A little old woman who never stopped smiling walked into her kitchen from her garden. She had been standing in the sun for twenty minutes, tears in her eyes, looking at her beautiful raspberry bush that had died overnight. Instead of perky red raspberries she had found them black and brittle, and they fell to the ground at the slightest touch.

The sun shone through the kitchen window and lit up everything with sparkles of gold as the little old woman who never stopped smiling called up her sister in such a sorrow. Her sister was eighty-eight and lived in California. She said into the phone, "The raspberries are dead."

Her sister replied, "Well, the grandchildren are flunking out of school and Martha is pregnant and Sam is divorcing his wife and his wife is taking up with a gypsy girl. The infant has the flu and she never stops coughing. I was over there the other day and all they talk about is money ever since Tom got fired from the plant. Not to mention that Timothy never stops dating and we all think he has AIDS or gonorrhoea or something. The news, I saw it today, told about a hurricane in the Andes which, as you know, is where Paul and Marie went skiing last week. Everyone here is miserable with grief and worry."

The little old woman listened to her sister, and when she had finished the little old woman who never stopped smiling put down the phone and sat in her kitchen that was dotted with gold.

There was a knock.

"Hello?" called the woman, and she stood up and padded to the door and peeped through the peephole and saw a young man in a delivery cap holding a bouquet of flowers. She opened the door.

"Why," her lips curled up in a smile. "These can't be for me."

"Are you Miss Marcia -- "

"No, young man. She's next door." And the little old woman who never stopped smiling closed the door and went to sit at her kitchen table. The day was long; there were eight more hours in it. She had planned to eat the raspberries, one by one, every last one of them. But overnight the bush had died and there wouldn't be raspberries ever again.

The little old woman laid down her head and started to cry. She cried at her table every day, but no one knew it.

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