On Edge
opening excerpt
You're driving home and the radio's on but you're not really listening you're thinking backwards to things you forgot to pick up at the supermarket (chicken thighs, buttermilk, Tylenol) and forward to things that need done at home (pick beans, get some editing done, maybe if there's time mow the lawn.) You more or less have your day planned and that's one nice thing about living alone is that you can plan almost to the minute and nobody is going to say, "hey, honey have you got a minute?" which never means one minute at all but a big black hole of minutes that you'll never get back.
Then you get home and your whole plan goes pear-shaped because while you were out some courier left behind a parcel on your front porch and it's not yours. It's not yours but now it's your problem because it's on your porch and it's almost as big as a breadbox okay not that big but a bit longer and not so wide and you have to step around it to get to the door and guess what here's another thing you'll have to do today.
You put the groceries away and go back to ponder the parcel so you can figure out what to do with it. It's got your address on it but someone else's name and who the heck is G. MacAskill anyway? You know MacAskill is not the couple you and Doug bought the house from five years ago because they had a Welsh name that sounded like water being sucked down a drain. You try to pick up the box but it weighs a ton but not really so you push it to the side a bit so you can look at the shipper's name right way up and it's On Edge from some place in Oregon so that doesn't tell you anything.
The beans aren't going to pick themselves so you grab a basket and walk across the lawn that needs mowing to the garden. You still call it "the" garden and not "your" garden because it was always Doug who did the garden and now that you're doing it you remember why you let him do all the work. But you feel like you have to keep it up even though Doug died before last year's harvest and there's only you to feed so you make a show of planting easy things like beans and tomatoes and cucumbers so that people won't think you can't manage on your own.
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