Creative Writing Imagery Assignment

This is the third assignment completed for my creative writing class. It's been graded so I thought it would be safe to post it on the blog. I'll post the others as they are completed. This was an imagery assignment. I used some details from real life, but mostly made up the rest. I did have someone post a comment on the discussion thread asking me if it was a real story about me... I wanted to respond that yes, I'm a 92 year old woman with a full time nurse. But I didn't have the heart.

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Songs of Summer

I look out the window, smeared with bird droppings that only the rain will clean. I would clean it myself, but it’s difficult to get out of bed. This is what it is to be an old woman. I feel the same way I did when I was sixteen years old, on the inside. But on the outside my ninety-two year old body has betrayed me.

When I look out the window I can see the old pecan tree. I know that its dark green leaves, wet with the morning rain, would smell like a cascade of damp earth and grass, if only I could go outside. The weathered black tire swing hangs lonely from the branches of that tree, waiting to serenade children with songs of wind and sun, waiting in its stillness to be loved again. To cut the air, with tiny feet and hands holding tight begging, “Higher! Higher!” To sing songs of summer and sweat. To sing songs of happiness.

By the old barn, I see the tractor he was working on the day he died. It sits red in its guilt, under the loft, not moved from the day he last tinkered with it. The day he said he’d be back for lunch, with only the treachery of his beating heart to stop him. The day I lost my husband.

Past the swing I look to the fence. The brown splintered posts stretch out of sync, losing their rhythm to time, trying to escape from the rusted barbed wire curling in despair. If I could stand there, I would run my withered fingers across the rusted wire as he used to, plucking it like a harp, listening for a chord that would reveal the weak spot. I would feel close to him there.

My own weak spot keeps me captive in this bed. So I look. I remember. I follow the fence line to the right and see the white cinderblock garage like a great, bleached bone stark against the green landscape. I can only see the inside of the garage in my mind.

Inside is a gray world of solitude. A world of motor oil stains and steel. Tools. Beer. I smell him here in this gray world. Like the flannel shirt kept next to the bed for fifteen years, safe from the laundry. The one my daughter found me hiding with after his funeral, my face buried into worn, blue fabric that dried my tears and eased my mourning with the lullaby of his smell.

Once when I was left unattended in my chair, I wheeled myself over to the garage and managed to roll inside. They found me there, thinking me addled with age.

“Why did you come in this old, dirty place?”

 But they could not sense him there. They couldn’t see that it was gray from the stain of his touch. The memory of his hands once covered with motor oil and grease, spreading his absence on every inch of my world.

As they wheeled me away muttering, my chair complained, its stainless steel wheels squeaking in protest. I did not complain. After fifteen years, I still go in there and expect to hear him call my name. The tide of memory drags me weightless, into the undertow of my longing. The price is not always worth the pleasure.

Today, I look to be sure my nurse is far enough for me to noiselessly slip away. I stand with my walker, damning the squeaking bed as I quietly shuffle out of the bedroom. Out the back door into the rain. To ease my weary bones onto the tire swing and drift into the sun. I will close my eyes and sing my own song of summer. I will let the golden rain gild my face, and breathe in deep the green of damp earth. I will leave the fence in disrepair and mock the garage that beckons my memory. Forgetting if only for a moment. That he has left me behind.