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Lord’s Prayer should read,” William, who’s eaten a potato every day of his life, used to say. “The potato is the purest of foods. Straight from the earth. Whole populations have survived, Morgan, on the potato. Out west we knew what a potato was. A good potato should be as dry as the dust bowl. But here in Ontario, they like to eat them wet. Here, they wouldn’t know a good potato if you threw it at them.”
    In the cellar tonight, I bent over and plunged my hand into a burlap sack, groping among the russets. My hand grew slippery with fine, dry earth, my nostrils flaring with the sweet, pungent smell of soil and sacking. Half an hour later, the potato baking in the oven, the heat from the glass door warming my backside, I picked up a tulip bulb from the kitchen table.
    “Don’t touch those,” I remembered William barking the day of the stroke. I stood beside him that afternoon, watching him shift groups of flower bulbs around on the table, as though he were deploying model armies. Tulips. Narcissi. Daffodils. Hyacinths. Allium. Some large as a baby’s fist, others tiny as pearl onions.
    “They’re delicate,” he warned me. “You’ll knock the skins off ’em.”
    And indeed, their brittle, papery, toast-coloured skins were shedding everywhere, leaving the swelling curves of the tubers naked and gleaming. How could he tell me they were fragile, I wondered, when he was about to bury them in the dry, acid, ruthless ground and those vulnerable skins would be letting go of the flesh even before he pressed the earth down on them?
    I watched him make a drawing on a piece of paper, trying to map out his planting for the best effect, considering the length of the stems, the colour, size and shape of the blossoms, the moment of blooming — early, mid- or late spring. The bulbs stood aboutin fleshy clusters, dense and meaty as organs, as colonies of miniature inverted hearts.
    Later, looking over his shoulder at five o’clock, I saw that he’d made no progress with his diagram, but was tracing the same lines over and over, the velvety lead now so heavy that it smeared like prairie crude across the heel of his hand. I grew impatient.
    “When are you going to stop fussing with them? Why don’t you just put them in the earth? It can’t be that complicated. We’ve been living with them for a week.”
    “Three days,” he corrected me. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Morgan. I can’t seem to come up with a plan. I can’t form a decision.”
    “Well, I wish you’d get on with it. We’ll be eating supper soon. Where are we going to put down our plates? I’m sick to death of the sight of these bulbs. I’d sooner sweep them into the trash than look at them another day.”
    “That goes to show what your values are. That tells me what you’re worth. You’ve never made a decent garden. You know nothing about creativity and the time it takes.”
    “I’ve been creative in my life,” I said, injured. “I gave you seven children, didn’t I? And another two that died? Carried all but one of them to full term? I call that
time.”
    Dear girls,
    …Lately I’ve begun to think that Morris has brainwashed me, because I find myself wondering if he may be right. Perhaps despite all their contraptions and charts and blood thinners and fancy tests, their dopplers and ECHOs, the doctors can’t put a finger on the centre of your father’s malady. Like stonemasons, carpenters,plasterers repairing cracked walls and foundations, when it’s the soul of the house that’s crying out for help…

October 22
    I’ve begun to draw a map of Simplicity in my head, each day digressing a little further from my original route, getting to know the streets because, before this, it was always William who knew everything. With my one good eye, I’m able to read the street signs and am committing them to memory. And I can’t help feeling it was a different Morgan who arrived at the hospital in the screaming