in the kitchen while my mother cooked we put cake cloches over our heads & walked around the room pretending to be aliens - "take me to your leader" - colanders worked well too - my mother was surrounded. she protected herself from the great invasion with stories about the dust bowl and Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones - toe shoes that crippled her feet, grandfather's loaded pitching arm and running away from the west. poppy would wander in from training guinea hen to attack intruders and tell us "lousy kids" to leave mother alone - go outside and find nails in the gravel -bring 'em back and we earned a penny - a penny! then he would drive us to the railroad tracks and we each laid out our change and waited for the train to flatten them. big wide shiny- smooth between our fingers. if the tide came up the grass wept if the ocean swelled it took the trees. i saw my younger brother in the atlantic - late august - hurricane season - swimming beside a deer - the whole beach watched as they fought with nature - or maybe they weren't fighting at all.