Sand in My Eyes (2 page)

Only then would I be able to write an appropriate ending to my novel and move on, by asking if she had any of the tidbits she used to share with me—ideas for how a woman my age might go about re-landscaping her current life and the dullness setting in.

“This is the day,” I declared out loud as I turned into the parking lot of Belvedere Nursing Home. “This is the day for change in my life.”

CHAPTER ONE

AS I GOT OUT
of the car with the bouquet of flowers and a canvas bag with the manuscript strung over my shoulder, I wondered, whether my friend liked where she was living and, other than watching butterflies, how she passed her time, all those hours in a day. I wondered could she recall the details of the life she had lived, born at the turn of the century and now living out the New Millennium in a bed on wheels, a bed operable by remote control?

I stared at the two-story white brick nursing home, wondering whether I had it in me to live as long. I always assumed I might die before getting so old, but now, thanks to health care advancements, I knew I needed to start brainstorming ways I might go about living productively for another half century on Planet Earth. Others my age were talking optimistically of the future and were content with the present, but I had been living in the past, walking in my mind the halls of the old house, hearing the voices of my children when they were small, and wanting to know that the years I already spent living mattered.

I’ve got years, decades—at least two, probably three, and hopefully four—I figured as I walked up to the main entrance, before I need to think about assisted-care housing options, nursing homes, or living in a place other than my own home. Then again, in the last year alone I had gone to the funerals of an older first cousin, an aunt, and a roommate from college, so there’s no telling whether or not I would make it so far. I only
knew that it felt like yesterday when I was thirteen years old and my junior high teacher had us volunteer at a facility like this and then write a paper about it.

I turned and rammed my behind into the large, silver, square wheelchair button that is supposed to automatically open a door, and, when it didn’t open, I rear-ended the button several more times, trying to remember what I wrote in that paper, or the grade I got for it. But I couldn’t open the door with my butt nor remember life lessons from my nursing home experience. All I remembered were the stenches that had me running out the door, performing cartwheels with my girlfriends in the parking lot.

“That’s not the button,” a woman looking to be in her twenties and jogging effortlessly up the stately steps told me. “Here,” she said, pushing a silver button I hadn’t seen. The doors opened instantly.

“Whoops,” I said, pulling my reading glasses from my purse, putting them on and taking a better look at the button I had been ramming. And when I read that it was a plaque of dedication for the building and knew that my eyes had failed me, I felt far removed from the junior high girl I once was, the youthful me intoxicated by a sense of invincibility and the belief I’d remain forever young. I should laugh at myself, I thought as I hurried inside, at my hormones for playing tricks on me. They say laughter is the best medicine. Then again, they say convertibles are the best cars for women with hot flashes.

As I stepped up to the reception counter, I didn’t feel like laughing. I didn’t find me funny. All I felt was nervous at the thought of seeing my friend, and how the years and disease would have had their way with her. I knew from her son that her health had been rapidly deteriorating in recent months, and that the progression of her type-2 diabetes and complications associated with it had been one reason that her children switched her from the assisted-care facility she had been living in to this one.

I picked up a pen and did what the sign-in form instructions told me to do, writing my name, the time I arrived, and the person I came to see.

As I wrote her name—Fedelina Aurelio—on the line, I felt overtaken by emotion regarding this lady I knew from my old street; it was a time when I had been feeling entangled by life and its pest-like frustrations and
was hardly seeing all the beauty that was there. I was balancing three children, a marriage in crisis, financial distress, a house in need of repairs, and, lastly, myself, and I had been feeling as if I were the only woman in the world struggling, juggling with it all. And because we had recently moved, she was at that time the only friend I had.

It was through our chitchatting here and there that I learned to identify the weeds that were pulling me down and getting in the way of what was important. She never spoke in the form of a lecture, nor did she sound like a preacher. And she wasn’t a clinical psychologist. I never paid her a co-payment. All I did was open my door when she came a-knocking, or stopped by her garden when I saw her watering roses, or waved when I spotted her looking out her window at me and my children going by with the wagon.

Fedelina shared with me the insight I needed to rake through my mess. I don’t think it was her intention to do gardening on me then, and I don’t know whether she knew that, one by one, our small woman-to-woman talks were helping me pull the ugly from my life, so that beauty, peace, simplicity, and contentment could sprout forth strong and free. We were two females gabbing away. She was the older widow out growing flowers, and I was the mother of three caught up in the weeds.

And I’ll never forget the letters she shared with me—letters her mother once wrote to her—words I let sprinkle down like slow-release fertilizer, inspiring me long after we both went our separate ways. But it bothered me through the years that I never had the chance to tell her of the profound impact she had on my life. It’s why I bought tickets and flew all this way to Indiana, to let her know her life mattered, that it meant something significant, at least to me, and to thank her for sharing with me her knowledge of flowers and of life.

“You don’t have to fill that column in,” the girl working the reception counter said. “You can skip that, the purpose for your visit.”

I stopped writing and crossed out what I had written so far. “Good,” I said. “It’s enough to fill a book.”

“You’re here to see Fedelina Aurelio?” she asked, reading the clipboard.

I nodded.

“Down the hall, seventh door on your right.”

CHAPTER TWO

THE HALLWAY WAS LONG
and sterile. It smelled of ammonia, and I was glad for my friend’s sake that the floor was clean. Fedelina once told me she kept her floors so clean that her children, when they were young, could lick butter off them. It was her children who found her this place. Her son said they visited a dozen before settling on the one that smelled, felt, and looked the best.

When I found myself at the heels of a woman with a hunchback inching along, it made me feel younger than any jar of anti-aging cream ever could. I switched to the fast lane, passing her by and stealing glances into rooms with open doors as I went, catching glimpses of women passing time propped up in beds, sipping through straws, dressed in nightgowns, and living by way of the television. One was talking out loud, having a lively conversation, but there was no one in her room.

What I saw prompted some dim urgency. Life is as long as it is short. And despite it feeling like yesterday that I turned sweet sixteen, so too could it be like tomorrow that I would be a resident of a nursing home. The place also had me feeling young and grateful. Youthfulness oozed from my pores. Throughout the halls and in the rooms were women no longer fighting, hiding, or masquerading their physical age, and it had me reconsidering the cosmetic procedures that, in recent months, I had been researching, looking into for myself. Does it matter how we age if, in the end, this is where we all end up? Then again, yes, all the more reason to
postpone those wrinkles as long as I could. I would purchase, as soon as I got home, a jar of serum to reduce my age spots, RSVP for that seminar on preserving youthful brain activity, and order the supplements I saw on the late-night infomercial, the ones that promise to extend life. What a breakthrough it is, modern scientific intervention!

But for now, I felt peace as I looked at the faces of these old women and acceptance as they looked back at me. I felt temporarily removed from all that is culture, a refreshing respite from that anti-aging movement of which I was becoming a patriotic member. Within the walls of this place, I no longer felt like a criminal. And what a crime it is in the world today, a shame at least, for a woman to look older than she is. Women are ambushed for how they look, thrown into vans, driven to talk shows, and made over to look like the women they need to become. I didn’t know what I was supposed to look like. I didn’t know who I was now that my children were grown and I was entering this new phase of life.

I stopped outside the door with Fedelina’s name beside it. Her door was opened a crack. I almost knocked but stopped myself and checked the time on my cell phone, instead. It was too early in the morning to come barging in for a reunion. I should wait an hour. Who knows what her mornings were like? I didn’t want to disturb a nearly one-hundred-year-old sleeping, bathing, eating, dressing, or television-watching old woman, and so I pulled out the letter I had earlier started writing to my daughter. With the stationery held up against the corridor wall, I added a little more.

Some say life changes in the blink of an eye. Others say it changes with a mere thought. Chaos theorists claim the whole world changes with the single flap of a butterfly’s wings, and that the ripple it sends out could spawn a hurricane. I don’t think you know this about me, Marjorie, but my life changed long ago, with a knock at my door, or rather, it changed with the opening of that door
.

I folded the letter and put it back into my purse, and softly but confidently
began knocking, this time on her door, on the door of the woman who two decades earlier showed up early in the morning knocking at mine.

CHAPTER THREE

WHEN NO ONE ANSWERED
, I slowly pushed the door open and walked in. There, lying in bed, her eyes closed, was an older version of the woman who once claimed she had no secrets with regard to raising children, marriage, and living life. Her hair, the natural red resource she was born with and later kept red by way of a box, was drab and gray, and her once-powdery white skin with faintly pink cheeks and nose that glowed from beneath the awning of her floppy gardening hat now had a dull matte look. She no longer looked like the fairy godmother I thought she was, but the grandmother of a fairy godmother. In other words, she looked old and less colorful than I remember. And tinier, too!

There was a thin blanket pulled to her neck, tucked along her sides, and her body looked more like that of a child, no plumpness left to it. I was expecting a bigger person, a giant. Over the years, and through my writing, I had turned her into this larger-than-life character in my mind. I could see now that she was just old, really old.