Tom Wiggins, Letter Carver & Writer

  And then you smiled and my heart leapt so high I thought it would come out of a nostril.   If you can make me laugh within the next ten seconds , you said, sitting cross-legged on the picnic blanket, I’ll kiss you .   Under normal circumstances, I would have dozens of one-liners ready to go, but the way you looked at me made my mind go blank and something in me regressed to a billion year-old fish state and I starting making bubble noises.   You know, the kind you make in front of a fish tank and want to get some dialogue going.   I needed something else, a more silly-surrealistic one-two because two funny things done together is much funnier than the sum of two funny things done separately.   So I did a roly-poly off the picnic blanket and down the hill, but the hill was rather hillier than expected.   On this mild, autumnal day, the roly-poly snowballed.   I was a tumbling seasonal anachronism.   Gravity became persuasive: one roly-poly t...

“I’m worried about the cows,” Mother said. Father looked up from his newspaper.    “ The cows? ”   “Yes, the fate of the cows.”   Father folded up his newspaper, removed his reading glasses and took a sweet out of his jacket pocket.   He unwrapped it slowly.   It was a Sherbet lemon.   It was bright yellow even in the half-dark.   “Indeed, the cows,” Father said.   “The fate of the cows.” He placed the sweet in his mouth and closed his eyes.   We knew not to disturb Father while he was sucking a sweet.   I continued spinning a brass button on the floor.   Mother was looking at the fire.   Her mind was in the cowshed.   In the silence I could hear a moving and a not-moving.   It was seven or eight minutes before Father finished his sweet, at which point he opened his eyes. “The cows will come with us.” “Thank the Lord,” Mother said. “And so too the house.” “The house?” “Yes,” said Father....