Ernestine wears the red-sashed taffeta dress

she plucks out of the photo of herself at nine, which she found cleaning out the baby bassinette her daughter left in the spare room closet when she departed to become a mushroom expert in the redwood forests of California.  Ernestine and Dougie alter the dress with their amateur alchemical set while her mother rushes around yelling, “No time for love, no time for love,” watering plants who are staging a protest at being kept indoors. 

“I don’t see why your mother seeks to nurse the inconsolable,” murmurs Dougie. 

He wears a good brand of earplugs to dilute the shrill notes, so Ernestine doesn’t bother to answer.  Instead, she gazes more intently at the blue air buoying white billows of evaporated water they are inserting into the seams to make the red/black/yellow/blue plaid dress spacious enough for her ready, ripe body. 

Certain things in the past need to be rectified.  She knows when her mother sees the red velvet sash holding in pieces of the sky, she’ll stop yelling.