9-17-2020 Sometimes you don't get what you want...

Great Aunt Suze loved her name.  She loved that the kids had figured out that her initials were GAS.  Too funny, and even better that the kids thought she didn’t know.

Years ago, she had started to write.  Her close friends knew she had quiet time in the morning.  That’s what she called it.  Quiet time.   And they knew she meditated, but they didn’t know she was a writer. 

Suze became stronger in her writing and discovered that she was enjoying it enough that she didn’t need additional support for her writing. It wasn’t like she needed to belong to a writing gym, where someone would tell her to write more, write higher, write faster, or even that she was doing a good job.  She began with 30 minutes of writing, this was years ago, and found that these days she was writing for longer and longer chunks of time every day.

After Suze retired from teaching, she looked forward to getting up in the morning.  She would make coffee, call to the cats, and head toward her rose chintz chair in the living room.  She would settle one cat on one side of her and another on the other side, place her favorite “writing pillow” on her lap, and reach for her journal.  The journal was kept on the hearth, close to Great Aunt Suze’s chair, but just out of reach of the flames of the gas fireplace.  Then she would get herself “quiet” and listen for the words to come.  It usually worked, and she would find herself an hour later, sitting with two warm cats, a new group of words and cold coffee. 

When she was stuck, when the writing didn’t come easily like turning on the faucet, she had tricks.  One of her favorites was to go back to old journals searching for wisdoms in her older writings.  It was like priming the pump, something the neighborhood kids would never be able to understand. 

Another thing she loved to do was to go through old magazines, tearing out words or images that sparked her imagination.  Just last night she sat herself down with a stack of magazines and a cup of tea and lost herself in the process. “Joy,” “Home,” and “Garden” were on the kitchen table right now, with pictures of a dragon fly and a very round sunflower.  She would save these in her journal, the one where she saved inspirations just for herself.  She had put a picture of herself on the front page of this special journal, inside the cover.  In the photo she was sitting on some steps in the south of France waiting for a friend.  They were headed to the market.  Someone else on the trip had taken the photo and sent it to her.  Under the photo Suze had written, “I say to myself, Hi, Sweetie.”  This is what Suze usually says to herself, out loud, when she sees herself in a mirror or window reflection.  “Hi, Sweetie.”

Looking at a collage she put together last fall and then taped to the frig, there were kids.  There was a black and white animal face that was an homage to Norman, her late husband, but mostly it was children that looked out at her.  The words Nature, Life, Home, and a grouping of eyes…  The eyes were about watching, something GAS was good at and was teaching the kids these days. 

So, GAS would write from old journals, she would make a collage, but mostly she loved to go out to the garden when she was stuck.  If the weather was really rotten, she would sit on her wide porch in her porch swing, that was really a double bed hung from the rafters, filled with her outdoor pillows and blankets.  She called it Nature bathing.  Nature with a capital “N.”  She would sit, cuddled up in a corner of the porch bed, and watch her birds fly through the garden. 

Suze loved birds.  She loved them visiting her feeders.  She kept the hummingbird feeders clean and filled year-round.  A few pair always spent the winter in her garden.  Around the end of October, she added the suet feeders.  This brought a whole new gang of birds to her porch. 

Great Aunt Suze lumped birds into groups.   The big ones… the woodpeckers and blue jays, that came for the suet, then the smaller birds who would arrive in mass and cover the feeders.  One of her buddies gave her a round feeder, big enough for two slabs of suet and seed to be available to the birds, but with a cage around it.  The little birds could slip through the spaces of the cage, and the squirrels and large birds couldn’t fit. 

Great Aunt Suze was funny about her birds.  She would watch them, feed them, but rarely would she look them up in her bird book.  One time, after she figured out what a Black Capped Chickadee was, she started saying that all the smallish birds with black anywhere near her head were Black Capped Chickadees.  It was just the way she was with her birds.

If the weather was better, even cool but not cold, misty but not rainy, GAS would grab a pair of gardening gloves and head out into the garden.  She never kept a list of tasks to do unless she absolutely had to spread the fertilizer or fill the suet feeder.  She loved to wander out, listening with her “Self,” not her ears, to the plant that was calling her with the loudest voice.  She might come back for a weeding tool, or a green bucket, sometimes a rake.  But she would tend to the plant or area of the garden that called the loudest.  It was the way she had always gardened, and it worked for her. 

Great Aunt Suze’s home is on Garden Home Road, just down the street from Garden Home Grade School.  It is a quiet street, and she likes the way the trees lean over the cars as they drive past.  It feels like a tunnel of green, and sometimes GAS takes a folding chair out to the parking strip there, just to be able to sit comfortably in the green light.  The street is concrete, kind of a light grey color, so the summer shadows from the trees aren’t quite so dark, and it feels like the right spot to plant a grade school and some homes for families.  The school had been there in Garden Home for years.  Suze’s father and uncle had even gone to school there.

Great Aunt Suze filled her hummingbird feeders on the porch. She hosed the front walk.  She mowed her own lawn.  And most often, her favorite thing was to be with the children.    

Great Aunt Suze had been a 2nd grade teacher at Garden Home Grade School for 34 years.  She was sad when she retired from teaching, but it was time to be in the garden more and to spend time with her cats.  Some of her friends wanted her to travel, go to England, ride on ships, but she was content to be at home, in her own bed. 

And, GAS didn’t miss kids.  The kids on her block, most of them still in Primary School, passed her porch on the way home from school.  They could have gone around the block, but GAS was good friend with all of their families, and most days the kids would stop at her house on the way home.  Great Aunt Suze always had a snack for them, that is, if she was home. 

The kids and GAS had a signal.  If GAS was home, and she had time to see the kids, she would put out a flag.  GAS always had the American flag flying over the front porch, with its stars and stripes, but this signal flag was just around the corner of the house by the kitchen door.  It might be a pumpkin if it was Halloween time or a Christmas tree if it was December.  Today it was a cat flag.  GAS had two cats, both girls.  One was black with white, the other was white with black.  At least that is how she described them to the kids, and today it was one of them up there on the flag. 

One cat, Molly, was a black and white long-haired cat.  Molly was “used”, meaning she had come from a friend that decided she only wanted golden colored animals.  This friend had two golden retrievers, and two golden cats.  Molly, with her black and white coat, just didn’t fit in.  Suze feeling lucky that Molly was hers now, and not golden colored, was tempted to change Molly’s name to Lucky, but kept Molly’s name as it was.  Molly loved Suze and was particularly glad to be away from the big dogs.  They were gorgeous dogs, but they thought too highly of themselves. 

Great Aunt Suze had a neighbor named Michael. One morning they were sitting on the porch, drinking coffee, watching the bees move in and out of the hive.  From where they sat it looked like morning fireworks, the light bouncing off the shimmer of the wings.  Michael looked serious this day, and his words surprised Suze.  “You go through your whole life doing the right things.  School, Bar Mitzvah, Marriage, Kids, all the right things, and you get to this time in life and it just doesn’t work out.”  She knew he wasn’t talking about the two of them.  He was talking about his marriage.  She was thinking of hers.

Great Aunt Suze had married Norman years ago, so long ago it felt like another lifetime.  They had found each other in a bar and were inseparable in the years to come.  They fished, bought a home together, got married, and wanted to have kids.  Great Aunt Suze had always wanted to have a big family, maybe as many as eight.  But her husband, Norman, had died young, too young to have their family. 

Norman was a zookeeper.  He tended to his zebras and hippos, the zebras being his favorite.  And GAS was a teacher, mostly 2nd grade, and her favorites were the boys.  She wanted to have sons, but it wasn’t to be, so she taught school and the kids there were her kids.

But Norman was gone now, long gone.  He had died on a fishing trip, in his favorite river.  GAS had always thought it would be a zoo accident that would take him, but oddly it was a slippery rock in his favorite river. 

The State Police came to her door.  She couldn’t remember much else.  She just knew that Norman was gone, and so were the boys they had hoped for and never had.  All gone.

Years later, when Suze could look back at those early years of being alone, she remembered a meeting with her therapist.  She was still feeling sad, and she told him how she was feeling about life.  He looked at her, and with his hands gently resting on his own knees, he leaned forward and said, “Suze, sometimes you just don’t get what you want.”  The words were like a slap to her face.  A rough slap, harsh, and powerful and true.  And with that, Suze stood up, thanked him for his honesty and walked out into her new life.  She could either wallow in the sadness of losing Norman and the dreams they had or move on to find new dreams and adventures.   

She was going to set a new course.