Description

Ellen stood at the nursery window looking out at the gray sky and the wet, blowing branches of the trees. It had been raining and blowing all day. The roof pipes poured out steady waterfalls; the lilacs bent over, heavy with the rain. Up in the sky a bird was trying to beat its way home against the wind. But Ellen was not thinking of any of these things. She was thinking of the story that her grandmother had forgotten again. Ellen's grandmother was very old; so old that she often called Ellen by the names of her own little children; children who had grown up or died years and years ago. She was so old she could remember things that had happened seventy years before, but then she forgot a great many things, even things that had occurred only a few minutes before. Sometimes she forgot where her spectacles were when they were pushed back on her head. Most of all she forgot the stories she tried to tell Ellen. She would just get to a very interesting place, and then she would push her spectacles up on her forehead and look vaguely about her. "I forget what came next," she would say.