Saying Goodbye

I met J more than 55 years ago when we were carrying our first-borns. Several years ago, she became my landlady as well as my friend when she and her husband, G, bought the house next door to theirs that included the attached cottage I rent. I have a screened gazebo in my backyard where I sit to read in the summer. I’d hear her back door close and she’d come down the path between our houses calling out, “Here I come with my tea to interrupt whatever you’re doing!” We saw each other almost every day until Wednesday, November 2nd, the day she died. 

 Though we had a lot of ideas in common – we shared political, religious, educational and philosophical views – she was much more pragmatic and practical than I, and I don’t think there was anything she couldn’t fix. Because of that, she made an excellent landlady. If I called in a dither because a radiator pipe sprung a leak, she’d call the plumber, then over she’d come with a basket of towels to mop up the mess. One day she grabbed the tail of a writhing snake that had somehow ended up in my bathroom and casually tossed the reptile into the woods. She helped me build bookcases and a patio fence, we Christmas shopped together, gardened in side-by-side plots, and always we talked, compared and shared viewpoints, and laughed. We laughed a lot. 

 Sometime around 2009, after declaring the two of us to be on, at best, a 20-year life plan, J and I decided to co-compose this blog we called Laughing On the Way Out. In it, we recorded some of the things that happened first to her, then inevitably to me, as we approached late middle age. We agreed the slope toward old age was slipperier than we'd thought. There was the morning she called me to tell me that she’d just spent 15 minutes trying to scrub a shadow from her kitchen counter that she’d mistaken for a stain, or that she’d been halfway to a town to the south before she remembered she was supposed to be going to a dentist's appointment north of home. So many things we'd taken for granted, like being able to notice whether we were groomed and dressed properly, or that we knew where our glasses and keys were, or we were sure, when we set out, that we knew where we were going - these suddenly became things we had to question. And so it went. Arm in arm, slipping and propping each other up and laughing hysterically at our failings, J and I were heading off down the hill. And if you’re sitting there reading in disbelief because these things haven’t happened to you yet, relax, there’s still time. 

 Today though, instead of J, I find a J-sized space in front of me. Though I'm missing her and feeling sad, I still get to choose how to fill that space. I can fill it with sorrow that she’s gone, bitterness and anger toward the illness she suffered, or I can fill it with joy that I knew her, pour all my memories of her into it until it’s full and brimming over. While she was here, J was so appreciative – she was happy with the life she’d made for herself. She appreciated her farm animals – the cows even when they broke the fence, the pigs even though they stunk to high heaven, the sheep though they ate every brussels sprout either of us tried to raise. She loved her chickens and especially her cats. And she was appreciated in return. She was civic minded, volunteering year after year at the voting booth and working as an aide at the school. She cleaned houses and polished silver and mowed lawns to supplement her income. She was valued and respected by a great many people. 

 There is so much we humans don’t know. We choose what we believe and believe in – we choose that which comforts us, that which gives us hope. But one thing I do know; while J was here, she loved -she loved her family and her home and her friends - and while she was here, she was loved in return. In the end, I believe that’s what matters most. 

 I leave you with this thought from JOHN O'DONOHUE, an Irish poet, author and priest: May you know that absence is alive with hidden presence, that nothing is ever lost or forgotten. May the absences in your life grow full of eternal echo. May you sense around you the secret Elsewhere where the presences that have left you dwell.

Moments

I used to have the stereotypical blonde moment every now and then. Called senior moments now that my hair is grey, they are the times you forget something vital and don't remember it until your daughter, who lives 60 miles away and whose house you left an hour ago, answers the phone with, "We have your pocketbook, Nini!"

Of course, you knew she had since it wasn't in the grocery shopping cart when you went to pay and it wasn't in the car when you ran out of the store, waving hastily at the clerk to hold everything, you'd be back in two ticks. And then you weren't because you were tearing the car apart looking for the blessed bag that was an hour away at your daughter's house right where you'd left it.

And of course, everything you needed - credit cards, medical cards, driver's license, cell phone - were in that one bag you could be relied on to leave behind despite a taped note on your car's dashboard exhorting you to remember your pocketbook and the annoying little chimes on your iphone reminding you to grab your pocketbook on the way out the door. For the past six years you've been reminding myself with such reminders, and in those six years you've left your purse behind an embarrassing number of times.

Daughter obligingly took said pocketbook to the Post Office, wrapped it securely, and put it in the mail after being assured it would reach me the very next day. It did, intact and with a text message on the phone from daughter the day before saying it had just been mailed. Of course, she added sheepishly, she'd had a blonde moment of her own when, from the depths of the box in the Post Office clerk's hands, she heard my phone whistle to alert me that a message was on its way.

I relayed all this to my friend and cohort in aging, J, who has her own pocketbook issues. She laughed sympathetically, offered to take me with her on her trip to town, and reminded me to be sure to grab my bag before meeting her. I obligingly flung the strap over my shoulder, closed the door behind me, and met her at the end of my driveway. She grinned at me when she saw my purse and off we drove.

Ten minutes later the grin turned to grimace when she reached into the back seat for her pocketbook. "Why," she began, "where's my purse?" We both looked at the empty seat. She fumbled under the driver's seat. I searched the space between the driver and passenger seats. She got out of the car and looked in the empty trunk. Then she looked at me. I snorted. She giggled. We guffawed. "Who's going to take care of us?" we asked each other, only half in jest. Then we drove back to her house to fetch her pocketbook.

Angel Food Oooops

There comes a time in many a woman's life when she has to admit that she isn't the cook she used to be. My time is obviously now. I've been baking since I was knee high to my mother. I can't count the number of angel cakes I've made in my 72 years, but the one pictured here took the cake, literally. Rather than taking it to new heights, however, the accidental addition of an extra cup of water brought it to the brink of disaster. 

Today's efforts to produce a chiffon cake (pictured below) ended in a marvelously high dessert that scented the whole cottage in eau de chocolat. That is, until I propped the cake in its pan upside down on a bottle of balsamic vinegar to cool, whereupon it tumbled off the counter, pulling the bottle of vinegar with it, whereupon the cork popped out of the bottle and doused floor and cake alike with a river of the aromatic liquid.

I mopped up as best I could - cake top, floor, cupboard doors, table legs. Then I called J, my friend and partner in aging catastrophes, to come for a cup of tea and some "vinegar chocolate cake."

"Oh!" she enthused. "I've made chocolate cake with vinegar before. It's quite good."

"No doubt you did it on purpose though, right?" I queried.

There was a pause.  "But..." she began and I could hear a quiver of laughter in her voice.

"But," I reiterated and told her about the bottle and the crash and the river of aromatic liquid.

By this time she was laughing helplessly. "This reminds me of the angel cake you made, the one with too much water. The crust was quite good, though." She hiccuped.

Like its predecessor, the chiffon cake had some quite edible parts, those slices where the vinegar hadn't penetrated. And with enough whipped cream, even those bits that smelled like salad tasted almost like chocolate.

Oh dear.

My Love Affair With Office Chairs

Perhaps I’ve lived alone too long. Perhaps in my 70^th year I’m becoming a bit dotty. Or, perhaps I’m merely fussy. I’m sitting in my newest acquisition, an office chair of exceeding comfort. It’s my seventh office chair in 15 years. For one who doesn’t really have an office and only uses the chair for a bit of computer time, and that not even daily, a seventh chair might seem excessive. I don’t have them here all at once, of course. That would be excessive, not to mention eccentric (and uncomfortable since my accommodations are quite small), but as my friend J pointed out, there has been quite a succession of chairs moving in and out of my quarters.

The first chair came from a friend’s office, which was being refurbished. Since the old chairs were destined for the trash, my friend rescued one for me. I brought it home, rolled it up to the computer and sat there quite comfortably for a couple of years before the height adjuster lever gave out and I found myself much nearer the floor than was comfortable. (No, of course I didn’t sit there continually for a couple of years. There were interruptions such as mealtime, bedtime, work, etc.) At any rate, the chair needed replacing so I kept my eye out at my favorite Transfer Station and sure enough, my patience paid off. A beautiful rolling chair covered in brown velveteen appeared. J and I hoisted into the back of the pickup and brought it home.

The chair was perfect. It was comfortable, stylish, elegant, even. It was also big. Far too big for the space allotted it. I tripped over it and pushed it out of the way for a couple of weeks, then J and I hauled it out to the barn to wait for our annual tag sale. In its place I put another Transfer Station find, a much smaller chair with an ugly red seat and wheels that rolled only under duress. It, too, lasted a few weeks before being unceremoniously hauled back to the TS.

Next I tried a smaller version of the velveteen chair. At least it looked smaller in the second hand shop, fitted in as it was amongst some larger lounge chairs. It was softer than the first and shorter so that even when the height adjuster lever was in its highest position, I still had to reach up to use the keyboard. Out that chair went to join its compatriot in the tag sale pile.

I replaced chair number four with another large office chair which, though much too big for the space, won my heart with its leather cushions, it’s workable height adjuster, its smoothly rolling wheels and its general now-THIS_is-an-office-chair look. In fact I liked it so much that when I’d tripped over it and shoved it out of the way for a month or so, rather than take it back to the TS I hauled it out to my screened-in gazebo and spent the summer months lazing about in it. Finally the back gave out and I was in danger of spilling over backwards every time I sat in it.

Chair number six came home with me from a yard sale last July. It was smaller than its predecessors, had a cushioned seat, hard wooden arms and rollers that needed attention, but the price was right and I needed a chair. I was quite fond of it despite its drawbacks because the height adjuster level worked. I was finally able to fit my knees under the desk and still reach the keyboard. Until a couple of weeks ago, when the height adjuster lever got stuck in a lower setting. (I was trying to make a minor adjustment to accommodate a cushion.)

As luck would have it, while I was visiting my daughter’s family the following week, my son-in-law brought home two office chairs from a building in which he was doing carpentry work. “We don’t need two!” my daughter exclaimed.

“I’ll take one!” I offered. My grateful daughter hefted it out to my car.

I’m sitting in it now. It’s lovely. My knees, even with a cushion on the seat, fit under the desk. The height adjuster lever moves up and down as though proud of its functionality. The wheels swivel smoothly, the colors match my décor. I’m thoroughly smitten.

Last night I could not sleep, so got up, made some tea, and sat watching the stars spin through the night sky. “Did you sit in your new office chair?” asked J.

“No, I didn’t,” I answered. “But I did gaze at it fondly for a bit.”

She looked at me as though she thought I was eccentric.

The other day my sister-in-law, E, and I were on the tag sale circuit. We'd just pulled out onto the road from the last sale on our list and were headed home, congratulating ourselves on our brilliant finds and assuring each other we were done for the day when a tag sale sign at the edge of the road dragged the steering wheel from my hands. E and I looked at each other and shrugged. "May as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb," I said as we clambered out of the car and set off at a trot toward several tables piled with unexamined treasures. 

Half an hour later, our hands full, we returned to the car. I'd rolled the front windows up while we drove so we could hear each other talk, but the rear windows were halfway down. As I opened the back door to set my purchases on the seat, the keys in my hand caught on a plastic bag. I disengaged them and tossed them into the front seat. As I did, I must have squeezed the button on the car door opener because I heard a beep. It didn't register though. I slammed the back door, reached for the front door handle and nearly wrenched my elbow. The door wouldn't open. Nor would the back door. I'd locked us out of the car. 

"Well, hellfire," I muttered. I tried reaching through the open back window to the front seat but my arm was not long enough to reach the keys. "I'll go see if someone here has a wire coat hangar," I told E. I'd no sooner turned my back on the car when the alarm went off. E looked sheepishly over the hood. 

"I reached in the open window and unlocked the back door," she said, tossing the keys over the hood of the car. Huh. I stood there for a second, feeling impossibly foolish. That had not occurred to me. I got over feeling foolish and began to feel distinctly unnerved. E is a year older than I but apparently she still possesses all her faculties. Why had I not thought to simply reach through the open window and unlock the back door? Was this a sign of early dementia?

As we were pulling out onto the road I remarked, "This reminds me of the Frenchman who locked his family in the car and it took him a week to figure how to get them out."

E turned to me, horrified. "I didn't hear about that!" she exclaimed. 

"It's a joke," I said, explaining that it was a slur on the French intellect. "None of them had thought to simply unlock the doors from the inside." 

"Oh," she said, not cracking a smile. I felt immeasurably reassured about my faculties.

I was relaying this misadventure to J, my friend in aging, who told me a story of her own to make me feel better. "Yesterday my son hurried in saying he needed a bag of ice so I pulled the bin out from under the automatic ice maker in my freezer, emptied the contents into a plastic bag, and set the bin down on the counter while I put a twist tie on the bag. We were in a rush so out the door we sped without a backward glance.

"Later that afternoon while I was making dinner I kept hearing a strange clunking sound, a sort of intermittent ka-thunk, ka-thunk. It continued through dinner and into the evening. During a TV commercial I got up to get some ice cream. I opened the freezer door and WHOOSH! I was inundated with ice cubes. They flew in all directions, there were so many of them. And there on the counter next to the fridge, right where I'd set it down, was the ice bin. I must have looked at it a dozen times but it never occurred to me to put it back in the freezer."

We looked at each other. "Who's going to take care of us?" she asked, only half in jest. 

The three of us can take heart, however, that things can always be worse. A mutual friend fell asleep in his chair one afternoon. When he awoke he looked at his watch and saw with alarm that he had only a minute or two before he was due at the nearby high school with the bus he drove. He wheeled into the drive and pulled up to his usual spot, surprised to see he was first in line. "Hmmm," he thought, checking his watch again, thinking perhaps he'd read the time incorrectly. Nope, only a minute or two late. He sat there pondering for a time before he noticed that not only were there no other buses in line, there were no cars in the parking lot. That was because it was Saturday and school was not in session. 

"I felt really foolish," he confessed, "but there's no way you can sneak home in a big yellow bus." He drove down the road scrunched down as far as possible behind the wheel, parked the bus in his yard, went back into the house, sat down in his chair, and pretended to himself that what had happened had not just happened. 

We're all obviously slipping down the hill toward dotage. But, I take heart from a report I read stating that there are currently over 9 million 80 year olds in the US. That gives E, J, and me about ten years to get our act together before we can use really old age to explain our actions.

Why Is Nothing Ever Simple?

J and I were on our way to Home Depot, a 45 minute trip, to purchase a new, higher (chair-level) toilet and some new floor tile for the cottage bathroom. My brother had generously offered to put down the floor. "Might as well get the toilet in at the same time," he told me. "No point in putting it in and then pulling it up to tile the floor. I'll do it all in one go." Oh, to be a strong man and have the  confidence and know-how to do things in one go.

Not that women can't do both - just not this woman. I could, however, choose the toilet I wanted and the floor tile. So J and I set off in her pickup to do just that. When I climbed in, she tossed me a folded piece of material. "Spread this over your knees," she said. "The heater is working but the fan isn't, so it may get a little cold in here."

I spread the cloth over my knees, pulled my hat a little closer over my ears to ward off the chill, and off we went. Not five minutes into our drive I noticed the window in my door was icing over. I glanced over. J's was doing likewise. "I think..." I began when J leaned forward suddenly. "I can't see so well," she said, scraping hard with her fingernail at the ice forming on the windshield. She looked at me with a wry smile. "Maybe we better go back and swap the truck for the car."

Nothing wrong with the heater in the car. "We're later than we meant to be," J said as we sped off. "We may as well stop and have lunch first before we shop." Eating always sounds like a good idea to me. (It was because of my chubby little knees protesting during a two a.m. visit to the loo that we were getting a higher toilet to begin with.) We stopped at a popular buffet place near the Home Depot and ate a leisurely lunch while we discussed tile colors, the weather, the state of the world, and how our bodies were betraying us into buying things like raised toilets.

As we stood to leave, J put her hands in her pockets expecting to encounter her gloves. Instead she pulled out two large hen's eggs. I felt my eyebrows crawl up into my hair. "Have they been in your pockets all morning?" I asked, wondering how on earth they'd avoided being scrambled given the way J clambered in and out of the truck and tossed her coat carelessly down on the bench in the booth when we came in.

She looked at me. "They've been in my coat since yesterday when I took them out of the laying boxes!" I thought of all the things J does in a day - heaving forty pound bags of grain around, rough

housing with her dog, shoveling snow, bounding in and out of the truck a dozen times, hauling trash to the transfer station - those eggs had been jostled and jiggled and bounced around. The thought of what might have happened if they'd broken while still in her pockets made me giggle, then guffaw. We left the restaurant poking each other and laughing like two silly school girls on a lark. The eggs rode safely home in one of the car's cup holders.

The tile and toilet have since been successfully installed. And other than J locking herself out of her car Thursday and me locking myself out of the cottage Friday, our recent days have been relatively event-free.

Back-Up Wreath

Yesterday at the Transfer Station J and I searched the shelves as usual for discarded treasures. Our local TS is a resourceful place. Adjacent to the the trash compactor are several shelves where residents can bring unwanted but still useful items for trade. The shelves are always full in the summer, especially after tag sales. The pickings in winter are much slimmer until right before Christmas. Before our arrival yesterday, someone had left three giant cardboard boxes full of Christmas decorations. I know there are people who, though they have no reservations about pawing through discount tables at Filene's, will shudder at the thought of looking through a box left at the TS. My sympathy goes out to them. Over the years I've found numerous discarded but still useful items at the TS including a glider chair, intact and without a stain or a loose screw; a Williams Sonoma popover pan; a Cuisinart; a camera never out of its box; assorted cutlery and enough pretty plates to feed 30 people at my daughter's pre-wedding dinner; vases of all sorts and sizes; a futon still in its shrink wrap, and… Christmas decorations.

My parents and grandparents lived through the Great Depression which had a profound effect on the way they lived their lives once it was over. I was brought up with such slogans as make do or do without, waste not, want not, and use it up or wear it out. Nothing in our house was ever wasted or thrown away until every last vestige of usefulness was wrung from it and even then, many of the holdovers so necessary to survival in the 30s remained behind even after my parents passed away – the ball of string in the corner cupboard, the waxed paper bags that held kitchen garbage, the desk drawer full of rubber bands, the straightened and pressed wrapping paper, the rescued bows, the over-stuffed rag bag. I figure I could have gone two ways when I reached adulthood  – I chose the frugal way and it frames the way I now live my own life which, I suppose, explains my delight in our local TS.

J and I spent a happy half hour holding up one thing after another for approval. I make fudge at Christmas. This year each recipient will receive theirs in a charming china dish decorated with tasteful renderings of angels or penguins or carol singers on the outside. My grandchildren will love the Santa that lights up inside with a tiny candle; my daughter-in-law will enjoy the basket her gift will come packed in. I may not have saved more than $10 all told but it's $10 still in my pocket.

Often on the ride home, J and I discuss the pleasure we get in thinking about the money we've saved and how it gets harder and harder to part with our hard earned cash for something we know will, sooner or later, show up at the TS. Perhaps that is why, when I saw a perfectly good grapevine wreath in the shape of a heart, I snatched it up despite the fact that I already have a perfectly good grapevine wreath in the shape of a heart at home.

"This," I told J, waving it over my head, "will be my back-up wreath in case the one I have falls apart." And then we both gasped. Is this what it's come to, then? Are we on our way to hoarder-hood? I thought of the coat I'd snatched up last week even though I already have a perfectly serviceable coat. I thought of the Christmas decorations in my hands and the five boxes of Christmas decorations in the attic at home, leftovers from my childhood and my children's childhoods. I sighed. But, I did not put the wreath back. I brought it home and on the way we laughed at the thought of two old bats combing the TS for back-up treasures to the multitude of treasures we already have.

This morning J called. She was making cookies. She'd hauled out her old Sun-Beam MixMaster and rifled about in the drawer where she had not one, but two sets of beaters. "I remember when my mother didn't hook the beaters in tight and when she turned on the machine, they twisted all together," she explained. "I saw those extra beaters one day at the TS and I thought, 'I might need these someday!' They're my back-up beaters, you see, just in case I make the same mistake my mother did."

I suddenly felt much better about the wreath. Next week I'll return the coat because I don't really need it and someone else will. But I know that someday my little heart-shaped wreath will fall apart - it's already second-hand. And then, you see, I'll have back-up.