Whenever my older sister’s friend Karen came over to spend the night with her, she’d bring her Bonnie Braids doll to sleep with me.  It kept me out of their hair and gave me someone to talk to.  Perhaps it established a precedent? When I went to visit her in Minneapolis 60 years later, she still had Bonnie.  Here, we reminisce. She still lets me do all the talking.

Prattle Practice

I don’t have any roommates since I lost my spouse,
so I chew the fat with animals and objects in my house.
“How did you get way over there?” I mumble to a spoon.
I converse with my potted plants, complete with off-key tune.
Sometimes I jolt myself awake, talking in my dreams.
What I have to say at least I want to hear, it seems.
I’ve had a conversation with the sidewalk, face-to-face.
I’ll have another talk with it once they remove this brace.

I hold my kittens in a trance by talking in their ears,
and though they do not answer in the manner of my peers,
they have their personal language of meows and purrs and squeaks.
While I speak back in high-pitched tones like baby talk for freaks!
I hope the neighbors have not heard as I advise the trees
 to only shed their debris on their own lawns, if they please. 
I sometimes gripe to flowers that they are too soon dying
and to potatoes in the pan that are too slowly frying.

I grumble to my router and cold water from the tap.
Soundly, I upbraid them in my own domestic rap.
I talk to nestlings from below as they cheep from their nest,
but, dive-bombed by the mother bird, I give our chat a rest.
When I prattle to the furniture, the cook pots and the cactus
in lieu of human company, in fact it is just practice.
All my other blatherings just keep me there on track
for when I meet with human folks who no doubt will talk back!

Don’t know where else this photo of the Bonnie/Judy reunion would ever fit in so here it goes into fun photos, along with the poem I wrote to go with it.