Ours
152 the widows’ handbook Ours Lenore McComas Coberly It was an ordinary late afternoon when he came from our living room into the kitchen where I was making bread & butter pickles and said he could not bear this place if I was not in it and I turned to see the naval officer he was returning from the war and when he kissed me I felt a magic I knew he felt too. We were outside ourselves, together in a place we did not name, yet knew it to be ours. Swaying to a rhythm only we felt, we smiled before he returned to our ledgers and I to our bread & butter pickles. People urge me to go to the cemetery where they say I will find him, but they are wrong. He is not there. He is in our yard, in tedious ledgers he left well tended, in my memory that transforms grief into love and pickles. ...
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