Free Sand in My Eyes by Christine Lemmon

like you were already self-conscious.”
    “I did?”
    “Yes, that your kids weren’t quieter, your house cleaner. The last thing I wanted was to make you feel embarrassed, and besides, the alarm wasn’t so bad. The noise of it had me chopping at my vines faster and harder.”
    “I know about foil on the burners now,” I told her. “It’s taken me twenty years to figure it out.” I felt sweat forming on my forehead and wondered whether it was from all this talk of fire alarms. “Is it hot in here or is it me?” I asked, pulling off my cardigan.
    “I was thinking it was rather cold.”
    “Then what’s wrong with me?” I asked, not expecting a real answer.
    “Menopause!” she said matter-of-factly, using the same diagnostic tone she had used years earlier when letting me know I was suffering a full-blown case of motherhood. “You look surprised. Am I telling you something you didn’t know?”
    “No, I kind of figured that’s what it was,” I told her, “especially after my daughter sent me a book from college, a book on menopause—how dare she?” I laughed.
    “Marjorie, did she really?”
    “Yes, I think she noticed all the words I was forgetting. And not sophisticated words, but basic words, words no one should forget. And I have been getting these hot flashes, I admit, but my denial has me blaming global warming. Gosh, I can’t believe I’m there,” I told her. “The big ‘M.’ How can life be going by so quickly?”
    I put my cardigan back on and walked over to a blanket folded on the counter. “Of course it’s menopause. I’m a dummy to think it’s anything else,” I said, and handed her the blanket.
    “My body temperature goes up and down and I forget my words all thetime,” she said. “I wish it was menopause, but it’s not, Anna.” She picked up the orchid that had been on her stomach all this time and slowly started to caress it with her fingers.
    “You remember what kind it is?” I asked her.
    “A blooming cattleya,” she said, her lips curving into a smile. “Some things a gal never forgets. So what happened next, after you read my mother’s letter? Did you find a spot in your house suitable to the orchid?”
    I picked up my manuscript and started to read where I left off last.



CHAPTER TWELVE
    WHEN I CLOSED THE letter my neighbor’s mother had written to her, I noticed the orchid starting to hunch, as I had for months, walking around with my neck lowered, shoulders wilting. Of all the things I dreamt of having, an orchid never made the list. But it was mine now, as was the challenge of keeping it alive and getting it to flower.
    “How difficult can it be,” I told the poor-postured stem, “to give you what you want, to get you to flower?”
    I had to act fast. I knew it wanted a pleasant spot in my house, suitable to its needs, as much as I had for months wanted, needed, pleaded with my husband to allow me an itsy-bitsy amount of time for myself — an hour, maybe two—but all he did was make me feel guilty, or give me an hour of “personal time” locked up in my room folding laundry. It took me falling apart at the seams for him to grant me this week to myself.
    I carried the terra-cotta pot with me into the kitchen and placed it on the window sill above the sink. But then a red-and-green card stuck by magnet to my refrigerator caught my eye. I pulled the Christmas card, postmarked December and stamped in four different states before arriving months late and one house over, off the refrigerator. I needed to tear it to shreds, get rid of it, should my neighbor stop by, should she come in. I would cringe if she saw it, and if she saw me that day standing in the road, holding the opened poinsettia card, reading the handwritten letter inside, meant for her, the one in which her friend wrote about a lunch she had with a group of ladies,“mostly widows like us who get together every month, and how we wish we could all wake up and find the holidays over!”
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