From "Marjorie" : Hanging Clothes

The sun warmed her bare legs as its rays just began to touch the water of the bayou. The porch was very high, twenty or thirty feet, or was it fifty? It made her dizzy to look down, but the railing felt solid at her waist. Sometimes there were ducks, or little fish that made the water shimmer and vibrate across the surface of the bayou. Little waves lapped at the sides of the fishing boat.

The warmth climbed up her body and the sky began to take on the deep blue color of summer. A sudden urge began deep inside her body. It hadn’t started with a thought as in normal urges where your mind decides something and your body follows. Instead, it was the other way around. The body trying to get the mind to remember. She lifted both arms above her head reaching high, stretching and swaying a little. The stretch felt good. So did the sun on her arms and chest.

‘Mama?’ Her son’s worried voice. ‘What are you doing?’

She had to make an effort with the interruption to stay there in that place. To keep going back as though something had been lost, a key in the dirt, and you walk over the spot slowly, slowly searching every inch.

‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Did you sleep okay? It’s early.’

She lowered her arms. ‘I’m enjoying the sun.’ Her mind finally caught up with her body’s memory and she saw the lines against the blue, felt the grass tickling her feet, smelled the china ball trees and the dark humidity of New Orleans. The sheets taut, swaying in the wind, the clothespins lined up straight like toy soldiers.

He said, ‘I made some eggs. I’ll bring them out here.’

She sat down a white rocker near the railing where she was still in the sun. ‘Oh, thank you. You treat me like a queen.’

The urge remained in her belly like a child waiting to burst out of the door to run to their daddy. That joy. She had loved hanging clothes.

My mother, Marjorie, 98, enjoying an orange, blissfully unaware of the fear

When I called my mother yesterday, she was eating an orange.

Last time you called I think I was eating an orange, too, wasn’ t I? I love oranges, you don’t love oranges?

She loves to asks questions in the negative. Then she always asks about the weather. Hers is always great, no complaints.

I talk about the virus, about New York.

I don’t peel them, either, she says. Do you peel them? A lot of people peel them, but I don’t. I love to suck out all the juice.

I’ve watched my mother eat oranges all my life. She cuts them into wedges and settles in with her teeth and lips, slurping quietly, working the teeth into the flesh.

I mention that I cannot teach anymore, because of the virus, I’m teaching over the computer. She doesn’t understand the word online.

She says, But you’re not in New York. Why can’t you teach anymore?

Then I realize that another shift has occurred in her ability to engage with the world, the world as I know it, anyway. Once an avid follower of TV news, I believe she is no longer able to hear it well enough, or follow it well enough, or perhaps, she is wise enough to choose not to do either of those things.

She has remained for me a steady and constant companion in life, if from a distance, never failing to ask about each of my children, about the weather, my job, my husband. She continues to ask, but this time, when I answer, she is reluctant to follow up, to add to the train of the conversation.

i, meanwhile, have a son in New York City, who, the hospital has more or less admitted without administering the test, has contracted the virus. My daughter lives in San Francisco. My stepson and his friends here have mild to severe cases. I am worried. I am scared.

I hear a slight slurping sound, Mmmmm. Do you peel them? I don’t peel them.

I realize that she is blissfully unaware of this threat, the magnitude, the scope of it. Or again, that she has chosen not to let it in, not to worry, at this point, who was one to worry and pray much and often, especially over us, her children, her grandchildren.

Do you eat the white stuff? I like to scrape the white part off with my teeth. I like it. I don’t know if it’s good for you or not. Do you think it’s bad?

When I eat my orange later in the day, I am more grateful for it than ever before, its bright color, its surface, both smooth and bumpy, the shock of citrus on my tongue. I allow myself the gift of this moment, to feel and taste and smell and see it in all its beauty and complexity. One moment among the many frightening ones.

And I thank Marjorie for that.