She wants her cup of stars.

The two women that live to the left of me are sisters. The house they live in is the house they were born in. They are middle-aged, one fat and one bone-thin with a long grey braid down her back. The thin one with the braid works every day. She drives a pick-up truck and exudes that brusque competency that middle-aged pickup-diving women tend to. The other one, the fat one, is tall and unkempt. It's not really that she's fat so much as that she billows, her clothes far too big and untucked and stained, her hair frequently uncombed, and so somehow it seems like her flesh too is chaotic.

We found out early on that the plump sister is a paranoid schizophrenic. She seems painfully awkward every time you talk to her, but sometimes something will be so urgent for her that she'll try, she'll approach you and start raggedly talking about rats or sewer pipes or something, and you just try to follow where she's going with it, not because you're afraid of whatever she's warning you about, but because you've heard her in the backyard crying hysterically and if something is that important and that terrible it seems like you should shut up for a minute and listen. Our neighbor across the street was the one who verified our suspicions; apparently, the plump sister had warned her that the FBI was going through her trash and could read her mind based on the dog food cans they found there (never mind that the across the street neighbor doesn't have a dog).

One afternoon she stopped Hodge and me on the street and accused him of coming out of the house one afternoon and staring at her. Just standing in front of her and staring. Both of us just stood there holding hands and sort of shifting our weight. She finally got flustered and went back to her gardening.

We live for the most part pretty comfortably next to them, and have even sort of grown a little fond I think. When we first moved in we dubbed them the Lesbian Witch Sisters (not in front of them, obviously, and not in earnest). They have an incredible garden in the backyard. The schizophrenic and I have talked about cats a few times, and animals. She's bitched me out about our yard a few times (we're not exactly super-gardeners), but in general we're all right. There are days when she won't look up at you or say hello, but when she does she sometimes smiles really big.

Anyway, yesterday the working sister came over to the house and told Hodge that the police had taken her sister in for "evaluation," whatever that means. There had been a couple of cops over at the house, and she didn't want people to gossip about it so she was trying to let everyone on either side know.

The cops? Evaluation? What the hell? I know it's not my business, but it seems sort of fucked up that the cops can show up and escort a mentally ill woman who spends every waking moment in her own damn garden away. I don't understand what happened. But she's going to miss her crocuses, which are blossoming nicely. It just all feels wrong and sad.