Waiting

an essay; reflections on senior widows, creepy busts, and forgotten stories.

Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash

Dot

Dot deadheads the petunias in the large pot right outside her front door as my parents watch from inside their living room window across the court, “She’s not using her walker.” They worry she’ll fall. At 97, her mind is sharp as a tack but her body, unsteady. Later, she calls to invite Mom over, I tag along, to give away the items from her weekly Meals on Wheels delivery she doesn’t need - a full container of grapes, squashes, peppers, green tomatoes, an onion, and a banana. We talk about vegetables, medicines and the healthcare system, and she invites us three times to “come sit”. One unripened green tomato waits on the windowsill above twelve bottles of prescription pills, all lined up in a row in the order in which she takes them. We three sit to chat in the too-hot living room and I push up my sleeves and already know I want to stay forever and ask about her life. She grew up on a large family farm and milked a cow before school. As an avid Braves fan, she’ll get to watch them play tonight! I notice their game schedule is tacked to the wall in her den, like a sticky note would be above a desk. That was the first clue to the necessity of functional living, which was certain to occur at some point. That, and, displayed on the built-in shelf around the TV, a triangular-framed and folded American flag - a visual hope for and reminder of one who’s also waiting. For her. I asked if she gets a lot of visitors and she chuckles and says, “Well no, I’ve outlived them all.” She says her father lived until he was 102 and she expects there’s more time to live. I expect there’s more time to love. She’s managed to carve a permanent pleasant smile as her resting face - because beauty within always comes out. She speaks excitedly about the arrival of family and great-grandchildren coming in a week but for tonight, she waits for Salisbury steak, salad, and fruit. Tomorrow, she’ll sit in the sunroom and watch the church service from her computer. She loves the Lord. She looks forward to that.

That’s what Dot does – deadheads her petunias, watches her Braves and pastor. And waits.

Mary

Mary’s home attaches to Dot’s; their garages are beside each other and the same bee pollinating Dot’s petunias also does Mary’s. From across the way, Mom and Dad know when Mary is outside sitting on her porch because her Yorkie, Fritzy, stretches the retractable leash as far as it will go from her, and stares in our direction; they both wait. That’s exactly how I find him when we return from our errands. Dad and I walk over because it’s been four days now that I’ve been here visiting Mom and Dad and haven’t visited Mary yet. Fritz is wagging excitedly and begins jumping up to my shins. I greet Mary with a hug and ask if I can walk Fritz. “Take two bags,” she says. He walks me to the grassy area and poops twice. Who knows how long he’s been holding it, waiting for someone to walk him, bless his little heart. I feel bad I haven’t come over sooner. Mary said her knees won’t let her walk him anymore. Her knees won’t let her do much of anything anymore. She said she had someone over all day yesterday helping her clean and box up many of her belongings. When we return from our walk, she tells us to sit. I look leerily at the bucket of salvaged rainwater she collects to water her plants right beside my chair. Fritz jumps in my lap and hot fish-breath rolls off his curled little tongue as he smiles at me. Mary fills Dad in on family and neighborhood drama while I alternate between scratching Fritzy and smacking my legs to kill the biting mosquitos. It’s like they knew I’d come. I see all the boxes in the garage and ask what she plans to do with her stuff. “Oh, I don’t know.” She asks us to throw the water on her Japanese Maple, “See how it’s dying there at the top? That rain wasn’t enough. It’s been waiting for that.”

Mary, Fritz, the mosquitos, and the Japanese Maple were all waiting. And some, for me.

Gloria

My visit to Mom and Dad’s sans the kids gave us the rare gift of quality time. I listened to stories, looked through boxes of photos and albums, and we searched on Facebook for some of their old friends who I remember from my childhood. It felt like the perfect way to spend these few days but it has left me with the strongest sense that time is a vapor. Pictures of my long-time deceased grandfather as a baby, as a young boy, living his life in the army in one country, next to photos of his pregnant wife, my Mamoo, living her life as an officer’s wife in another country. And then he’s Pappy, how I remember him, then, sick with Alzheimers in that hospital, and then, gone. A vapor, released and extinguished right in front of my eyes.

All of this nostalgia, I suppose, led to my idea to go antiquing. Walking through the aisles of Ben’s Antiques, we found my great grandmother’s German china, Moss Rose. Dad found an old metal lunch pail, like the one Papaw would take to work in the coal mines of West Virginia. And I stumbled upon Gloria, in all her high-cheek bone, 70’s (?) glory. I had no ties to Gloria yet her presence was doing something to me - so much so that I went back several aisles to take her portrait because I kept thinking about her. That hair, those eyes, that nose. Maybe it was the ‘maneater’ quality about her, or maybe that I simply couldn’t place what era Gloria ever would have graced our streets in real life. But I think maybe it was because she has a name. And that name gave a story to this lady in waiting. Waiting for someone to see her. To know her. To want her. Yes, Gloria waits patiently, along with all of the other items displayed on the dusty shelves in the musty aisles for that one person to remember.

When I look at Dot and Mary, I picture what I think they’d look like when they were my age, or younger…what they were like when their husbands were still alive, and their homes still full. I have a strong desire to ask to see some of these photographs but I suppose that’s kind of a weird ask and I don’t know them well enough to know how they’d take it. I guess it’s that I don’t want the stories and lives of young Dot or young Mary to be forgotten; a problem Gloria, captured forever in her glory, will never face. But Gloria, like Dot and Mary, waits. She waits for someone to be curious enough to ask. Or love her again. Life is a vapor, after all, and soon, all of that stuff boxed up sitting in Mary’s garage may be sitting on the shelves there beside Gloria.

Waiting.