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35 The Tailor’s Widow Cooks For One My first Saturday night home alone is honed in whim and smoke. Flowers of steamed broccoli added to my pasta assure my guardian angel that I watch out for myself too. Sweet juicy watermelon, as much balance as I could find in my refrigerator. I cook conscious and half-mad, for one mouth, for speed, throwing in anise seed, a clove of garlic, inventing a new dish, as befits a new widow who is going to live a long and healthy life. That wedged whiff of creativity lets me know I have begun to bend the minutes to myself. I iron, too, while operatic overtures billow like silk through the empty rooms. And I sew, as I saw him in his shop listening to Beethoven, or sitting home beside me sewing, all the motions of the long evening echoing along the inner caverns of our long years that seemed at times so empty, filling now with the song of my own being, this bereft woman awakening in sorrow as if sorrow is the genius composer of a thoroughly modern music. ...

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