Time

My neighbor, 87, rings the doorbell to ask if I might have seen her clipping shears that went missing a decade ago, with a little red paint on their shaft, or the iron turkey bank and the porcelain coffee cup that disappeared a while back when her friend, now dead, called the police to break in to see if she were ill, and have we had trouble with our phone line, hers is dead and her car and driver’s license are missing though she can drive perfectly well, just memory problems, and her son is coming this morning to take her up to Sheboygan, where she was born and where the family has its burial lots, to wait on assisted living space, and she just wanted to say we’d been good neighbors all these how many? years, and how lucky I am to have found such a nice man and could she borrow a screwdriver, the door lock to her house is jammed.