Henrietta was a tall, thin woman, a reed of a woman. She’d celebrated her seventieth birthday last year, and Aggie had made her a cake in the shape of an airplane, for her late husband, who’d been a pilot. She was quiet, gray-haired, aloof. She generally stayed to herself, and I don’t think she needed much sleep anymore; I’d caught her in the living room at three in the morning, reading books about ornithological case studies in the near dark. Whenever I tried to turn on a light for her, she’d said there was no need: she knew the books by heart. “Then why hold them at all?” I’d ask. “They’re a
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this is the best method of “show don’t tell” in character description, and also the best character description ever
