407 Birch Street.

Barkston, Michigan

February 26, 1986

 

         She has fallen. As she recovers from the surprise of the fall, the memory of another rushes in—ice skating with Stephen the winter of 1917. She had laughed with that fall, and then pulled Stephen onto the ice next to her. They kissed, his cheeks as red and chapped as hers. She remembers his laughter. 

         Real pain arrives, and she knows this tumble is no laughing matter.

         She has tripped on the edge of a braided rug that covers the foyer floor. Made by her mother’s mother for the new home, it has lain there for nearly a century without causing injury. Until today. Her head hit the marble-topped entryway table on the way down, then her left knee took the brunt of the impact followed by her arm and shoulder on the same side. 

         “Well, old girl,” she mutters to herself.  “There’s a rare advantage to being short. You’re closer to the ground.” She had held onto her cup, but the tea is now soaking into the rug. “Damn. That’s going to stain.” As she struggles to all fours her knee and head begin to throb in unison. Her knee especially. Holding onto the table, she pulls herself to standing. Her heart is racing. It takes a minute to catch her breath. She decides to get Karl’s walker from the front hall closet. As she limps there, the knee sends sharp pains up to her hip and down to her ankle. The notion that for her own safety she should not be living alone is angrily dismissed. She gets the walker and returns to the kitchen to pour herself another cup of strong black tea. This one she sips at the Formica-topped table while gently rubbing and flexing her knee, wondering if she should take something for her growing headache. 

         The kitchen is spare, white enamel cabinets, apron sink with a blue plastic wash basin, the table with four chrome and plastic chairs, plaid patterned linoleum with worn paths. She’s thought about remodeling it, but no vision has had enough appeal to outweigh the imagined cost and trouble. Windows to the north show a neglected backyard and a maintained bird feeder.     

         The tea gone, she takes a bag of frozen blueberries from the freezer and hobbles to the front parlor. Crossing the foyer, she silently curses the stain and grieves the rug. The leather sofa is rejected as too low. On the end table next to it are her tools—a stack of legal pads and a chipped cup containing a dozen or so ballpoint pens. None of the pens were purchased. It has long been her practice to accept any free pen offered, and when her supply looked to run out, a pen or two has accompanied her home from the local bank. She heads to the wingback chair, Karl’s favorite—as stiff and upright as he was. She winces as her knee bends. The blueberries help. Even after nearly two decades, the chair exudes a slight aura of Borkum Riff pipe tobacco, the odor cathecting the affection she still has for her big brother. She turns on the table lamp, but its brightness hurts her eyes and makes the headache worse. The diffused morning sun will have to do. Because Eleanor Penelope Rasmussen, eighty-eight in years, is at heart and mind a poet, she regards this and all experience to be material for her art. Her practice is to do writing and editing on a legal pad with a ballpoint. When she is completely satisfied with a piece, she enters it into a moleskin notebook with a Montblanc Meisterstück pen, a treasured graduation present from her parents.

         A poem comes slowly. She dozes in between efforts. When the noon siren wakes her, she examines her work.

 

         Helpfully sensitive to shifting weight.

         Willing to take me up ladder and hill.

         Adaptable to my various gaits.

         Able to bring me near pansy and squill.

         How many meters and miles have we gone,

         With your identical twin on the right?

         How many mornings we greeted the sun

         After Lindy hopping all through the night?

         Now here you are quite swollen and stiff,

         Becoming  a spherical bane of pain.

         Swapping my Of Course with your Maybe If.

         Trading my Oh Sure with Never Again?

         Marvelous construction of nerve and bone,

         How much of my life will now be undone?”

 

         She continues with just a few more alterations, then makes four copies of the completed poem on blank sheets. It is not good enough for the notebook yet, but it will do for tomorrow’s meeting of Poets and Tea. 

  Rubbing her knee, she considers that tomorrow’s two block walk to Tatty Tatten’s not to be a problem. Making it downtown to Doc’s Place for her daily taste of good whiskey and pleasant conversation is going to be more of a challenge. 

By the time she has shuffled to the kitchen for lunch and back to the parlor for a nap, it is clear her life is going to be different for a couple of days, at least. 

         The nap lasts longer than usual, long past the time to go to Doc’s. She lies blinking her eyes and waiting for her vision and thinking to clear. They do. She makes her way into the kitchen, where she heats and then leisurely consumes a bowl of canned soup. Again, she retrieves the package of blueberries from the freezer, and nursing her knee, continues reading the latest from the Folger Shakespeare Library. When the blueberries begin to soften, she looks at the clock and decides that, even though it isn’t seven, she’s calling it quits for the day.