Study in Perfect Read Free Page A

parents. We are backbones when their own skeletons are evolving or devolving. We are fence posts, traffic signs, door frames. We mark their territory and ours—this is where you should go, this not. I was always on my feet in the old house, which also was on its feet, and had been for more than a hundred years.
    Now in middle age, our vision’s softer, taste buds not so discerning, and one ear catches only a half-conversation at best. We’ve been knocked about enough to learn that no plan is a sure thing, no matter how well structured, and no body will last, no matter how well maintained. Our new house celebrates the gray areas, dissolves categories, subverts traditional outlines. A vertical house, with its right and proper posture, holds. A horizontal house releases.
    Shortly after we moved in, we discovered we weren’t the first to take residence since the sale. Twenty feet down the chimney, just above the flue, was a nest of barn swallows. OutsideI watched the female swoop from sky to nest without pausing to readjust her aim. Then the thrumming of her young began, faint at first, but as the summer wore on, nearly deafening, primordial. We could hardly talk without acknowledging the famished creatures. They outgrew the nest, three of them bouncing into our living room, slamming into the windows, frantic, till we could chase them down with a thrown dishtowel. Here and there, droppings on sills, stretchers, beams—evidence of their panic. My husband bought a wire screen for the chimney, but we never got around to mounting it. We were human, after all, and rather liked the role we played in nature—this swallow drama. A small part, but essential: cupping the fledglings in terrycloth, we carried them gingerly to the porch.
    The birds did the rest.

PERFECT
Word
    Serendipity
, tasty to look at, a bright experiment for the mouth. Leading off, the meditative hum,
seren
, like a flat horizon. Then the playful up and down of the last three syllables as if our boat has encountered chop.
    She flipped off the trampoline, knocking over the soldier who would soon become her lover. Isaac Newton was not beaned by a falling apple, but it’s a more perfect truth, the one we love and remember. A moon called Charon emerged from a “defect” in a photograph. Before departing for vacation, Alexander Fleming failed to disinfect his bacteria cultures, only to find them contaminated with
Penicillium
when he returned.
    Thoreau said, “There is a certain perfection in accident which we never consciously attain.”
    There is also a certain accident in perfection, which favors the prepared mind.

Darling Amanita
    Â 

    Noli me tangere
. (Touch me not.)
    Halfway through Bo Widerberg’s 1967 film
Elvira Madigan
, the camera pans over a summer pasture with trees encircling. The sun is resplendent, and soon blond Elvira in her long striped skirt and white peasant blouse stumbles out of the woods with her paramour, a handsome soldier from the Swedish Army. The story is true: Thirty-four-year-old Lieutenant Count Bengt Edvard Sixten Sparre abandoned his post and family for the twenty-one-year-old acrobatic dancer, whose parents ran a small circus. Sixten and Elvira fled to the island of TÃ¥singe in Denmark, where they lived for barely two weeks.
    In the film, the couple is starving, famished, and falls upon a scattering of mushrooms. They drop to their knees and stuff the mushrooms wildly into their mouths without washing or chewing. Later they are sick like animals in high grass. Perhaps
Amanita fulva
, or tawny grisette, was the culprit. This species is found in conifer, birch, beech, and oak woodlands in Europe, and, like most amanitas, it causes vomiting, gastrointestinal distress, and sometimes death. But the mushrooms don’t kill Elvira and her lover. After thirteen days, Sixten knows their situation is hopeless and walks to town, where he spends thesmall remainder of their money on wine, bread,