palimpsest ovenbird She met him in the san, while tuberculosis lived in their lungs and left its scars. He was a World War II vet who spent his tour as a chef, cooking pork chops and frying eggs on a naval vessel. He never talked about it, but he made good pork chops, always served with apple sauce on the side. The guys called him “Red.” He was funny and irreverent, prone to climbing out the windows at night to roam around the grounds. I don’t know what she thought their future would look like when she married him but I’m guessing it wasn’t spending two decades caring for a man broken by a blood cancer that ate his bones. They gave him two years to live but he lived twenty, taking them from her. She meant to spend much of her retirement in England with her sister, but she couldn’t leave him long so she went in brief stints every couple of years. She came back with photo albums documenting her brief freedom–there she is in front of Stonehenge; there she is, dressed in charcoal wool slacks, in a quaint churchyard with bluebells at her feet; there she is walking up to a castle on a hill, carrying sandwiches for lunch. I didn’t know anyone else in real life who had had such adventures. I made her tell me the stories over and over again. When his body finally gave up she didn’t have much living left for herself. Her sister soon died of an aneurysm and she always wished she could go the same way–feet up in her chair with a book in her lap and a coffee still hot on the table beside her. Instead she died of a slow brain bleed after a fall, spending days in medical limbo before making a painful exit. Shortly before her death she declared, “I just really don’t feel like breathing anymore.” I called her on my lunch break when she was in the hospital. She was still talking as if she might live but I didn’t trust her optimism. Before I hung up the phone I said, “I love you” and she said, “I love you too, dear.” And those were the last words we spoke to each other. She left me a ring that she always wore. It had belonged to her mother before her. And I wear it now so that whenever I look at my own right hand I can see hers superimposed upon it. Now we can flip the pages of the old albums together, at least for a little while longer. 250816 what's it to you? who go blather from