GROCERIES A hot one for sure, the key into bliss of air conditioning a sharp pang in his pocket, but for all that he stays sweating on the stoop, veins thick as green beans as he leans and contorts his body, heroic under the strain of his refusal to admit that for all our late-afternoon grit, our penchant for one-trip wonders, what's worth troubling the table nearly always begs more than a bit of doubling back.
Real The best yield the garden bore was before we soiled the spot with seed, before Henbit and Bittercress became weed because we didn't plant them there, and the fence was neatly stacked in lumber racks at the hardware store with a pressure-treated chance at perfectly plumb. Our significant others, too, kept their figures firm as the flesh of a fresh cuke twenty years into our marriages before we met them, their priorities in prim rows well-tilled and running parallel to our own. The summers were never dog-tick hot, spouses always were, and our houses rarely required repair, till we—our very real bodies with their very real hungers tiptoeing for the ripe glint of it all at the top of the trellis—found the beans were soft in spots and less than ideal, but still, once swimming in a thick confession of butter, infinitely more filling.
THE LINE OF THINKING The line of thinking runs that given time enough—the funds— we might yet get in front of this. That one day honey just does the list, and lo, the fixer-upper’s up and fixed, the lawn at last trimmed low and all the laundry done, so give it but a week or so and we'll at last begin to live the life we always imagined as something more than a growing list of pending repairs. Of course, all this will come to pass only after the ballots are cast, the offices swept and emptied out for our officials, who will, no doubt, enact our will and set right the deluded line of thinking we’ve too long been governed by. Then once the baby sleeps through the night— or say instead the baby graduates and vacates the house—that will be our ticket to kick up our feet the way we've dreamed about and somehow come to expect, when we’ll rest as deep and long as Orion in repose, belt unclipped and bow leaned back in that ever-elusive posture of "rel...
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