Sand in My Eyes, page 28
“Thank you,” the little girl said quickly, and I wondered whether she understood it all. I did and was rummaging through my bag for a pen, wanting to write it down, add it somewhere in my story.
“And women today,” Fedelina started up again, “especially my own granddaughters, they’re emotionally consumed with looking young.”
“What I’d give to look thirty-six again,” was all I said.
“I was thinking the same about eighty-six,” Fedelina said, and we laughed. “But it’s harder in some ways for you women living in today’s anti-aging society and probably easier, too, with all those products and things you can do to put off wrinkles and reduce the signs of aging. When I was younger, if you really want to know, I’d mix laundry detergent with water and rub it into my face as an exfoliant. Back then, for me, that was pampering my skin, so I’m not opposed to modern science and doing what we can to look our best. But in my day, we hardly talked of it. I guess we welcomed wrinkles with wisdom.”
“Now there are support groups for women with wrinkles,” said one of the mothers. “Anywhere you go, it’s not uncommon for it to come up in informal conversation, and for women to commiserate together.”
“You see this dress I’m wearing?” Fedelina asked us, pushing the blanket down so we could see it. “I always wondered why old ladies wore these things, and now I know. They slip right over the head. No buttons, no zippers, and they come in a zillion different colors and patterns. They’re so darn comfortable. That’s important to me at this age, you know. At my age, comfort is more important than how I look.”
“Are you comfortable?” one of the school girls asked, and I felt bad for not having asked her this myself, and sooner.
Fedelina reached for a tube of lotion beside her on the bed, took the cap off, and started rubbing it into her arms. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not all the time. My skin is dry. I’ve got itchy spots on my buttocks, knees, and elbows. I have tingling in my hands, and pain. It’s worse at night. I have trouble digesting my food, but constipation is the worst. Everyone does his or her best, and it’s like a team effort to keep me comfortable. I’m grateful for all the effort. I don’t want to disappoint the nurses and my family, especially all you girls who come to see me.”
“You could never disappoint us,” the girls told her.
“She’s a beautiful person, isn’t she?” I said to them.
“Thank you,” Fedelina said to me, and then focused her eyes on the girls. “You are beautiful, too,” she told them. “You are living, breathing masterpieces, created by God. Don’t let the world trick you into thinking you are not beautiful, because you are, and true beauty never fades, never dulls.”
The nurses took her bed, and, like an organized procession of people, we started to parade through the halls of Belvedere Nursing Home. Fedelina was quiet but had a look of pride and festivity in her eyes as if she were riding on a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I think she got a kick out of the entourage surrounding her, and she started blowing random kisses to women in the rooms we passed. They were waving back, and a few called out her name.
I looked at my old neighbor being wheeled through this final stage of her life and promised to pay older people more attention—because tomorrow I will be old, too, and what might I give then for a young person to show up and ask me my story!
“My friend Anna, here, she’s a writer,” Fedelina was saying to the girls, “and I’m one of the characters in her story!”
“Everyone has a story,” I told the girls. “Whether you build an empire from the ground up or raise a child, your lives are worthy books of their own.”
We rounded a corner, turning down a hall that had no rooms and was quieter. “We’re about there, aren’t we?” Fedelina asked me, taking hold of my hand.
“The butterfly garden?”
“No,” she said. “The end of your story.”
“Sort of,” I told her.
“What do you mean ‘sort of’?” she asked.
“I don’t have an ending,” I told her. “I could never think of one that was good.”
By then we had reached the indoor courtyard, once a patio, but over time it had been transformed into a haven featuring a walking trail, a trickling fountain, and fragranced flowers and plants. The little girls opened the gates for us, and I, along with the nurses, pushed my friend’s bed in.
“This is remarkable,” I said to the volunteers.
“It’s brought a lot of joy to this facility, and it all began with Fedelina’s flower boxes.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The ones she insisted on bringing with her the day she moved in. She hardly brought anything else, just flower boxes, and the nurses thought she might be losing her mind. But she wasn’t. Turns out she had a plan.”
I shook my head, as amazed now as I was the day I heard about it on national radio. She had recruited children from local schools to come by and help her turn those flower boxes into a haven for fluttering butterflies.
“A woman is never too old for flowers,” Fedelina said. “If I were younger, if I knew then what I know now, that old people like me still crave beauty in their lives, then I would have worked to implement such courtyards in facilities nationwide. But I didn’t know back then …”
“Know what?” asked one of the girls.
“That one day I’d be old, really old. I had no idea then what being old was all about. It’s just an extension of being young.”
We broke up laughing, but as I watched the girls prance about, their arms extended, hands opened wide, waiting and hoping for butterflies to land on their palms, I knew that later I would give more thought to what Fedelina had said about what being old really was.
I extended my arms like the girls and let butterflies land on my palms. “You know what amazed me most about you back then, when we lived next door to each other? And what still amazes me now?” I said to my friend.
“No, what?” she asked.
“You have a way of showing me that getting old isn’t all bad.”
“Did you imagine it all bad?” she asked, and I gave her an honest nod, “yes.”
“This garden,” she said, “is designed to sustain the entire life cycle of the butterflies. But metamorphosis is not finished, Anna, with the production of a butterfly.”
“It’s not?” I said, looking at the winged creatures gathering on my palms, then back at my friend on her bed.
“No. One might think this is the end. After all, what more is there after becoming a butterfly? But let me tell you, Anna, the butterfly is the beginning. Metamorphosis is a cycle.”
I thought about it a moment. “Thank you,” I said then, tears welling in my eyes.
“For what?”
“I have an end to my story.”
“Well, we haven’t reached that point yet,” she reminded me. “Why don’t you read more?”
“You mean when we get back to your room?”
“No,” she said. “Right here, read to me right where we are.”
“Okay,” I said as I sat down on a black cast-iron bench and pulled out the manuscript I had in the bag that had been slung over my shoulder all this time. I started to read where I left off last, about my children and me, and their last day of summer.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
THE POST OFFICE WAS closed when we got there. After all the effort it had taken, counting pennies and getting ourselves dressed and out the door, I decided we would stay, sitting on the curb, waiting the fifteen minutes until the post office opened. It was nice knowing, after our summer spent without looking at clocks, that I was capable of getting us all ready and to a destination early in the morning. I felt more confident about starting the school routine.
Then one child had to use the bathroom. Another fell down and scraped her knee. And the last, I saw from the corner of my eye, was pocketing large landscape rocks. From the corner of my other eye I saw that the first child had peed in his shorts. My daughter was screaming bloody murder over the sight of her hurt knee. And my remaining son had clenched his fists and was grunting at me in an ill-tempered fit when I told him to empty the rocks out of his pocket. It was all making me think that I had a hundred children, not three!
“In the car, all of you,” I scolded. By the time I had fastened their seat belts, the post office doors had opened and I was tired. I could do without the stamp, and my children could go on without having experienced a field trip into the post office.
“Whoopee,” I said out loud as I put the key in the ignition and started my car. Then again, I should get us all out, go in there, and buy the doggone stamp. Or I could buy it tomorrow, alone. I could come back and stand in line silently, full of peace, a pleasant look on my face, with no one tugging on my hands or pressing my nerves. I could leisurely stuff my query into the envelope and lick it lackadaisically, or I could do it all now, get it over with—oh, how I hated my indecisiveness. I sat in the car, fretting over what to do.
“We’re going to rest,” I announced to the children. “We’re going to sit right where we are and rest for ten minutes.” I was aware of weariness that had to do with writing past midnight and again before sunrise. Writing at those hours would be simple if I weren’t mothering three children from sunrise to midnight.
With their seat belts fastened, I no longer cared that their mouths were rambling or that they were whining and giggling in the backseats. As long as they weren’t getting into things, I could close my eyes and fall asleep. A mother gets her sleep wherever she can, even in the post office parking lot.
But then, like a cat about to nap, I gazed out my window, my eyes homing in on a patch of dirt alongside the building. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t look away, for I instinctively knew what I needed to do in my life, and the thought had me pawing at my eyes. Rather than send my query out in the mail, I would dig a hole in the dirt, drop my writing in, and fill it up—I saw no other option. There was only so much of me to go around. I needed to work on my marriage, my husband needed my help in generating income, and my children needed a mother, not a walking, talking, sleep-deprived, dream-chasing zombie.
“Sometimes a mother does that,” I whispered to myself. “She tosses her aspirations into the dirt and walks away, leaving them behind. It’s not that she doesn’t have the passion or desire to cultivate them, but that there are other things demanding her care and people who cannot flourish without her.”
My children were bickering in the backseat, and the sound of it made me cry—not ordinary tears, but rather droplets of passion-filled dew that watered my dream, my desire to write, which now, like seeds, I was mentally, emotionally, and spiritually letting go of, tossing into that dirt. I would walk away from it for one year, two years, or however long it might take until my life cleared and I found myself a woman strolling along, frolicking in the rain, tiptoeing through a garden with more time and less pressure.
But then I could feel my creativity, like a strong wind twirling within me. My thoughts were spinning like the noise in my car. Inspired by the chaos coming from my children, I grabbed a broken crayon from the floor and, on the back of a grocery receipt, I calmly wrote a letter to my first son, because I had already written one to my second son, and one to Marjorie, and it had been in my subconscious all this time that I didn’t want anyone to be left out. And besides, I was feeling emotional about them starting school in the morning.
Dear Child,
When I look out my window I see an osprey soaring through the sky,
But when I look at you I see you doing more.
When I pull you in the wagon we see a turtle diligently digging a hole,
But when I look at you I see you doing more.
When I take you to the shore I see a big boy building castles out of sand,
But when I look at you I see you doing more.
When I take you for a ride at night, I see the lighthouse lighting up the
Gulf so bright,
But when I look at you I see you doing more.
When I push you on the swing, we see the trees reaching up to Heaven,
But when I look at you I see you doing more.
When I look at you, my son, I see the things that you can be,
And I also see bits of me.
I see all the things I wanted to be, the things I wanted to do,
But then I see more.
When I had finished writing the letter to my child, I glanced into my rearview mirror and saw a car run through the four-way stop sign and turn into the post office parking lot, jerking into a space behind me. I recognized the red-and-white convertible and the woman driving it. It was Fedelina, and she was getting out. With tears streaming down my face, I felt caught in the act. I considered telling her that she had changed the way in which I perceived my life, that her garden idioms were rubbing off on me, and that I was sitting here crying over my children as well as for dreams that were like seeds planted in the earth. But how ridiculous, I thought as she came up alongside my car. She was a busy lady and there was purpose to her walk.
“Why, hello, Anna,” she said, stopping at my opened window.
“Hi. How have you been?”
“Good up until a week ago,” she said.
“What happened a week ago?”
“My claim was denied and I don’t know why. It’s not the first time. Last time, would you believe, they wanted a prescription for eye drops that didn’t require a prescription with the pharmacy. Who knows this time?”
“Didn’t your insurance company send you an explanation?”
“They did. I had to use a magnifying lens to read it, and I read it over and over again but still don’t get it. I feel like a struggling school-girl. I’m so frustrated.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said. “How was the Grand Ole Opry?”
“Wonderful,” she said. “I felt so alive on that trip. Now I just feel tired. I was up all night, hoping there might be a better explanation of benefits waiting for me in my P.O. box today.”
“Did you try calling a representative of the insurance company?”
“I will today.”
“Good. They should be able to talk you through it, give you a thorough explanation. It’s probably something simple.”
“Let’s hope,” she said, looking out at the parking lot filling with cars. “I better get in there before the lines start. I’ve got a lot going on today.”
“I only came for a stamp, but …” I lowered my voice. “Someone in my backseat needs a change of clothes. I’ll come back later.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! I’ll go in and buy it for you. Just one?”
“No,” I told her. “I can come back later.”
“Let me help you,” she insisted, and hurried inside. A few minutes later she returned, holding a stamp in one hand and a large, padded envelope tucked under her arm the way one clutches a purse.
“Thank you,” I told her. “You spared me from what would have been an all-day, hair-pulling field trip.”
“I do remember,” she said.
I smiled at her. Despite her opinions that day in the garden, I missed the pleasant things she used to say to me. “Other than your claim being denied,” I said, “life is going well?”
“I have nothing to complain about. And I’ve been waiting for this,” she said, taking the padded envelope from under her arm.
“What is it?”
“A couple of more letters my mother wrote. Two, I’ve never read before. After all these years they’ve shown up. My cousin found them tucked in with some old papers in a trunk she hadn’t opened in years, and they had my name on them. I can’t wait to get home and read them, Anna.”
“Wow,” was all I said.
“If you’re at all interested, I’ll let you read them. I know you enjoyed the others.”
“Yes, I did. I’d love to.”
“Good, then why don’t you come by sometime?”
“You’re the busy one,” I said with a laugh. “You tell me when a good time is.”
“They start school tomorrow, right?”
“Yes, so don’t be alarmed if you hear a few hallelujahs coming from my yard.”
“I’m sure you’re looking forward to a little private time.”
“I am,” I told her, “although I do have to find a job—nothing too stressful—but a job that pays, a job I enjoy.” I smiled, waiting for her to give me a glimmer of optimism, a fact about roses.
“Well,” she said, “I had better get going. I’m meeting a group of ladies for a breakfast in ten minutes.”
“Don’t let me keep you,” I said.
“Stop by sometime, Anna. If you see me out in my garden, come on by.”
“I will,” I told her. “Maybe tomorrow, once I get the children off to school.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
THE NEXT MORNING I walked up the steps of my stilted house alone. There was no child riding on my hip or tugging on my hand or whining at my heels. But there were two lizards dancing in circles at my feet, and a bunny staring at me from afar, and a sticky frog attached to the railing. It all made me cry, for there was no one for me to point these things out to, no children for me to share it all with.
I was a teary mess by the time I reached the top and there, sitting at my door, were a plant and an envelope with my name on it.
Hi, Anna,
This Trimezia martinicensis is for you. Don’t let that name intimidate you. It’s a subtropical walking iris. I figured, what better gift to give a mother whose children are headed off into the world, even if it’s preschool. I used to divide my clumps of iris by taking the whole mass out of the ground, breaking it into smaller pieces, and planting a few small ones. Of course I always gave some to friends.
Anyway, it’s called a walking iris because it sends up a spike with a baby plant on it. The baby plant falls to the ground, still attached to the mother plant, and often roots. The plant appears to be walking!
