Marion liked the rain, but only from the inside. She loved nothing more than curling on the couch in front of the fire under a down comforter. The feeling of her sock feet as she rubbed them on the nubby blue rug and the taste of hot cocoa were almost as comforting as the soft sound of the rain and the moaning of the wind around corners. Marion liked things to be orderly. Her small house was as gray as the rain and as clean. The floors looked as though they had been scrubbed until raw. She would often forget to turn on lights as the short winter days darkened quickly into evening and the pictures flickered across her television. One light maybe, for reading, or none at all would glow, leaving her house looking like a burned out stranger next to the others on the block which were brightly lit. Also unlike the other houses, music never drifted from her door, “that horrible racket,” she called it—be it Bach or The Backstreet Boys. Her neighbors barely knew she was there at all.

The tiny woman, grandma haired but not plump—indeed, her skin looked painted on over her bones–stood at the door surveying her kingdom, no, no, she was forgetting her list. Now it was glasses, she couldn’t drive without her glasses. As she hunted them up she mused that her sight had stuck around long after her youth and her beauty—cowards which had fled early in the game. Marion remembered how angry she had been when she had first been told she had to wear glasses—she’d felt like her body was giving up on her! “It’ll be my mind next!” She joked, hollowly. It was easy to find things in the tiny house. The bottom floor was one open room that held only a small table with two chairs, couch, TV and a small end-table. There was no clutter, no magazines scattered about under which her keys or glasses could hide. No sweaters thrown over a chair where she might absentmindedly tuck important articles a pocket. She kept to a system, keys always went on the kitchen counter by the phone, and glasses on the end table near her reading lamp. Marion like to keep things neat, so she could find everything, there was nothing worse than not being able to find something when she needed it!

Thursdays were her shopping days. Had been every since she was a little girl shopping with her mama, and she didn’t see any good reason to change now, even if it was raining. “No sugar and spice here-I won’t melt!” Marion told herself as she walked out the door to her car and drove off without looking back. As a child she used to follow her mother from door to door, to the butcher and to the baker. The dairy farmer they left alone–to Marion’s dismay at the 4A.M. milking and egg gathering–they had milk and eggs at home. Back in the day, before they had giant warehouses with everything under one roof, she mused as she pulled into the Safeway parking lot and sidled up to a handicapped space. She wasn’t handicapped but damn it, she was old enough that she deserved her own parking, she thought. _For all of their “convenience” I still prefer the old way,_ she thought._ Everything I buy these days tastes like three day old plastic. I miss FRESH food!_
By the time Marion finally got out of the store the cloudburst had gone from a gentle spring rain to a cold, stinging downpour. Glad that she’d insisted on plastic, Marion waited and the minutes passed slowly, but the rain did not abate. Finally, she made an undignified dash for her car. As she closed the car door the rain immediately slackened, falling in big, widely spaced patters. One of her bags had torn and oranges began popping out of the rift like clowns from a Volkswagen and bags of vegetables dripped wetly into her pristine seat. Feeling like a clown herself, Marion tried to catch the oranges, juggling them from hand to hand frantically as they fell one by one into the floorboards. She sighed and fished them out.