A Tidings of Magpies

by Marjorie Saiser I ride along in the backseat; the aunt who can drive picks up each sister at her door, keeps the Pontiac chugging in each driveway while one or the other slips into her overshoes and steps out, closing her door with a click, the wind lifting the fringe of her white cotton scarf as she comes down the sidewalk, still pulling on her new polyester Christmas-stocking mittens. We have no business to be out in such a storm, she says, no business at all. The wind takes her voice and swirls it like snow across the windshield. We're on to the next house, the next aunt, the heater blowing to beat the band. At the last house, we play canasta, the deuces wild even as they were in childhood, the wind blowing through the empty apple trees, through the shadows of bumper crops. The cards line up under my aunts' finger bones; eights and nines and aces straggle and fall into place like well-behaved children. My aunts shuffle and meld; they laugh li...

by Margaret Widdemer The Poor Old Soul plods down the street,        Contented, and forgetting How Youth was wild, and Spring was wild        And how her life is setting. And you lean out to watch her there,       And pity, nor remember, That Youth is hard, and Life is hard,       And quiet is December.