If Spring

Dear Kate,

So Mrs C has gone.

I've rehearsed speaking these words in this way or that, and finally when it came to the time to speak them yesterday, they came out without me catching the moment's coming and going.

Mrs C was my endearing neighbor.  Was she really?  I can call her that, I suppose, anything I want to call her, everything of her now in soft focus.

She was actually a bit of a nuisance--not the worst neighbor, but close enough for me to know right from the start that somewhere down the road a prayer or two is needed for me to keep being a good one to her.

The road, our street, she would walk, around the block twice every time and thrice a day when I first moved here more than a decade ago, and in the last two years, barely up the block, hanging onto the street sign pole at the end, catching her breath, before coming back down.  Winter breath is what I remember of hers, manifestly resolute to me then and now.

Summer, though, was all smiles between us.  She would scrutinize my lawn-mowing, loom over from her balcony my sweaty back and demand every wayward blade of mine be repatriated immediately.  I respected her authority on the matter, would give her a Yes, Madam with every sweep of my broom.  You don't need me to tell you her lawn was perfect, as in perfect.  She would make sure no one needed to engage any thesaurus when beholding her good, hard work.

In the beginning, she was there, when the street was created ex nihilo, her family having the first choice of land and house design.  Wrong shape of roof she chose, she told me, and water problem over the years by virtue of the original sin (until only a few years ago when the roof was thoroughly born again and finally giving her peace lasting enough to outlast her).  Fire across the street, half of a house up in flames, made whole again later but never gonna be the same, ever, she insisted.  And the owner of my house before me?  He was just as careless with a lawn mower and only half as polite.

She was fearful and suspicious of just about everything, but no more than any Chinese grandma I know.  Over the years she did come to trust me enough to have me step into her house and fix her cable box, cordless phone, start her mower, and pretend to be her husband to call the bank and hydro (due to language barrier, first with her husband).  I've explained many things to her, so many that strange enough at this moment I couldn't recall any, not lucidly enough for me to be there again.   The aim has never been to make her grasp the facts but to give her peace.  One time, now I recall, I translated into Chinese some procedure she needed to follow before having some medical test done on her, how I scrapped my original write-up and made a chart of the same information to noticeably more calming result.  The wonder of a few lines between words.

At the end, though, she didn't trust me enough to tell me she was going.  For about half a year I didn't see her on the street, which I thought, I wished, was due to COVID.  Of course I knew it was not: I did talk to her about COVID last spring.  If spring, then why not summer, and winter, up our road all over again breathlessly?  I asked Why all the time, but this one I let it stay at the back burner to smolder low and lonely.

Yesterday Mr C saw my wife in our backyard and gave her some Japanese pumpkin to plant, easy enough he said, that his then wife had too many of them in theirs.  Then was more than half a year ago, Mr C said after my wife asked, how she moved into a Care Home for four months and never cared to come back home.  It sounds swift, but I don't quite want to know in what sense.

The day she left the house beside mine, what was I doing, the precise minute the big yellow taxi came to take her away?  Was it in the deep of night and I worrying about something trivial, like how she was before, many nights, couldn't wait to knock on my door the next day right at 5 pm when I got off work to show me her troubled mind and hear an answer that she probably already knew?

I wish she did tell me.  I wish she did knock on my door before she left, whatever time of day it was.  What I would have spoken to her, that I didn't rehearse.  How is one to prepare for an accident that is anything but accidental?  Somehow I had imagined taking her to the hospital--an illusion.  Who wanted me?  Who said my help is needed?  There was the family, the ambulance, firefighters fit enough to pose for calendar.  Mr Liu has been good, but only enough to draw lines.  And lines need to end somewhere.

November 23, 2019 was the last time I visited a Care Home to talk to residents, something I had done every Saturday morning before that.  It stopped when there was a flu outbreak, and then of course a pandemic of a more forceful kind.  How was I to know the moment I stepped out on November 23, 2019?  Those four COVID months Mrs C spent in a Care Home, was she treated well?  Was there anyone to talk to her, when not even her family member could visit?  Did she know those narrow corridors could have been our street all over again, us going around in circle, I pushing her and she leading me, eternally as every fleeting moment goes?

Yours, Alex