell, tolled like a funeral knell, as they used to say, used to be able to say without cracking up. I’m sorry to run on like this, but it’s been raining steadily here for three days.
    Among Mama’s things, I found a silver and ivory brooch, which might be worth something, and my immediate thought was, I have to show this to Jolie. I miss having you around to talk to. I even miss the way you used to press your hands against your ears when you thought I was holding forth too long. It’s odd how the most irritating traits of the people we love can come to seem endearing when they are gone, when they, the people, are gone. I think also of Papa’s habit of sticking little bits of toilet paper on the bathroom mirror, I never knew why, or yours of blinking rapidly when I would try to explain something to you.
    I spent two days carrying up all the junk and debris, brought it all up and stacked it in the dining room, which I never use anyway: the lawn mower, thick with a sticky melange of oil and dirt, four kinds of shovels (for snow, dirt, ashes, and, I suppose, flower bulbs), all of them rusted, two car batteries, tufts of blue moss sprouting from the terminals, two ladders, one with three broken rungs (what use did we think we would ever have for that?), several broken chairs, Papa’s enormous old Philco radio, minus all the knobs, axe, pickaxe, hoe, snow tires (flat), storm windows (two of them cracked), a duffel bag stuffed full with Papa’s old leather shoes (stiff as boards), a large expensive painter’s easel (remember that?), a shoebox bristling with Mama’s plastic hair curlers like a nest of little pink hedgehogs, a box of her stained flesh-colored girdles (the horror!), a dozen brass curtain rods (for what windows? in whose house?), your bicycle, a black ceramic umbrella stand, an American flag. I had almost finished, was tugging a roll of fiberglass batting out from where it was wedged beneath the basement steps, when I spotted the scaly thing: it looked like a dusty carp. The thing was so coated with dust it took me a moment of bug-eyed staring to recognize that it was one of Sokal’s snakeskin boots. I found the other one too, farther back under the stairs. And all this stuff is just a minute piece of the whole. A person can’t get sideways into the dining room anymore. I had to shove the last pieces in there with main force and pile the overflow in the hall. Which will prove convenient when the time comes to toss it all: just open the front door and
heave
. If it ever stops raining.
    The tenants at the duplex, which I finally managed to rent just two weeks ago, went to the city about the roof, so I had to send a roofer over there. He says it’s not just the shingles; the sheathing underneath is rotten. He absolutely refuses to start work unless I pay in advance, and now the city has made me take the whole thing, even the half that doesn’t leak, off the market until it’s