Simone Weil 7

To act not for an object but from necessity. Seeing my $20, the Hilo vendor stuffed my sack with tomatoes, long gong, small ovoid mangos such as we'd never seen. One of the Two Old Ladies brought me mochi from the back; she'd been hanging boys' day kites from her ceiling. At the intersection of For and From we exchange objects for 20s, and sometimes we get change. It's in the air, this shift of tenses, as if we'd waited out the squall and headed for a landing. Some days, travel is allegory. The market sells what this earth creates. A tailless white cat, one eye shut, follows us around a cottage, rubbing our legs. Domestic, needing a home. I smelled his spray beside the door. That's what keeps him outside. The market stinks, too, of old fruit. If we're lucky, we are who others need us to be. Necessity is not the mother of invention, but mother to another girl who travels more awkwardly than we. A pruned metaphor might heal the family's tree.