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On the ride home from the airport, Mom and I stop at the Farmer's Market. It's 98 out but the booths have a steady fill of people who are all slightly uncomfortable talking to the farmers. We sample cheese and my mother asks the vendor if she ever considered getting her cheeses certified Kosher...the vendor says she's just a vendor...and my mother says that it's not that she doesn't like the cheese, it's that she has a kosher kitchen. Both women have solved their own existential queries.I want to ask the vendor out but don't.

We stop for peaches at a table resting in front of a pick-up truck. Mom makes a beeline past the table with a lush spread of peaches, anodyne ornaments for the hot gravel market, toward a box on the bed of the pick-up truck labeled "Seconds"

What are seconds? Mom has asked a farmer who seems uncomfortable talking to strangers.
For a dollar-fifty less per pound, you can have the seconds, the too-small peaches, the soft-spotted peaches, peaches with little holes pecked into 'em by the birds. Mom fills her bag.

I drive home from Blockbuster around midnight and I am on the road for five minutes without seeing another car. This is the not the backwoods, this is the fourth-largest city in the country. The radio is playing Mahler's Eighth Symphony, but I take The Offspring so I can feel as if I am making some ruckus to pierce the quiet. I forget what it's like to not hear a thing sometimes.

Inside my dog has become deaf in her old age. She doesn't hear me approach anymore and gets frightened when I find her. She's fifteen, well into her Seconds stage, and looks of a tangle of fuzz, soft spots, and halo as she sleeps in the sun on the flatboards in front of the window. I was in the sixth grade when we got her.

Our housekeeper's granddaughter is there when I come down in the morning. She is a dignified seven years old. I am introduced to her stuffed gorilla who she says she can feed and who actually knows how to speak to people. I ask for a demonstration, but she claims it a secret. I forget that girls are almost born with the capacity for keeping secrets.

I leave thinking that it's surreal to talk with someone twenty years younger than me who knows to speak politely and lucidly tell stories.

In the daylight, I finally see the house next door has been torn down and replaced with a massive white house that dwarfs ours. Our house isn't that small. When I come back later, I find the bowl of peaches has been lessened. I imagine a little bird pecking holes there in the kitchen. It's a good thing the dog didn't hear her.