It’s the first Wednesday of the month, so they’re testing the sirens, and this is harder to explain than anything else. Someone’s left a cardboard box of corn on the front step, so we shuck it and let the children play with the silk. It tangles in hair, scatters on the wind among shreds of Kleenex I pluck from my purse, shreds I stored there after letting my baby tear them up in the pew while my inner voice offered affirmation because texture and cause and effect. It’s the end of summer. I nudge withered noses off the ends of freshly shucked corn that is no longer sweet. My sister finds the can of Wild Harvest organic canola oil spray in my cupboard. I don’t use this, she says. Butter or bacon fat. I save jam jars to use as drinking glasses. Yes, that’s a trendy thing to do. Oh, she responds, is it? My daughter’s lines are sharp, thin ridges on the opposite side of the obituary. She’s left a mountain range. A pattern of stars. A road. I run my fingers over them to convince myself they’re real—the stars, that is, the road. Grief is the turnip my mother harvests from her garden and brings peeled in a Ziploc in case anyone wants to try it. It is dull white, and the bag is full of condensation, and two days later, I throw it in the trash with hamburger buns ridden with preservatives and an ice cream bucket of turkey and fat. Today, I am overripe corn, stripped and withered along one side. Yesterday, I was a peach. Let heaven be the place I become the hard pit I’ve lately lost. Tomorrow, I will be the apple my daughter painted on her first day of preschool to learn the number one. I don’t know what the paint is made of, and I don’t need to save that either, do I? Every day, if I ask her to, she can bring home another one. Someday she’ll paint what’s inside. She’ll try her hand at seeds. But I can’t save everything.