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do old folks lose the ability to censor themselves? I mean, they just blurt out whatever comes into their minds.
    She said, “ My! You’ve certainly dropped the weight after the baby.”
    I responded, “This isn’t a baby—it’s a dog.”
    The woman leaned in for a closer look, her cataracts almost as bad as Sushi’s. “Well, thank goodness!” she said. “Here I was thinking you’d given birth to just about the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen!”
    “What a lovely thing to say,” I said, smiling.
    Soosh just growled.
    The trolley arrived, and the silver-haired, bearded gent driving assisted my new acquaintance with her walker up the few steps, then turned to me.
    “No pets on the trolley,” he announced. “Sorry.”
    Hmmm. “What about Seeing Eye dogs?” I asked.
    “In that case, of course. But, young lady, you’re obviously not blind.”
    Liking the “young” part if not wild about the “lady,” I said, “Well, the dog’s blind and I’m her Seeing Eye human.”
    And giving him no time to think about that, I climbed aboard.
    The wonderful smell of Mother’s beef stroganoff greeted us when we arrived home, and I thought Sushi was going to swoon and faint—Rudy and stroganoff in the same day! Heaven on earth….
    In the kitchen, I mixed a little of the stew with Sushi’s dry dog food (was a woman in Japan right now feeding a pet named Dry Dog Food sushi?) and put it in her dish. That way, Soosh would be sure to eat right away…so I could give her the insulin shot. (It’s not good to have a diabetic animal who’s a finicky eater.)
    After dinner—at which I was anything but a finicky eater, forgoing my one-half portion rule—I did the dishes (well, the dishwasher did the dishes…but I put them in). Then I retired to the seclusion of the music/library/den room to catch up on my e-mail on my laptop, which hadn’t been tended to for a few days. Usually this amounted to an hour or so of deleting unwanted spam, but to my surprise, I had one from Jacob.
    The e-mail read
    Mom, I guess I could come for a little while to see Grandma and you. My year-round school has a vacation break soon.
    Jake.
    I sat back.
    He hadn’t written “Dear” Mom; he put his grandma before me; and he didn’t sign off “Love” Jake…but still…hearing from him was…hearing from him.
    You see, though I’d sent Jake many missives via both snail-and e-mail, this was the first message I’d received from my son since the divorce.
    Could this be a warming trend along with the Indian summer?
    I was alive with excitement about his visit……but also, I have to admit, a little trepidation.
    If I was the kind of writer who wrote things like “Little did I know how much trepidation I’d have felt, had I but known the danger I’d be putting him in,” that’s what I’d write right here.
    But lucky for you, I’m not.
     
    A Trash ’n’ Treasures Tip
     
    If you can’t wait around all day at a local auction for a particular item of interest to go on sale, ask the auctioneer to move it up in the schedule. But don’t try this at a federal auction; you’ll get your head bit off.

Chapter Three

A Hunting We Will Hoe
    M y sister, Peggy Sue, was old enough to be my mother. Born in the 1950s, pretty, pretty, pretty Peggy Sue was named after Buddy Holly’s hokey if infectious rock ’n’ roll song.
    Mother always claimed the idea to call sis Peggy Sue came to her in a vision shortly after giving birth; but Father, who kept a diary (a holdover from his World War II correspondent days), penned that a pimple-faced but pretty nurse’s aide was singing the rock ’n’ roll tune as she pushed a groggy Mother-on-a-Gurney out of the delivery room, still wearing saddle shoes from a sock hop. (The aide, not Mother!)
    Then, after eighteen years passed with no more children, Mother and Father thought they were done with child-rearing, Mother having entered menopause. But (as she has told me so often) when Mother began gaining weight