It was minus 30 degrees outside. Through the dusty window, she saw hot air blowing from her heater. In the long term care home that she could see from her bedroom window, a few lights were on. A few years ago, the high rise building had almost all of its rooms lit. Olive often wondered what it would be like to live in a care home.
Winter afternoons can make the passage of time sorrowful for a senior, she thought. How much can crocheting help? Crocheting with friends felt different a few years ago, when Olive would go to the library and meet her friends once a week. They had plans to make it twice a week when things suddenly changed.
Veronica was the first to go. Then three more from her group of seven.
It was the sounds that she missed the most. When the birds were around in spring and summer, she hardly noticed them but now…the occasional visitors were not there any more.
Even the chipmunk with whom she had waged a battle, had gone. In her mind, she offered truce- you can come to my yard and I promise seeds, just don’t touch my sunflowers.
At that moment, all she wanted to do was sit by the window and watch the chipmunk make its hurried trips – from the neighbourhood pine trees to its den where it probably had a stash for winter – through her backyard fence. Merely thinking about its survival tactics lent an energy to her days.
A car screeched to a halt in the nearby Tim Hortons parking, breaking the silence of the afternoon. Must be a new driver or an angry one, she thought. But it instantly reminded her of something unexpected.
The way Jeff would clear his throat after he brushed his teeth thrice a day. He would never close the door behind him, causing reverberations of his throat-clearing sounds to reach the farthest corners of the house, making sure it hit her eardrums before losing steam.
65 years. Olive didn’t give up hope until a few months before Jeff left.
It was the sound that punctuated her days, though in the most annoying way. Some days she let it be but some days, she reminded him politely to shut the door before he launched into the sonic act. At least once a month, for several days in a row, she would lose her cool. But Jeff was okay with it. And that was amazing, she thought.
Occasionally, thinking about his calm reactions to her mild explosions would make her heart tender.
They had established a cadence to this. A slow, calm and understanding cadence.
Olive had prepared well for the silence. But occasionally unexpected sounds from her surroundings triggered memories.
The irony of things caught her unguarded. She didn’t appreciate silence now despite all her preparations to embrace it. When Daniel and David were in the house, she longed for everyone to leave so she could have the silence for herself.
When Jeff was around, she detested the times when he broke the permeating silence with his sounds which Olive thought were unwanted and avoidable. But the times when they put together their little dinners and ate them by the table under the beautiful lights , the time when they yanked the dahlia bulbs, and put away the Christmas tree long after Christmas- those were moments that she would hold dear.
Now she wished for the tap to run, for Jeff to putter around making the avoidable sounds…it didn’t matter if he left the door ajar.
Until the birds returned and the chipmunk came back, if at all it made it through the winter, she would not spare a single sound- she would hold onto them to go back in time. Just to be present in the past till the future arrived at her doorstep.
Whims and fancies 