Mourning In Miniature Read Free

summer, we crafters borrowed from a Bolivian tradition, Alasita. We’d learned about it from Beatriz, a woman who joined us briefly while visiting her mother in Lincoln Point. We were fascinated by the concept: during the Alasita festival, people made or bought miniature versions of what they hoped for in the coming year.
    “In the markets you find everything,” Beatriz told us. “Tiny cars, houses, and food, and even little bitty marriage certificates, passports, and money. Men buy hens and women buy roosters in the hope of finding a partner before the year’s end. If you buy these things or make them, it’s supposed to bring them into your life in the next year, as long as it is blessed by a shaman.”
    “Do you think there’s a shaman in Lincoln Point?” Karen Striker asked now, as we sat around a large table in my primary crafts room. (According to my late husband, and everyone who was familiar with my house, the whole rest of our four-bedroom home was a secondary crafts area.)
    Karen, five months pregnant, was building a lovely nursery, augmented by the one-inch-scale baby carriage I’d picked up for her this morning in Benicia. “I want to send good vibes into the air on every possible wavelength,” she told us.
    “I know a priest,” Mabel, our oldest member, offered.
    Her husband, Jim, the only male in our group, grunted, conveying doubt that a Catholic blessing would work as well. Mabel and Jim were working on a ship’s cabin, a model of the luxury version they hoped to occupy on their fall cruise to the Mediterranean.
    Maddie enjoyed playing hostess on these evenings and tonight she seemed to have fun refilling glasses of ice tea and plates of cookies, running back and forth between the kitchen and the atrium of my Eichler home. It took the record-breaking heat we were experiencing to get us to move all our supplies from my crafts room to the cooler atrium, and this week had qualified.
    For her own project Maddie had chosen to build a miniature soda fountain. She’d worked diligently on a sign that named flavors after her own friends and relatives. In her red-striped shop, one could “buy” Ginger Grandma, Pistachio Porter, Strawberry Skip, Tutti-Frutti Tracey, and so on.
    “Does this mean your goal for the year is to eat all the ice cream you can?” Karen asked.
    “For now,” Maddie said.
    I was happy that my granddaughter considered her life so good that all it needed was more ice cream. I also loved that she worked the spectrum of creativity, from computer programming in the morning to crafting tiny ice cream sodas in the evening.
    Of all the projects, Rosie Norman’s was the most interesting and packed with meaning—she was building a half-scale room box replica, one-half inch to one foot, of the hallway of lockers at Abraham Lincoln High School.
    “It’s where David Bridges, the star quarterback, kissed me,” was her only explanation the first week.
    Rosie, who owned the bookstore in town, was a student of mine during my first years teaching English at ALHS, right after Ken, our three-year-old son, Richard (Maddie’s father), and I moved to California from the Bronx. Rosie had also become a good friend who sometimes watched Maddie when I had undisclosed errands at the police station across the street from her shop.
    Rosie’s class was holding its thirtieth reunion at the end of the week. At first I questioned the math, but finally grasped the reality—it had been three decades since I helped distribute diplomas to my first graduating class. Faculty, current and retired, like me, were also invited to the gala weekend, most of which would be spent at the beautiful, old Duns Scotus Hotel in San Francisco. (Apparently, no one wanted to party at Abe’s Beard and Breakfast, the only motel in Lincoln Point.) Rosie had talked me into going so she wouldn’t have to walk into the opening cocktail party alone on Friday night.
    “Why are y’all bothering to go?” Susan Giles asked, her