The Postscript

The hour passed. I opened my eyes. Even though the chapel is lit only by candles and the windows are stained glass, it still seemed darker than it should be. Then I heard a crash of thunder. I looked at my watch. 7:00 exactly.

I know a lot of folks my own age who think they have everything figured out. They tell me how it’s all downhill from here—whether they are talking about the country or their health or literature or the quality of baked goods. Everything was better in the past, and now we’re all addicted to social media and reliant on the internet and nothing good will ever come of it.

Other than my photos of flowers, I don’t do much on Facebook, but I am a member of a few groups and most of them have to do with writing. As of this week, I think that might change.

Now that I am finally able to move all my clothing back to its rightful spot, I am faced with the unavoidable question: Do I really need all these clothes?

We didn’t take a pontoon ride.

My mother was feeling a bit under the weather. We were planning to go to a restaurant that we feared might fill up if we got there too late. Rod nodded, but I could tell he thought we ought to get on that pontoon boat anyway.

I do a funny thing in the middle of June. I try to celebrate the summer solstice. I don’t do anything particularly romantic. If you have visions of me leaping over bonfire flames or dancing around a maypole wearing a flower crown or attempting to contact my inner goddess, you would be disappointed.

I remembered my mother’s Swedish relatives who came to visit in the 80s. They did not think wall-to-wall carpeting was normal. They were concerned it would not be clean. They thought area rugs were the way to go. I reminded my 100% Swedish mother of this, in an attempt to make this whole tiling of the bedroom thing look like a return to my roots.

Now that I’m older, I am having a lot more fun getting dressed up than I ever did when I was young. I think the expectations are different. When I was younger, I had this wrongheaded idea that there was a right way to dress up. I thought I would either hit the mark or miss. Now that I’m older, I realize there is no one keeping score, there are no points off for getting it wrong.

Gardening was supposed to be enjoyable and the fact that it always seemed like work to me made me feel guilty. My mother and sister are wonderful gardeners, and I have no reason to believe they are fibbing when they say they enjoy getting their hands in the dirt, tending their flowers and watching things grow. I do enjoy watching things grow—this is the truth. I just enjoy it a lot more if someone else has done all the work.

Her notes appear in little bubbles at the side of the text. “This is reading like a sermon,” a note said. This was a puzzling observation because the passage she was referring to was, in fact, a sermon. But I gathered from the note that sounding like a sermon (even if it was a sermon) was not a good thing.

A big storm would have been nice, but it’s really the lack of color that is getting me down. March is nothing but mud and surprise snowstorms and then more mud. April is nothing but cold wind and gray skies. So I expect big things from May. And, this year, May is dragging its heels. Whatever it is I’m waiting for, it doesn’t seem to be showing up.

I would see the face of the dance teacher light up as they assumed I was a dancer, and I would dread what was coming. I would stand up and start to move and the teacher would immediately realize they had made a mistake—I was absolutely not a dancer. In fact, I had enormous difficulty following the simplest instructions. The notion of “body memory” was alien to me. I had a bad case of body amnesia.

Felix is our cat. He had made a small noise a few minutes before landing, but I had thought nothing of it. Now it smelled as if something was badly amiss. I know you might be having your breakfast as you listen to this, so suffice to say, of the three types of potential messes an animal could make in a small container, this was the worst of the options.

Honestly, I was not hopeful. There are a lot of stray dogs in Mexico, and Muneca was no longer a puppy. We later learned that her owner was not an older person, as we assumed, but a young woman who died unexpectedly. The whole thing seemed terribly tragic.

Jade is one of the new people I have met while spending time in Mexico. Jade used to be an eye doctor. But after retiring from medicine in her 60s, she decided to do something a little different. I’m pretty sure—no matter how much time I gave you—you would never guess how Jade now spends her time.

If having more refined tastes means I stop noticing bougainvillea, I’d be happy with the tastes I have, even if I never understood much poetry. Because it seems to me the ability to notice the beautiful in the ordinary is more important than recognizing the unusual.