I found her at the town’s old folks’ home. That’s what everyone called it when I was a child, and that’s what most people still called it. The large Victorian house with an abundance of rocking chairs on its wrap-around porch had a dignified sign at the front of the property reading Sunset Haven. I asked at the front desk, and was directed to room 1.

I knocked lightly and had barely set foot over the threshold, when Ginn sailed over to me and, letting her cane fall to the floor, wrapped her arms around me. Oh it was good to see her! I hadn’t guessed how good. It was beyond good. I picked up her cane, offered my arm and we soon found ourselves rocking away on the wrap-around porch.

She insisted I fill her in on my life before sharing anything herself, so I did, but not before pulling some sugar cookies from my purse. We had a good laugh over that. They were every bit as good as the ones we’d enjoyed long ago, if I do say so myself. I told her I’d sent some mail to her that unfortunately hadn’t reached her.

Then she told me about a pretty bad fall which had landed her in the hospital for a hip replacement. The hospital had insisted she stay somewhere before she went home, so here she was and had been ever since. In the name of care, some institutions – even families, I suppose – deny a person’s own desires. And the efforts given and the decisions made are not as much for the person as for the person making them. She knew it and I knew it and the hospital and nursing home knew it. It was one of those things everyone knows and no one admits. We sat in silence for awhile. I don’t know what she was thinking, but I was pondering over why people think it’s better to be safe and sad than to live a life of contentment with some risk. All she said was,  “I want to go home.”

Then, in a moment of wild abandon, we told the person at the desk we were going on an outing.

Ginn’s house was just as I remembered. What an afternoon we had! Well, it was actually more than an afternoon. We managed to get permission for an overnight, then two, then a week, and eventually got the permission she needed to move back home.

I stayed the summer, making sugar cookies from her hand-written recipe card and eating beef stew that no one made like Ginn. She regaled me with stories from her time in the entertainment business and I told her stories of the children in my kindergarten classes. We planted a profuse garden with more flowers than vegetables, and I began to understand why those conversations of long ago included flowers. I understood, too, why she hadn’t minded a weathered house. She’d grown up wanting for nothing, left her two disappointed parents to pursue something as frivolous as entertainment, and had discovered the common life was the best kind of life.

“Oh how we all yearn,” she said. “We want what is pretty and what makes us feel important. But it seems to me that in doing so, we miss what is truly beautiful and important.”

She didn’t elaborate. I painted her house anyway.

I asked her why she smoked one cigar every evening. All she would say is that it was her special time for memories. So I gave her that and pulled weeds in the garden while her mind drifted to people and places all her own.

We spent some time every day on the porch swing and talked of everything from flowers to fire engines and Harpo Marx to heaven. Only now she spoke less of Harpo and more of heaven or, in her words, “the restored Eden”. Our descriptions impressed even ourselves and there was never too much in the describing because, we concluded, heaven is so expansive our words were only like a single droplet in an ocean.

The summer went too fast, and soon it was time for me to attend school meetings and parent meetings and student meetings. We promised each other to keep in touch. And we did through long, newsy letters. Then one spring day her letters stopped coming and I discovered some things Ginn had left unsaid.

to be continued . . .

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