A blade of grass cuts upon the sky, disturbing the wind as it attempts to make it to its destination. The disruption causes a whooshing noise as a gust pushes the air further along to its destination.
A person takes a breathe, a deep inhale followed by a slow exhale. The belief that she could be anywhere but here is the only thing that propels her further into the future. She takes another breathe. And lets go all the same, again.
Her house, sitting in the distance, well beyond a tree that, itself, is also quite far away. She fantasizes about when her children were young, climbing the tree. The wind blows her hair into her face as she uses the fingers of her right hand to push the hair behind her ear, but the wind is blowing too hard and her efforts are futile. She gives up.
The house, having seen significantly better days, is still standing - the windows need cleaning, the wood door frame for the front door is starting to show rot, and the faded yellow paint harken back to her youth when a yellow house was far more common. She felt she has made it when she purchased this house, months before her first child was born.
She looks at her hands. They are aged, wrinkled with cracks, and the skin so thin that the blade of grass could cut through them. Her lithe frame of a body, skin barely covering the bones and equally as thin skinned as her hands, nearly gets blown over with the gust of wind.
Still, the fresh air fills her with a bit of life. She knows, as one does, her end is nearing. She has not spent the time to appreciate all that has happened on these grounds in her lifetime in so long, but she awoke this morning with a desire to connect with the past. And for her, in this moment, there is no future, nor any present, there is just the past.
She thinks back to when she was holding her second child outside while her husband painted the walls of the house. She remembers how exhausted he was, but how he pushed through to paint the house anyway. She remembers the fight they got into when they opened the first can of paint and it wasn't quite the yellow she wanted, and how he knew that in the long run she would like it better than the one she has originally chosen once it covered the entire house, but they argued over the non-refundable paint. The memory of him sleeping on the couch, baby monitor next to him, as part of the punishment of his lack of listening - they didn't have much money, so him choosing a color she did not approve of knowing they would have to paint the house that color, made her irate.
But she also remembers how he was right, and how she mustered up the courage - and swallowed her pride - enough to apologize after the house was done. And that yellow color he chose ended up being her favorite color thereafter.
She remembers the letter he had the nurse that helped tend to him write for her, to be given after he passed away, which consists of how much he appreciated everything they experienced together, how the good and the bad just made it all the more interesting to be alive. How the love they shared made it all worth it, but how he doesn't want her to suffer in sadness. Of course, she did suffer in sadness, and still does.
That led her to remembering watching her husband die a few years back. He was bed ridden, unable to even use the bathroom on his own. Their children spent so much time by him, doing whatever they could for the two of them, but the moment they'd leave he would pour his heart out to her about how he wished it would all just end. Then his mind left him. Then his life left him. And those things happened so fast that, in her mind, it felt like days even though they were actually months.
She remembers hosting a celebration for her youngest child when he got accepted into college, and how he showed up late to it because he had spent so much time in the library researching a new physics study, and he was going to be a physics major. And how he ended up becoming an engineer.
She remembers her oldest daughter opening a restaurant in Los Angeles, and flying into the city for the soft and grand opening. How proud she felt to see a full restaurant, packed full of people, and the phone calls she received from her daughter afterwards with the rave reviews.
But in this specific moment, she is alone. She isn't sad. She isn't longing for the days that have past, and she doesn't want to experience anything new. She just feels the happiness set in that it happened. She takes another deep, long breathe and begins walking back to the house. She will eat and do all the other normal things all humans have to do, but she is satisfied with the day.
-Dustin S. Stover
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