"Springer-ChasingButterfly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Jan)

NANCY SPRINGER

CHASING BUTTERFLY SHADOW

*
"Chasing Butterfly Shadow" is the first of two stories we have from novelist
Nancy Springer. Nancy has published nearly two dozen novels, and countless short
stories. She has won a Joan Fassler Memorial Book award for her children's book,
Colt. About this story, she writes, "In my experience, very old people, like
very young children, are cognitive aliens to the rest of us. I think this is not
because they are 'losing it' but because they are on their way out a here, one
foot in another world. 'Chasing Butterfly Shadow' is my attempt to depict a very
old woman's different view of everyday experience."

When Nona goes out to get the mail, she takes the new dog with her, letting him
run. He is a little thing, a sheltie, not a Lassie look-alike but just another
brown hairy. oblong, jaws worthy of a moray eel at one end, tail out of control
at the other. Because of his plenitude of fur he appears cute, but when the
people from the cinder-block church on the highway came knocking last night he
turned all teeth and snarl. Nona held him back by the collar and let him speak
for her. After the tract pushers went away she said, "Your mama raised you
right, dog," and patted him and smiled for an hour. She has never liked tract
pushers, trying to shove their religion down everybody's throat

The mail is waiting in the box out by the road, a quarter-mile away. It will
take Nona an hour to get there and back, but she does not mind. She has stayed
thin and healthy, and she looks forward to the walk. That sort of thing is what
keeps you going when you are ninety-five years old.

In the sandy front yard, between the twin palmettos, the big azalea bush is in
full coral-pink bloom. Nona slowfoots toward it. The dog, who does not care
about azaleas, busies himself sending a squirrel back where it belongs, to the
perpetual twilight of the pine forest behind the house. But Nona peers ahead,
perceiving an aureole of movement around the azalea and intimations of blue and
yellow amid its glory of pink. When she reaches it she comprehends: the azalea
is alive with butterflies, dozens of them.

"Dog, you got to see this!" Nona calls.

He comes running. Nona's son Bill did not want her to get another dog because of
the expense, but when her friend Maisie called her from the pound and told her
this one was going begging, she wasn't about to say no. It is Billy's problem if
he worries too much about money. Her husband was the same way when he was alive,
and that is why he paid the piper before he had to, she is sure of it. The man
was penny wise and pound foolish. He let money run his life, never understanding
there were things above and beyond.

Nona stands by the azalea studying the butterflies coming and nursing on it and