ON THE PORCH
In the late seventies, Craig was doing a lot of field work. He’d be gone Tuesday through Thursday many weeks, and often I’d visit Katie. We spent the hot summer evenings in the shady stillness of her house. Or we’d sit on Katie’s porch through the evening.
We always began with Tulip, whose relationship with Katie was in the nature of a flourishing romance. We would then rehearse the things we had in common, beginning with the all-important coincidences between Katie and my mother. Katie would sometimes question me about my job or family, and I always answered, but briefly. It was not so much that I was unwilling to talk about myself. I simply didn’t know the answers. Did I like my job? I wasn’t sure. Was it difficult?
When she questioned me her voice was sharp and her eyes were sharp,
too. I didn’t mind. I accepted Katie’s sharpness for what
it was, an old woman’s undisguised alertness and attention. It
was unvarnished curiosity. Katie would after a point drop the subject
and settle back in her chair to reminisce. It suited us both to pass
the time reliving Katie's life.
She had moved to Temple, 50 miles north of Austin, when she was eighteen to study nursing at Scott and White Hospital. There were pictures of Katie and her forty classmates in starched white dresses and brand new white caps. She worked for a doctor at the hospital in Temple for years, and she had a few stories about women who bled to death while delivering babies, and about how the doctors liked to tell dirty jokes in the operating room.
Katie liked to tell me I was as beautiful as a movie star, Jean Harlow, she suggested, only prettier. I told her she was crazy. Yes you are, too, she would say, and I would wave her off.
We would talk about the state of the world, and about animals. Katie thought that the way things were going, some day there wouldn’t even be any squirrels left.
She found the body of a little screech owl.
“What killed him?” I wondered.
“I don’t know. Old age, I guess.”
We sat for a moment in sorrowful silence over the little owl’s death.
Finally I said, “What did you do with him?”
She said, “Threw him in the trash.” Then she cackled long and loud. We both did.
“I got a ficus,” I once told her smugly.
“What is a ficus?”
“It’s a plant. You don’t know what a ficus is?”
“No, I don’t know what a ficus is. What kind of a plant?”
“It’s a kind of fig.”
“Does it have fruit?”
“ No.”
“Does it have flowers?”
“No.”
“What is it like?”
“Well,” I floundered. “It’s a plant...”
“How big is it?”
“About this big...”
“What color are the leaves?”
“Green,” we both said together. And again she cackled long and loud.
Once she said something about wondering why young people (I was not the only one) would come to visit an old lady like her.
I said, “You don’t know how much fun you are.”
That seemed to please her. Next
