Warm Wuinter's Garden Read Online Free PDF

Bill’s remaining years. Reading the latest
betrayal—spinach, for example—she would reduce Bill’s remaining
time on earth downward from 41.2 to 40.6 years. She would mourn his
earlier death, work through the implications of how her own life
would change with widowhood coming six tenths of a year earlier,
and brush away any guilt from having fed her family such copious
quantities of spinach—a vegetable all of them, except Uppy the
rabbit, detested.
    Dilly adjusted the lives and habits of her
family as a good captain would trim his sails with a shifting wind.
When the news broke that lead in the soil could be brought indoors
on the soles of shoes and build up in the carpeting to dangerous
concentrations, the captain enjoined her crew and all passengers to
remove their shoes at the door. As her shoeless hyper-energetic
children slid on the uncarpeted floors concussing heads, contusing
bones and bruising major muscle groups, and as they tore
fingernails making desperate lunges for a doorframe after coming
around a corner too quickly, Dilly reveled in the knowledge that by
preventing lead poisoning, she not only was giving her children
additional L.E. but also, because of the known cumulative effects
of lead on the brain, higher grades in school. Better grades led to
higher lifetime earnings. Studies had shown that fewer money
problems meant a lower probability of divorce. Since divorce and a
shorter life were highly correlated, Dilly added even more L.E. to
her kids totals. When the reports began on the deadly killer, radon
gas, emanating upward through the basement floors in the homes of
unsuspecting New Englanders, Dilly bought each member of the family
a pair of the cheapest sneakers. These shoes were to be used
exclusively for walking inside the house. The shoes’ wafer-thin
soles were supposed to protect the wearer from the radiation given
off as the earth’s radium disintegrated. A side effect of the radon
cure, that was of some importance to Dilly’s children, was that
their athletic careers improved as the number of practice days lost
to house fall injuries dropped significantly. The sneakers stayed a
part of the family L.E. regimen until a small study, one that Dilly
almost missed, showed a strong link between the early use of poorly
constructed sneakers and serious long term posture problems. When
she brought that information to the dinner table, her children
suggested that the solution be that they be given expensive
sneakers, but when Dilly fed the information of purchasing sixty
dollar sneakers for three children with growing feet into the L.E.
equation, the answer that came out was that outdoor shoes again
could be worn in the house. The family would make up the L.E. loss
from lead in other ways. The kids’ chore list was changed to
include more frequent, more thorough vacuuming of the house’s few
rugs until some research indicated that vacuuming actually had the
possibility of spreading lead dust.
    With the same sense of safety that knowledge
brings to the smoking cardiologist and the obese school
nutritionist, Dilly fine-tuned her family’s lives without being
overly involved herself in the various regimens. As she replaced
beloved childhood cereals with brownish-gray extrusions of bran, as
she banned butter and bacon and issued ukases on safflower
margarine and red and white-dyed soybean ersatz bacon strips, as
she added prodigious amounts of such carotene-rich foods as carrots
and cantaloupe and squash, and cancer-killing cruciferous
vegetables such as mustard greens, kale and broccoli, and as she
restricted red meat to such an extent that it seemed to her family
that cattle must be an endangered species, Dilly herself, with her
children safely away at school, smashed chunks of baking chocolate
into bite size pieces for her lunch. After scooting her children
out the door for more fresh air, having fed them a worm-scarred,
alaric-free organic apple as dessert, she would concoct herself