The Surprise
I have been waking at first light for so long that my body no longer requires a reason. It simply rises with the day, regardless of what the day contains, regardless of whether the joints in my hands are cooperative or whether the ache in my left knee has decided to make itself known early. I swing my feet to the floor and I sit on the edge of the bed for a moment, the way the physical therapist at Blue Springs Community Clinic told me to do after my hip replacement three years ago, just a breath or two to let the body remember where it is and what it’s doing.
Then I stand. Some mornings the kitchen feels like the friendliest room in the world, the light coming in through the east window over the sink, the coffee maker already set because I set it the night before, the small reliable sounds of a house that knows me. Other mornings my hands are stiff enough on the counter that the simple business of making tea requires a kind of negotiation, a quiet acknowledgment between me and my body that we are both older than we used to be and that patience is the appropriate response to this fact.
My name is Edith Thornberry. I am seventy-eight years old. I have lived in Blue Springs, Missouri for fifty-one of those years, since George and I moved here from St.
Louis in the early 1970s when he took the position at the engineering firm and we bought the house on Larkspur Street with the covered porch and the backyard that had a proper oak tree in it, the kind children can climb. Wesley was six then and Thelma was four, and the oak is still there, though neither of them has climbed it in forty years. George died eleven years ago.
Heart failure, which sounds like a failure of commitment but is really just a failure of muscle, the body wearing itself out in the ordinary way of bodies that have worked hard for a long time. He was a good man and I loved him for fifty-two years and I miss him still in the specific, practical way of a person who has misplaced their best tool, the one they reached for without thinking, the one whose weight was so familiar they barely noticed it until it was gone. I bake on Wednesdays.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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