I left the Piggly Wiggly with a barbecued chicken and with some peaches, the first of the year, and headed down the shady streets. To my right, atop Red Mountain, the statue of Vulcan, the largest iron statue in the world, gleamed in the summer sun. Actually, Vulcan was mooning me, since he faces downtown Birmingham and I was in the valley behind him. His big iron rear end is such a familiar sight, that I usually don’t notice it. Today, though, there were scaffolds hanging from the statue. Surely, I thought, they weren’t going to actually extend the old boy’s apron around to cover his prodigious backside as they had been talking about doing for years. Surely they were just patching some rusty places. I tried to remember if a petition had been tacked on the bulletin board recently at the local Quik-Mart to be signed by people offended by the big bare butt. That happens fairly frequently. But I didn’t remember having seen one.

My neighbor, Mitzi Phizer, was in her yard dead-heading a huge gardenia bush. When I parked my car, I walked over to ask if she had heard anything about Vulcan. She hadn’t.

“It’s got to be repair work, though. They’d be crazy to cover him up. It would be like the folks in Copenhagen putting a bra on The Little Mermaid.”

Comparing the statue of Vulcan to The Little Mermaid was quite a leap of artistic imagination, but I knew what Mitzi meant.

I grinned. “He just wouldn’t be as much fun with clothes on, would he?”

“That’s the way life is, Patricia Anne. I keep having to remind Arthur.”

“Surely you jest.”

We smiled at each other in the companionable way of friends who have lived next to each other for almost forty years. We had helped each other through births, deaths, miscarriages, in-laws, children, grandchildren.

Mitzi nodded toward my groceries. “The Piggly Wiggly’s been slaving over a hot stove again, I see. That barbecue smells wonderful.”

“Mary Alice and I went to a movie. She wanted to tell me she’s decided not to be sixty-six on her birthday. She’s decided to reverse the arrow of time.”

“If aybody can do it, she can. Does she have a specific plan in mind?”

“Lying. Consider yourself forewarned.”

Mitzi laughed. “You want some gardenias?”

I did. By the time Fred got home, the whole house smelled of gardenias and peach cobbler. Ah, summer!