The Postscript

We didn’t take a pontoon ride.

My mother was feeling a bit under the weather. We were planning to go to a restaurant that we feared might fill up if we got there too late. Rod nodded, but I could tell he thought we ought to get on that pontoon boat anyway.

I do a funny thing in the middle of June. I try to celebrate the summer solstice. I don’t do anything particularly romantic. If you have visions of me leaping over bonfire flames or dancing around a maypole wearing a flower crown or attempting to contact my inner goddess, you would be disappointed.

I remembered my mother’s Swedish relatives who came to visit in the 80s. They did not think wall-to-wall carpeting was normal. They were concerned it would not be clean. They thought area rugs were the way to go. I reminded my 100% Swedish mother of this, in an attempt to make this whole tiling of the bedroom thing look like a return to my roots.

It all reminds me of other rooms and smaller places I have lived in the past. It reminds me of being in my childhood bedroom, where I also had a desk and a bed in close proximity. It reminds me of when, at 50, I packed everything into the back of a pickup truck and went to grad school. I lived in a converted garage with hardwood floors and had a very similar setup—with a private bath and a desk, a chair, a dog, a cat, and a bed, all in one room. It was everything I needed. That’s how I feel now. I have everything I need within easy reach.

Now that I’m older, I am having a lot more fun getting dressed up than I ever did when I was young. I think the expectations are different. When I was younger, I had this wrongheaded idea that there was a right way to dress up. I thought I would either hit the mark or miss. Now that I’m older, I realize there is no one keeping score, there are no points off for getting it wrong.

Gardening was supposed to be enjoyable and the fact that it always seemed like work to me made me feel guilty. My mother and sister are wonderful gardeners, and I have no reason to believe they are fibbing when they say they enjoy getting their hands in the dirt, tending their flowers and watching things grow. I do enjoy watching things grow—this is the truth. I just enjoy it a lot more if someone else has done all the work.

Her notes appear in little bubbles at the side of the text. “This is reading like a sermon,” a note said. This was a puzzling observation because the passage she was referring to was, in fact, a sermon. But I gathered from the note that sounding like a sermon (even if it was a sermon) was not a good thing.

A big storm would have been nice, but it’s really the lack of color that is getting me down. March is nothing but mud and surprise snowstorms and then more mud. April is nothing but cold wind and gray skies. So I expect big things from May. And, this year, May is dragging its heels. Whatever it is I’m waiting for, it doesn’t seem to be showing up.

I’ve been thinking about the marshmallow test off and on for years, ever since I heard about it. I am positive I would have waited for the second marshmallow. In fact, I think there’s a good chance, when the second one arrived, I would have let that one sit as well, thinking I could be the first four-year-old in history to be awarded three marshmallows. Of course, I now realize that, instead of getting a third marshmallow, all the other kids would enjoy their marshmallows, the researchers would turn out the lights and leave, and I’d be left alone in the room until the janitor showed up.

I would see the face of the dance teacher light up as they assumed I was a dancer, and I would dread what was coming. I would stand up and start to move and the teacher would immediately realize they had made a mistake—I was absolutely not a dancer. In fact, I had enormous difficulty following the simplest instructions. The notion of “body memory” was alien to me. I had a bad case of body amnesia.