Free The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove by Paul Zimmer Page B

the bad—the frightening connections and the warm fancies.
    I don’t have to plan things anymore—or concern myself with what needs to be done . Nothing needs to be done—except that I must be cautious so as not to fall down, take my medicine on time, go to the bathroom regularly, and appear in the dining hall at meal times.
    I don’t wish to descend permanently into the television screen all my waking hours as so many of my coresidents do. So far I have been able to resist this.
    I know what lies ahead—an event not to be overly pondered. So I strike sparks off my past, wondering why I did this thing or that thing. I think of a particular event and wonder what it really meant when it happened. Now that I have time to think about them, I recall places in my life where I turned a corner when I did not even realize I had done so, or how I could have saved myself great trouble if only I had only done a certain thing. There are the lovely memories, too, of young infatuation, a good bottle of wine, many moments and realizations in art, an éclat amongst the trees in our woods, a fine book, a walk with Heath, a moment of lovemaking, a vegetable triumph in the garden, a picture, a poem, a dance, some music that illuminated and sustained my life.
    At last I have lived enough of my life so that I have some wisdom to rely on, knowledge I have accumulated to influence my decisions, some things that could possibly be useful to others, too. But no one really cares or consults with me about anything, and I am given no real decisions to make. It seems that things have already been decided for me. No wisdom is required in the face of this reality—nor, it seems to me, is wisdom much valued.
    No one comes to see me in the home. Heath and I had been a hermitic twosome over our decades together, had only a few friends, and mostly these are all dead or doomed now. We had a few good neighbors who occasionally looked in on us, but basically we were by ourselves. I have no relatives with whom I am in touch; they all eventually disappeared into my vaporous memories of France across the sea when I was a girl. Heath’s parents had both died suddenly when he was twelve and his only brother passed away a decade ago. Heath and I had our fields, our woods, our work, our house, and each other.
    We belonged to no groups or clubs, went to no meetings, rarely dined in the local bars and grills. We did not hunt our land, nor did we permit others to hunt it—and this, too, set us apart from our neighbors.
    In late autumn the guns come out in the driftless hills, and the war with animals commences in full. I would begin to hear gunfire and it always conjured up terrifying memories of the war combat in France when I was a child. Heath would be off doing his chores, and I would be frightened that some stray shot might take him down. I was unable to walk in our woods when this bellicose activity was commencing. When we went to town for our groceries there were deer strung up like lynch victims from trees around the houses, and pickups with bloodied animals’ corpses slung onto their beds as if they were firewood. This, too, stirred terrible memories for me and had its deep effect on me particularly, reinforcing our solitude.
    Dearest Heath, this was his childhood home and these things had been part of his growing up, but he changed his customs for me as an act of love, knowing that hunting bewildered and appalled me. If he saw hunters straying onto our land he would emphatically order them to leave.
    The caregivers in this home are professional and dedicated, but they are challenged and sometimes annoyed with their work. Like most people who labor in institutions that serve particular types of human beings—teachers, prison guards, ward nurses, military officers—they sometimes become impatient, especially when residents become querulous. Elders might be quiet people, but we are diverse; our one common denominator is that we are all moving now with