“So smooth and clear”

To his much younger wife Livvie, Solomon looks “a different and smaller man” when he’s lying in bed, even when he’s awake.

Eudora Welty, "Livvie," in Thirteen Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965).

For me “Livvie” is the most interesting story in this volume, a Welty variation on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. No pear tree, but there is a chinaberry tree in a dream, and a peach tree and a pomegranate tree in the front yard.