The Blue Garden

I come to the garden and sit on the bench in the shade. It’s quiet here. The lawn is deeply green. The garden froths with blossoms, magenta and blue and purple. The small tree behind me is blooming, and the air smells sweet. No rabbits visit today, just the occasional call of a jay, the liquid notes of a robin.

I hear a faint scraping of gravel and glance up. An older woman emerges from the other side of the wall that runs parallel to the bench. She wears sagging pants, a loose men's cotton shirt, a baseball cap over thin white hair that falls to her shoulders. She strikes me as unsteady, slightly bewildered--when she sees me, she glances away, then drops her eyes. 

I decide to head back home. But I’ve been wondering about the wall and what it means. Something to do with war? Lost soldiers? I notice a plaque facing away from me and go over to read it.

O Corona: A Little Argument With Mortality

Here’s what I figured out a few days ago:

There are probably a million things that could potentially kill me: heart attack, stroke, diabetes, cancer, car crash, terrorist attack, lunatic with a gun, carbon monoxide poisoning, the coronavirus, t flu, ALS, etc. etc.

Only one thing will actually kill me.

That means that 99.9999___ % of things will not kill me. (This alone is strangely comforting.)

Also, I don’t know which thing will kill me, and I can’t protect myself from everything.

Ergo, I might as well relax. I can’t control the method and timing of my death, so I might as well turn it over to God/HP/fate.

When I do turn it over to God, I feel safer. I also feel less alone. I have the sense that love will follow me anywhere, even through the passage we call death.

Self-Less, Self-Full: A Tale of Two Grandmas

Grandma 1:

Once in while I’d stroke Grandma Burkey’s cheek, soft as the leather of my old deerskin purse. She was tiny at 4’10”. She’d be wearing a dress that fit snugly over her round body, perched on a chair with her hands folded in her lap.

Like most grandmas, she came with a repertoire of food: shoo-fly pie, funnel cakes, Dutch potato filling, apple dumplings, fastnachts. She was best known for her “Easter Eggs”: melted dark chocolate laced with paraffin, poured over freshly-ground coconut, wrapped around peanut butter. These four or five inch long delectables had to be stored in the refrigerator so the paraffin wouldn’t melt; we drooled over them for days, waiting for Easter.

One day, when she was babysitting, she glanced up at the ceiling and said, “There’s Ishkabibble.” I squinted but couldn’t see anything. He must be very small, I reasoned. It made me think of Timmy, when he tied a string to the leg of a housefly and it buzzed circles in the air.

Grandma Burkey was nice, never wished to complain. She sat in the rocking chair that took up most of the tiny living room of her government-subsidized apartment, knitting and crocheting afghans and doilies and teapot cozies and Christmas ornaments and little dolls. Only once did I see a crack in her pleasant self-effacement: when my little sister painted herself and our hardwood floors with permanent India ink. Grandma muttered with fury as she scrubbed her down in the tub.

Grandma Burkey never made it past 8th grade. She was probably relieved when her husband, a domineering alcoholic, died of a heart attack at 40—she never dated or married again. When the doctor told her an artery in her brain was poised to burst, she entered a nursing home, occupying one half of a vinyl-floored room. She hated her roommate but relished her role as the queen of the craft room and favorite of the staff.

She lived in the nursing home for another 30 years. She was 92 when she died.

Grandma 2:

Isn’t this beautiful? Grandma Slack picked up an eggplant and held it up in the air. It was beautiful: its graceful curves, its deep black-brown-purple sheen.

On Being An "Older Woman"

The “old woman” I have in my head is gray-haired and slightly plump, wearing a neat dress and maybe even pearls. Her hair is permed. She speaks quietly and asks little for herself. Even in private, her demeanor is even-keeled, no longer at the mercy of emotion and desire.

I, on the other hand, swear and curse with impatience. Faded jeans are my go-to wardrobe. I’m obsessed with myself: my writing, my drawing, my inner conflict, my emotions--swinging from self-loathing to flights of transcendence. I am anything but settled. I can’t stop plowing forward into my wounds, fighting for more territory in which to live.

Maybe I have borderline personality disorder. Or is this what it means to be an artist?