By Michelle Douglas
The house is no longer her home: the gardens no longer filled with brilliant flowers her gnarled hands transformed into dancing ballerinas or sweet-scented bouquets in cut-glass vases. The stairs miss her footfalls, her thin, reedy voice singing of spinning wheels and parlors as she places jars of fruit on dust-free shelves. No more in the bedroom the soft scent of roses, of soap and cedar; no long gray hairs in her brush, no lonely cry of "Charlie" in the dark of a widow's night. The house is no longer her home. She who graced the wooden stair and short garden path sleeps within a house much smaller much darker now. But the house remembers. Michelle Douglas