“Things aren’t like they used to be. Oh, I remember when I first traveled out of the country. You couldn’t fly on a plane back then, not unless you were in the military – and your grandfather was, of course, but in the Navy, so he spent all his time on the water.”
The woman sat passive in a white rocking chair facing a bay window. Her hair rose in twisting white and silver wisps, a crown of 90 years, nearly a century of wisdom accumulated just below the tangles. Her hands, like the cracked and peeling veneer of the rocking chair, wore the marks of a long life. Parched plains with jutting hills and withered brush.
She pulled the phone away to adjust her hearing aid. She cursed it, especially when she was using the phone, but she couldn’t do much good without it these days. A constant reminder of the body’s frailty. Outside, the sun spilled upon the rolling countryside in the distance. A hummingbird shot into view just outside the window, its wings a blur of crimson and teal as it bounced back and forth.
“Grandma?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I was about to tell you about … oh, shoot.”
“The first time you traveled abroad.”
“Yes. We took the boat to Japan – your grandfather was stationed there. It was a long trip – your grandfather, your father, your uncle and I were on that boat so long. I remember so many days passed without a glimpse of land. We had to cross the ocean, the … uh … the …”
The word was there, somewhere, but she couldn’t reach it. It was like the hummingbird, moving in spastic leaps. She could see the beginning and the end but everything in between was a smudge on the window.
“The Pacific?”
“Yes, the Pacific,” she sighed. “Oh, honey, it doesn’t pay to get old. I can remember things, then sometimes they just fade.”
She turned her head toward a framed picture of her grandson standing on a shelf near the fireplace. He waved ebulliently at the photographer in a scene not as foreign to her as he may have believed when he gave her the picture. She had been there once, awash in insouciance and oblivious to the hands of the clock, just as he would one day be here, finally in acceptance of the passing of things. She wondered if he understood life’s immediacy.
“Well, honey, I’m going to let you go. It was so nice to speak to you.”
“You too, Grandma. Love you. Bye.”
“I love you.”
The phone clicked, and she was again alone. She turned back to the window. The hummingbird was gone.
Cirrus formations lolled over the undulating landscape, just as they had for seasons on end throughout her life. So many moments such as this one.
In years past, Karl had sat in the now dingy evergreen recliner next to her. Husband, father of her children, partner.
Long after the children had grown up, moved out, had children of their own, and after the residuals of romance in the traditional sense had become perfunctory, they had become partners in the passage through the elder years of life.
Till death do you part.
Her memory fleeting or not, she could smell the tobacco roasting in his wooden pipe as if he had lit his last smoke yesterday – the aroma drifting through the house like the jellyfish they had watched amass just off the Japanese coast during a daytrip from the base with the boys. Tilting to and fro in the tide, a long uneven pink blanket on the water. Just like those jellyfish, the smoke was noxious but charming.
He shuffled a newspaper, licking his fingers before turning the page. Deliberate. Even more so in the years just before his passing.
Reaching the end of a page, he placed the paper on his lap, pulled his glasses from his head, wiped them thoroughly. Once. Twice. Replaced them on his head, carefully resting them below the bridge of his nose. He licked his fingers in one very long motion, picked the paper back up, turned the page, pulled a long drag from his pipe and exhaled.
She often couldn’t help from watching him, noting his compulsions – locking and unlocking the door three times each night, checking his wristwatch every ten or so minutes for the time – curious that it should be his mind that would go first. And seven years after his last breath, she was still in good health. There were little things – the hearing, her memory, sometimes she couldn’t see so well – but no medications. Not a single one.
Sometimes she asked God to take her. Hadn’t she lived a full life? She still played cards with friends each week, tried to travel when possible – cross-country train trips to the Grand Canyon or bus tours through New England – and she looked forward to every visit from her children or grandchildren. But she was ready. At peace.
Her pastor assured her of the purpose of every day of her life.
“You are the cathedral of your family, and the Lord has a plan for all of his children. After all, you are still a child in God’s eyes.”
The hummingbird returned, dancing just outside her window, flashing its florid feathers – a panache of brilliance in the afternoon light. It smiled at her like an old friend.
Something swelled inside her, and she smiled back.
A jellyfish blanket.
