Warm Wuinter's Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

would not be
allowed to ignore the knowledge that each cigarette cost her five
and one half-minutes of life. She would be forced to recognize
that, on average, smoking would cost her seven years of life. If
the same girl chose to drink, or live on French fries and sausage
and pepper grinders, then more years would be subtracted. Dilly was
absolutely positive that her system would make individuals both
more aware and more responsible for their health.
    Dilly had spent many a laundry day working
through examples of her system. Everything was worked out except
the exact mechanism for assigning the L.E.s. She was leaning toward
it becoming one of the primary responsibilities of the public
health system. It would, of necessity, have to be an intrusive
system, but she was sure that the rewards in longevity would be
worth the cost in privacy.
    Dilly was positive that her father did not
have long to live. At age sixty-six, Neil Koster’s L.E. should be
sixteen years, but she doubted whether she could, in good
conscience, give him more than three or four more years. This
woefully short time was the reason for her mission. She was going
to spend her Labor Day holiday doing the things necessary to
recover the lost years of her father’s life.
    After she finished folding and sorting the
laundry, Dilly arranged the separate stacks of socks and underwear
on the long trestle table in the dining room which she always used
as a staging area for trips. She laid out the different-colored
backpacks of her three children. She began arranging stacks of
clothes on top of each backpack. This was the kind of work that led
to her best thinking.
    Dilly had spent much of her adult life
discovering and working through the complex equations of human
life. She avidly scanned newspapers and magazines and spent hours
listening to daytime television to keep up with the scientific
discoveries that affected life’s equations. Additional linkages of
cigarettes to lung cancer and heart disease, stronger correlations
between alcohol and stomach and pancreatic cancer, and more
findings on the relationship between cholesterol and
atherosclerosis were always exciting news. Even more thrilling
could be a report that a study in The New England Journal of
Medicine, or some other well-respected scientific journal magazine,
showed some important variable had been misread. A sudden reversal,
from something positive to something negative, was especially
satisfying. Something in Dilly’s soul was sated by scientific
betrayal. Milk was bad. Eggs were bad. Hard-bristled toothbrushes
were bad. She had been ecstatic upon reading a report that detailed
the hazards of eating too much spinach. Spinach had high
concentrations of oxalic acid, an agent used to clean the insides
of automobile radiators and bleach laundry. It was an exquisite
shock to find an article delineating the dangerous levels of
afflatoxin, a naturally occurring carcinogen, in such a politically
righteous food as George Washington Carver’s peanuts. An
investigative report of people dying from fiber blockages in their
colons from eating too much bran was as heady for Dilly as finding
Communists had been for Joe McCarthy. Life’s dangers were
everywhere. Food and habits, long trusted, could be traitors. A
mother and wife’s constant vigilance were necessary to protect a
loved one’s life, even one who thought that work was more important
than family.
    With each new bit of information that she
gathered, Dilly would recalculate the life expectancies of her
family members. Wound warm in her ratty robe, drinking double
strength coffee, syrupy thick with family-forbidden sugar, filled
with a horrible excitement, she would read the latest health
dangers in the Boston Globe. While her husband still slept, close
to suffocation under the pounds and pounds of covers which had
mounded their winter bed since the discovery of the microwave
hazards of electric blankets, Dilly would process the new threats
and recalculate