The Postscript

I honestly cannot think of anything less relaxing than walking much, much too slowly in a circle with other people who are also walking much too slowly, trying not to step on the heels of the person in front of me. It’s kind of tortuous.

Emily Anderson is a wonderful artist who paints scenes from nature in Minnesota. Unlike many northern landscape artists, her work is never dreary. Her scenes of the natural world just exude joy and a sense of discovery and—it might sound odd, but it’s true—humor. Her work makes me smile. I want to be in whatever place she has painted.

This was not an undercooked broccoli crunch. This was not wild rice. This was the crunch you might experience while eating a sandwich on a beach when the wind was blowing. I looked at my delicious meal. I took another bite. “Crunch.”

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.

It all reminds me of other rooms and smaller places I have lived in the past. It reminds me of being in my childhood bedroom, where I also had a desk and a bed in close proximity. It reminds me of when, at 50, I packed everything into the back of a pickup truck and went to grad school. I lived in a converted garage with hardwood floors and had a very similar setup—with a private bath and a desk, a chair, a dog, a cat, and a bed, all in one room. It was everything I needed. That’s how I feel now. I have everything I need within easy reach.

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’ve been thinking about the marshmallow test off and on for years, ever since I heard about it. I am positive I would have waited for the second marshmallow. In fact, I think there’s a good chance, when the second one arrived, I would have let that one sit as well, thinking I could be the first four-year-old in history to be awarded three marshmallows. Of course, I now realize that, instead of getting a third marshmallow, all the other kids would enjoy their marshmallows, the researchers would turn out the lights and leave, and I’d be left alone in the room until the janitor showed 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.

I googled the expression “nervous as a cat” and it comes from the idea that a cat moves very quickly and suddenly. It is used when a person is uneasy or overly alert. I don’t think Felix is uneasy in the least. But he is very alert. He can spring into action from complete stillness, zoom down the hall, bounce off the wall at the far end, return to hit the back of the sofa, and land on a chair—all in a moment. He has a lot of fun doing this.