Free The Sunflower Forest by Torey Hayden

Many of them were rather endearing behaviours, if no one you particularly wanted to impress was watching.
    For instance, my mama talked to radiators. And to most other inanimate objects, if the occasion arose. In her mind everything had the possibility of being alive. ‘Well, you don’t really know, do you?’ she’d say to us when we laughed at her. ‘Would a stone know you’re alive? Well, then how can you know for sure that the stone’s not alive too and you just don’t perceive it? How do you know? It could be.’ And in her mind, it could. So it only stood to reason that you treated everything courteously, just in case. Our radiators, which were forever banging and clanging, were the recipients of three-quarters of Mama’s conversations on cold winter mornings, when Dad, Megs and I were still stumbling around bleary eyed. ‘You got air in your belly?’ she’d enquire politely of the one in the kitchen as we sat, eating jam and toast.
    Some of her idiosyncrasies, however, were less charming. She had, for instance, a morbid fascination with food. Starchy things, like potatoes or pasta or rice, were her favourites, and many were the occasions that we would chance across her in the kitchen, eating a bowl of plain, cooked macaroni or a dish of cold, leftover potatoes. And my mother ate everything , including the fat off the meat, the skins off the potatoes, the liquid left in the vegetable bowl. Her idea of scraping dishes before washing was to eat whatever the rest of us had left and then wipe the plate clean with a piece of bread to get the last bit. The most distressing aspect of this inability to ignore food concerned things that fell on the floor. My mother would eat dropped food. She didn’t confine herself to retrieving those things that could be washed off, but also went after and ate such things as Jell-O or mashed potatoes or butter. Both Megan and I had always found this horribly embarrassing behaviour, and we were often reduced to bouts of berserk screaming when we demanded that she leave it alone and she in turn called us wasteful little louts. But we never broke her of the habit. She still did it every time something dropped. So we were forced to keep the kitchen floor literally clean enough to eat from and we prayed like zealots when we went to a restaurant that God might intervene before anything hit the ground.
    And others of Mama’s idiosyncrasies were downright intolerable. Perhaps her most incorrigible habit had to do with her speech. My mother still spoke four languages and used three of them in daily conversation, yet out of all those words, she had never acquired a euphemistic vocabulary. Consequently, tact and diplomacy certainly were not Mama’s strong suit. She had a colourful, multilingual way of offending everyone by always saying precisely what she thought. This habit, more than any other, drove my father wild. ‘Why can’t you think sometimes before you speak?’ he would yell at her. ‘How can you say things like that?’ Yet Mama made no serious attempt to curb her tongue. ‘I am just being honest,’ Mama would say. ‘It’s you who are wrong, always saying what isn’t true. I’m just saying what I think. I’m just being sincere.’ Or on other occasions, particularly when her language had gotten a little salty as well, she would just give him a completely blank look. ‘What does it matter?’ she’d ask. ‘They are only words. Shit is shit. Fuck is fuck, no matter what you call them.’ And Dad would explain that you didn’t call them that, period, at least not in polite company. Mama would nod wearily and shrug, and I knew she didn’t care one way or the other. Then, the next time, there they’d be, together at the checkout at the supermarket, Mama sliding cans of pork and beans or whatever down the conveyor belt for Dad to pack, and she’d casually remark what a bastard she thought the man who cut the meat was. My father would go white with horror, and once they