Sequestered

When people ask her what she does these days, increasingly

infrequently since she affords them only rare occasions to accost her,

she replies that she’s sequestered. Partly code for saying they are

prying and she’s feeling pestered. She’s not in mourning for her life

like in that Chekhov play – she’s glad she’s not a wife to any man –

whatever span of time remains to her seems neither too much

nor too little. But she loves to fiddle with the syllables of words

and she enjoyed encountering what seemed to her an onomatopoeic

whisper in the verb sequester – it bore the sound and somehow scent

of what it meant – and thought, oh, that’s what I would like to do.

And so she followed through: she’s now “sequestered.” When

she finds another syllable to love, which signifies an attitude, she may

decide to take its latitude on next. She isn’t the least perplexed.

.