the garden rewards me for my efforts. Red and yellow roses lift their faces to me, and the grass is green. Everything wants to live and to thrive. It… - Blume Lempel

“You must understand,” she [Mrs. Zagretti] says, “the fly was a kind of soul mate for me. Whenever I came home it flew to greet me. It followed me from room to room. At night when I got into bed it would circle around the night light. Around and around and around — it must have hatched in late summer so that its life was just beginning when all the others of its species had already died. I could feel the tragedy of being left all alone in the world — all ties severed and paths overgrown, all friends and relations annihilated without a trace, condemned by fate to live out its one and only life in anguish . . .” Betty wants to say that she knows many people who were orphaned and left alone in the world not because of a mistake in the calendar but because of the calculated, brutal, organized murder of a people.

"I understand people, maybe not with my brains but with something my ancestors planted in me." (Mrs. Zagretti)

in a certain sense maybe I am a recluse. For me it’s enough to write a story and have it appear in a journal. Beyond that, being in public scares me. bl