Crafts or Lovemaking: A Quandary (“Country” 16)

My grandmother, age 80.

My grandmother Lena came to visit me when I lived in a Vermont log cabin with R and the two children. A secular Jew rooted in Germany, she’d exited her homeland around 1938 for safety in England. In a large house in Woking, outside London, throughout World War II she managed the flow of family and refugees, including accessing food through everyone’s ration cards, and keeping her own chickens for eggs. I…