To Be Remembered Like This

This might be the way she would like to be remembered: sitting at the little table at the top of the yard, tea at hand, book in hand, dressed in her light weight sweat suit to ward off the rapidly dissipating summer morning chill. If she raises her eyes from her book, which at times like these she does often, the lake glimmers in the south. Snow capped mountains still surround it even though August is well under way. It was a long, deep winter. The sun casts speckled shadows on the ground around her and she is content.

The book in her hands on this particular morning is David McCullough’s 1776 although on other days it might be a mystery by Margery Allingham or Victoria Thompson. Romance enters the picture when Pauline Trent’s latest book arrives. To make her setting even more iconic her glasses should probably be the little half ones used only for reading. Years ago though she rejected the idea of putting on and taking off over and over again and so she wears her little granny glasses all the time - starting way before she was a granny.

These days if she makes it to the table up the hill after about 8, she also has her phone. Texts from family are too important to miss. And if she sits the whole time with no message coming through, it is ok. Tea is brought up the hill in a mug that will keep it hot for a long time in the chilly air. There is comfort in tea on a throat often roughed by pine pollen until the morning gets started.

Most mornings she walks up the hill, her husband is with her. He created the little space after all and loves it too. Conversation, if any, is quiet and usually has to do with the small critters that scurry through the manzanita or the view of the lake. Once in a while they share plans for the day or an idea one of them has had or a story about the grandchildren. Mostly though they are quiet. Their silence is intimate and as alive as if it were noisy. It is a shared space and time. There is no need to speak.

So her day begins and it is here, in these moments of quiet, contemplation, gentle conversation and peace that she would like to be remembered. A woman present in her moment needing neither the past nor the future to be affirmed.