The Enough of Biscuits

 At a certain time, in most places, there were women like this woman. She was careful, hard, kind. Laughter was nearly etched in her face, as though it might have had a place there had life been different. But life required care. It was hard. And, perhaps adding to life's hardness, she chose to be kind.

    Kind is not the same as nice.

    She was not a nice woman. She didn't have the time. And people made their own choices, so often at odds with her own. Not a good quality in a person when what she did for them brought them, as often, freedom from pain. Sometimes she even gave them an opportunity to go on living. No, she didn't have time to be nice.

    The woman, she brewed things from other things. Made them up from what she knew. Added what she could, with what she had. Not too much, though. No one needed to much. There wasn't enough of anything to go about having too much.

    There was enough for people to have enough, as she saw it. The trouble was, not a lot of people knew what enough looked like. About the same amount didn't have gratitude to give for the more than enough they had. Take biscuits, for example. No one ever had a clue about biscuits.

    The woman was more than ready to give the people a lecture about the enough of biscuits. She knew exactly when the enough of biscuits was. It was about four biscuits behind the other biscuits. The problem was that the woman had a tendency to land on the four biscuits on the far side of the other biscuits. Not that it gave her teeth any trouble. Nor her figure. Still, she knew about the biscuits. And if she was going to tell anyone when the enough of biscuits was, she had to know enough herself.

    She went to sleep that night and vowed against the biscuits.

    The next day, the biscuits went down all the same.

    She sighed. Then shrugged. We're all, she thought, just people trying to figure out the enough of biscuits.

    She gave no lecture. Which, if you think about it, was kind of her.

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