Around the House and in the Garden

I have been thinking of the summer when I turned thirteen. My sister and I had gotten a job looking after a woman in the later stages of Alzheimer's while her husband worked on their farm. Our mother would drive us out to the house they shared in the country. Down a little gravel road, it was almost hidden beneath the trees. The garden was sun-drenched and lovely. The fields were just in sight. It was, as my mother said, "a little slice of heaven."

We spent that summer digging our hands into the soil of Merry's garden, pulling weeds and planting flowers in their place. We cared for her ducks and ran across the lawn, playing with her dog Snickers. We sat in her living room, where a fan blew cool air onto all of us, and listened as she told us the story of the wooden figurine on her mantelpiece. He was a man named George, and she told us his story almost every day. I don't remember it anymore.

I have been thinking of that summer and remembering Merry. She had once been a teacher. She had once known the names of hundreds of flowers. She had an entire room of her house dedicated to the miniature villages that she and her husband would build each year around Christmas time. They would create entire towns on the tops of several tables pushed together. They would open up their house to the neighborhood and allow people to wander through, examining the miniature stores and cottages, admiring the miniature men who stood waving on miniature street corners. That summer, my sister and I built more miniature villages for Merry. We unpacked figurines and arranged them carefully, creating story lines in our head. She sat on a chair and watched us, smiling.

There are so many things that I will never forget: the image of Merry's husband standing with his arm around her in the garden, his blue eyes shining, as he told us the story of how they fell in love; the way it felt to jump on the old trampoline in the apple orchard behind their house, my sister's laughter awakening the air around us; the Dr. Pepper and ice cream bars that Merry's husband would buy just for my sister and me, so that we could enjoy them on the porch in the heat of the day; and how beautiful everything was in their little world of trees and sunshine and flowers, how beautiful the whole world seemed.

It was, I am just now understanding, one of the most magical summers of my life.

(Image here.)