She was sitting in her kitchen removing stones from cherries with the aid of an antique extractor she’d found on a dusty shelf in the back of a secondhand shop. It was a red, runny mess of a job, but she was smiling, happy, enjoying herself.
Her kitchen was a wonderland of old-fashioned gadgets, jars of honey and a refrigerator filled with alternative foods and supplements. It was a dark, moody space, just the way she liked it with a Tasha Tudor flair.
Friends had arrived earlier in the day for a visit, a girlfriends’ weekend. The occasion filled up some of the lonely spaces, spaces she now willingly gave up to them while denying to herself that such spaces existed.
She didn’t mind being alone in her hundred-year-old hillside farmhouse now that he was gone. He had loved this place, she had agreed. Now she saw him everywhere.
And there was the dog: a large, warm, comforting companion to care for and sleep with on the floor in front of the stove. She was more or less content – more or less. At least she got through many days balanced, or seeming so even to herself. Or she’d say the darkness was balanced by loving spirits she felt around her most of the time. Information she’d spontaneously share apropos to nothing.
She was a tiny slip of a woman, bone and muscle and sinew, held together by grit. Vanity had faded, replaced by the freedom of braless days and elastic-waistbands at night. But she still enjoyed her bling, of which she possessed a great deal. She was totally herself now. The wait was possibly worth the cost, but she wasn’t sure.
As her friends gathered for the first cocktail of the evening, she looked at each with love only true friendship can inspire. She had not had a drink in over 20 years. She knew her friends needed the temporary release and so she laughed with them easily.
Throughout the course of that first night, each would take a turn updating the latest news, details of jobs, children, events and, of course, men. They laughed with sweet guffawing abandon over past life chapters and how lucky they all were to have survived thus far. It had been touch-and-go for each at various points in their journeys.
And, she was now sick. Had been for a long time and counting. Some days she’d accept that her beloved old farmhouse would one day have to be sold. Other days with renewed vengeance she’d exclaim she’d die right there. Then she would chuckle a bit at her own selfish nature. After all, she knew the end of the story – it would all be sold off one day.
That weekend the friends ate fresh corn on the cob boiled up in an old dented pot over the one working burner on her antique Glenwood stove that threatened to blow them up or just simmer the water, simmer away the fear. What was living anyway but a series of events grand or miniscule, life changing, affirming or dangerous or maybe often just plain boring. They each in their own way marched through their days successfully if but scared. And she would encourage, applaud and hold them dear, always in mutual trust that they were safe in each other’s company. They ate corn as a last supper, so sweet, fresh and filling. She cut her corn from the cob and chewed it slowly, letting the taste of it fill her mind as well as her body. She was sick but not beaten.
She would look around that large, low ceilinged, open-plan space where she had lived with him, had lived as husband and wife like two orbiting planets and this room their universe with the central stove their sun. She would daydream whole afternoons away thinking about the past, and then take his warm body to bed with her at night. The empty dawns were harsh.
In the afternoon of that second day, they went blueberry picking. The late summer heat was a punishment, but they wanted their fill now. Later it would be too late. She sat on the farmer’s porch while the girlfriends gathered berries like little children – giddy and free, unburdened by their real lives during this interlude in a farmer’s ancient field.
Later that afternoon, they would be refreshed in the river behind her neighbor’s house where the water flowed in cooling torrents from surrounding mountain ranges, numbing the pain that they all knew was coming.
That last night no one said it, but all knew it was the last of these coming-together-in-harmony weekends. Time was running out.
She eventually sold that farmhouse and a vast inventory of possessions, while filled with anger that this day had finally come.
She wanted what she wanted. She wanted him. She wanted her dogs. She wanted someone to hold her hand and lead her where she needed to go even if it meant so much would be lost forever. She would wax philosophically, then wane and refuse the reality. Her tides were either very low or very high, the navigation nearly impossible. She needed the help of others now. Her independence was going, going, gone.
She had lost so much and now she was leaving her sanctuary. Steel will got her through the hours. When the time came, she packed the last of what was going with her in the car and said goodbye to home forever.
She resisted the urge to look in the rearview mirror, but she saw the home she had created receding behind the hills in her mind. Nothing would ever be the same.
Relocated to a place where services and her family could ease her through her final days, she never fully settled. Nearly smothered by possessions she could not release, she drifted more and more into a state bordering on mania until the medications were administered.
She was not afraid of death. She believed it was the next chapter with a rainbow bridge waiting for her to cross. She believed she needed to be as gracious as possible for her daughter’s sake so she tried to stay busy with a to-do list etched in her brain, pushing the limits of her strength with the power of her will. She knew she would be leaving soon and that he waited with the dogs for her arrival.
Her daughter got the memorial right. But then again, her mother had had a hand in writing the script. There was a buffet, music and the sharing of photographs to trigger the memories, laughter and tales of back when.
“My Mother was a gypsy,” her daughter had stated. A loving, seeking, intelligent, hippie-like, soul drifter whose magnetic charms we were drawn to.
Now that she is where she is, I must let her go, floating away in warmth and comfort I hope she has found, with the occasional circling back on gossamer wings to let us know all is well.
All is well here, too, my friend, all is well.
This Mattapoisett Life
By Marilou Newell