'In Her Delirium, Our Mother Speaks While We Hover Nearby' by Patricia Bender

First she tells how best to sort a 50-pound bag of potatoes. They no longer grade the potatoes, she says, so you need to sort them by size and even age sometimes or you’ll lose half of them. And then what’s the point of trying to save by buying the big bag? She describes her sorting ritual and tells where the boxes she sorts the potatoes into are in the cellar. Use the small potatoes first. Make salad or scallop them. If the potatoes are not too dirty you can cut up the bag and recycle the paper. If it’s too dirty just bury the paper in the compost but take all the webbing out first either way. Otherwise, why bother? Then our mother tells us how best to hang the wash if the ringer on the machine isn’t working properly. Aunt Julia, long dead, enters the conversation with our mother. It’s clear that Julia’s reputation has neither improved nor been forgiven even after all this time, and our mother’s voice shifts into a register she rarely uses. We straighten up and listen more carefully. Julia, our mother says, needs to step back and quickly. After a pause, our mother begins talking in the tone she always called her voice of reason. She waves her hand at the place Julia seems to be and says softly, I’ll be telling you what the ground rules are from now on, sure I will.