I had never heard of a Jack-and-Jill bathroom before, have you? It is a bathroom between two bedrooms and accessible by both, in this case Jack’s and Emma’s rooms. I imagine Molly, lost in her own thoughts, eyes closed, up to her neck in bubbles, when she hears someone knocking on the door to Jack’s room.

“Babe, I’m going to the store,” shouts 7-year-old Jack, impersonating his father. “Do you need anything?”

Then Molly hears someone knocking on the other door.

“Mom,” 9-year-old Emma calls, “Donald Trump is on the phone for you!”

“I can’t believe the kids think I’m so gullible,” Molly said, but I told her she is too suspicious. What if it really was Donald Trump on the phone? She could have missed an important call. When I told my brother Bill about it, he agreed.

“Yeah,” he said, “maybe he wanted to give her a cabinet position or something.”

“Get in on the ground floor for 2024,” I said.

“Right.”

Oh well, it’s probably too late now. Trump’s not about to call back.

I’ve been reading about the strides scientists have been making in deciphering the genetic codes of our earliest ancestors, people we didn’t know up until now were our ancestors, or even that they existed. The Denisovans have recently been discovered in a cave in the Altai Mountains, in Siberia. Scientists unearthed a fingerbone fragment which told them that the Denisovans interbred not only with Neanderthals, a different species, but also with their own immediate kith and kin. A fingerbone fragment that once belonged to a young teen-age girl could tell them all that! Nothing is private anymore.

According to an article in National Geographic, Aug. 22, 2018, “The new find is giving us a peek into an ancient world in which breeding happened freely between hominins from all walks of life,’ (Harvard geneticist David) Reich says. ‘That sort of qualitatively transforms and changes our understanding of the world,’ he says. ‘And that’s really exciting.'”

Now, using artificial intelligence, researchers have detected another ancestor, one that is still very mysterious. According to an article by Peter Dockrill in “Science Alert,” Oct. 25, 2021, there is evidence of “a ‘third introgression’ — a ghost archaic population that modern humans interbred with during the African exodus.”

Along completely different lines, I just finished “Villette,” a novel by Charlotte Bronte, published in 1853. My niece Rosemary was kind enough to send me a copy, and we have been exchanging notes as we read.

“Villette” is such a strange book. Maybe after I read the introduction it won’t seem so strange — I always leave the introduction for last. In fact, I hardly ever read introductions at all. This time I will, though, because the book is so bizarre I feel I need some explanation.

In the first place, the main character, Lucy Snowe, has no back story to speak of. The reader keeps expecting to learn more about her but never does. Even her appearance is a mystery. Somewhere around the middle of the book her age is disclosed — she could have been any age – but she is 24. Her parentage remains unknown.

Somehow the story is compelling enough that I faithfully followed the luckless Lucy Snowe through countless trials and tribulations as she made her own way in the world alone. Not for Lucy Snowe the handsome hero!

She does, however, win the heart of a very exasperating little man with a tendency to fly off the handle, and I hoped Ms. Bronte was not intending him to be her husband. They argue tediously about religion but eventually reconcile. They are in love!

Unfortunately, he has to go off to sea for three years. She waits for him; she is sublimely happy, finally, knowing he is on his way home. Sadly, on the last page, page 546, he is drowned in a storm.

Ms. Bronte points out that Lucy Snowe’s friends and acquaintances basically live happily ever after, which is no consolation and seems cynical on the author’s part.

I can’t wait to hear what Rosemary makes of it all.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley.)