She can come up with the craziest notions. Any slight matter can suddenly loom large in her mind, take on unwieldy proportions.
Anna’s canned peaches in the kitchen hutch, for example? Her tomatoes, hot peppers, soft-fleshed apricots, cherries, prickly pickles, beets in a spicy brine, sweet sugared applesauce? Her jars of grape pie filling (the skins pinched off, the slithery eyeballs boiled to mush and sieved, and then the skins dumped back in with the pulp)? Is her display too overweening and vain? It’s the dumb little questions like this that niggle at her. The waffling drives her husband up the wall. So imagine her antics when real trouble crops up, puzzlers of actual consequence.
Anna’s story is here. Maybe you’ll identify. Maybe you, too, are the kind to grasp at any straw for meaning.
