After eating little Zaviera and I pulled weeds out front.
I studied the bulbs of what she dug up so I could do same with minimized error and thought how much easier it is to navigate something delicate like this with language to share and how, to my benefit in conditions to the contrary, seven is the perfect age to teach an elder in the garden by pantomime.
I asked Sigrid — Danish, German, she — how long it took her to learn Greek. Many years, she said. I was smoking then, she said, and then she described a habit of listening to what people said to her and writing it down on the inside of her cigarette pack and — and here she pantomimed, a flat, out-turned palm extended and slightly aloft, for Sigrid is petite and the generic remembered Greek interlocutor, probably taller — holding it up for them to review.
