I’ve been out in the garden all morning hunting slugs. I put out blue pellets of poison in a line around the beds. Every day there are new trails of mad, staggering, dying slugs. Once they pass the ring of pellets they begin to weave and ooze their shining slime; they fold back on themselves and writhe in strange formations till they are dead. In the morning, I crouch over the dark earth and trace the gleaming mucus paths they leave, in wilder and wilder swirls, that lead to the bodies. Gushy lumps of things. I hack at them with the trowel until they’re part of the soil. The toad watches, sleepily, from the compost heap. He does nothing about slugs. His specialty is green flies, which I appreciate, but one slug can ravish a young lettuce in a single night. I’ve thought of getting a duck, but who’s to say it wouldn’t eat lettuce as well as slugs?

I phoned Jean’s house a while back to ask for a recipe we’d discussed. Her eldest daughter said her mother wasn’t home. It’s true she’s always busy, but she hasn’t called back.

It amazes me that I ever knew more people, and even lived with them, sharing rooms and utensils and meals. I can remember going for months sometimes without a harsh word or an ugly look. Now I listen carefully to my niece’s voice over the telephone trying to discern whether her mother has been saying nasty things about me in front of the children.

There are also the letter folk, the few people who I haven’t seen in years who write to me as though I were a diary. And I write to them just as though I were writing here, this easy communication with a docile piece of paper. The envelope and the stamp and the fall of the letter into the slotted box are just the way to get rid of it. A ritual tidiness. There is no thought of the receivers, the reader at the other end. The letters that come from those people I read like a continuing tabloid serial. Sometimes I find myself analyzing the decision to write in a family illness as though it were a questionable turn of the plot rather than a fact for someone in a house with loves and curtains and spoons, like myself.