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| Going to the grocery store was
her weekly excursion back to civilization. The other six days of the week,
she lived alone in the mountains. By telephone and computer she had good
contact with the people she cared about; most of her family lived out of
state. She had everything she needed, most particularly total privacy and
solitude. Aside from her preference for being alone, the wilderness inspired
her in her work. She was a photographer, working with an eight by ten view
camera in black and white. It was a difficult camera to use but the quality
of the images from the large negatives made it worth the effort. Her gardening, her dogs and cats, and her hiking filled the rest of her time. The cats were strays, both female, that she never named even though they had been there for years. At the vet, the charts read “stray cat #1”and “stray cat #2”. The flower garden which had started as a few marigolds next to the front porch had grown into a monster that included every inch of tillable soil around her house. Over time she had planted almost everything that it was possible to grow in her “zone” or climate. Her too-close planting made weeding unnecessary and the resulting jungle was in accord with the surrounding wilderness.
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If you would like to download a zipped pdf file of this entire story, please click on the following link and save it to your hard drive. Pdf has been completely reformatted June 9, 2002. animalrights.pdf
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Copyright © 2000 by Jay Arraich. All rights reserved.
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hile Edna was getting
groceries, there was a sparrow inside the store, flying around among the
giant price and sale banners over her head. None of the store employees
seemed to find this unusual. When she was putting her food in the car
there was a crowd of the same little birds hopping and pecking on the
asphalt almost under her feet. They gave way to her grudgingly; there
was something unnatural in their disinterest in her.
hat afternoon she
lugged the big camera, tripod and bag of film-holders, lenses and accessories
out to her old truck. She drove slowly down her road, looking for an interesting
prospect. Every day she found something new, though she had lived there
for years. The weather changed, the light was different, the seasons came
and went.
thin, reedy voice
interrupted her concentration. It sounded so strange that at first she
thought it was an animal. The nearest house was over a mile away; people
rarely arrived on foot and she had heard no car.