Sac d'os

Planet Lady, the Village Bicycle, Bag of Bones, La Folle.  When I bought this house down the road from Josette my children went into a panic.  They'd  run into her several times before we moved into the hood.  Planets talked to her, they told her that Carla Bruni was going to have a boy with Sarkozy.  She went to Super U and bought some blue baby clothes.  The planets buggered up that one up.  
The electric light next to her bed went up in in flames and burnt an image of the virgin Mary on her wallpaper.  
Her tiny, dirty, cluttered house is, according to her, haunted.  
Things disappear and it's the fault of a painting of wheat threshers in a field who move things around. There is Cathar treasure hidden under her stairs.  
She spends hours sitting by our kitchen fire on October and March evenings while we try to explain the change of hour.

She is 82.  She walks miles a day, round and round the town on her stick legs.  She is multifaceted but unliked and misunderstood by most people in these parts.  She elbows her way through the socially distanced queue at the boulangerie and the tabac. She paces the street with her hands on her hips waiting for her son to arrive for lunch at 1.30 each day.  They eat, they shout at each other and he leaves before 2.45.  But he dutifully  visits her.  
Babeth and Josette clash daily; shrieky exchanges which ricochet between the walls or the narrow street.  Babeth gets cross because I talk to Josette and vice versa.
There is no winning. 
. . .