The Progress of Love

don’t know why I don’t just let Nature’s bounty rot on the vine.”
    “It isn’t on the vine,” says David. “It’s on those god-awful thornbushes, which ought to be cleaned out and burned. Then there’d be room to park a car.”
    Stella says to Catherine, “Listen to him, still sounding like a husband.”
    Stella and David were married for twenty-one years. They have been separated for eight.
    “It’s true, David,” says Stella contritely. “I should clean them out. There’s a long list of things I never get around to doing. Come on in and I’ll get changed.”
    “We’ll have to stop at the liquor store,” says David. “I didn’t get a chance.”
    Once every summer, he makes this visit, timing it as nearly as he can to Stella’s father’s birthday. He always brings the same present—a bottle of Scotch whiskey. This birthday is his father-in-law’s ninety-third. He is in a nursing home a few miles away, where Stella can visit him two or three times a week.
    “I just have to wash,” Stella says. “And put on something bright. Not for Daddy, he’s completely blind now. But I think theothers like it, the sight of me dressed in pink or blue or something cheers them up the way a balloon would. You two have time for a quick drink. Actually, you can make me one, too.”
    She leads them, single file, up the path to the house. Hercules doesn’t move.
    “Lazy beast,” says Stella. “He’s getting about as bad as Daddy. You think the house needs painting, David?”
    “Yes.”
    “Daddy always said every seven years. I don’t know—I’m considering putting on siding. I’d get more protection from the wind. Even since I winterized, it sometimes feels as if I’m living in an open crate.”
    Stella lives here all year round. In the beginning, one or the other of the children would often be with her. But now Paul is studying forestry in Oregon and Deirdre is teaching at an English-language school in Brazil.
    “But could you get anything like that color in siding,” says Catherine. “It’s so nice, that lovely weather-beaten color.”
    “I was thinking of cream,” says Stella.
    Alone in this house, in this community, Stella leads a busy and sometimes chaotic life. Evidence of this is all around them as they progress through the back porch and the kitchen to the living room. Here are some plants she has been potting, and the jam she mentioned—not all given away but waiting, she explains, for bake sales and the fall fair. Here is her winemaking apparatus; then, in the long living room, overlooking the lake, her typewriter, surrounded by stacks of books and papers.
    “I’m writing my memoirs,” says Stella. She rolls her eyes at Catherine. “I’ll stop for a cash payment. No, it’s okay, David, I’m writing an article on the old lighthouse.” She points the lighthouse out to Catherine. “You can see it from this window if you squeeze right down to the end. I’m doing a piece for the historical society and the local paper. Quite the budding authoress.”
    Besides the historical society, she says, she belongs to a play-reading group, a church choir, the winemakers’ club, and aninformal group in which the members entertain one another weekly at dinner parties that have a fixed (low) cost.
    “To test our ingenuity,” she says. “Always testing something.”
    And that is only the more or less organized part of it. Her friends are a mixed bag. People who have retired here, who live in remodelled farmhouses or winterized summer cottages; younger people of diverse background who have settled on the land, taking over rocky old farms that born-and-bred farmers won’t bother about anymore. And a local dentist and his friend, who are gay.
    “We’re marvellously tolerant around here now,” shouts Stella, who has gone into the bathroom and is conveying her information over the sound of running water. “We don’t insist on matching up the sexes. It’s nice for us pensioned-off wives. There are about half a dozen of us. One’s a weaver.”
    “I can’t find the tonic,” yells David from the kitchen.
    “It’s in cans. The box on the floor by the fridge. This woman has her own sheep. The weaver woman. She has her own spinning wheel. She spins the wool and then she weaves it into cloth.”
    “Holy shit,” says David thoughtfully.
    Stella has turned the tap off, and is splashing.
    “I thought you’d like that. See, I’m not so far gone. I just make jam.”
    In a moment, she