Somehow I'm old.

It seems like it just snuck up on me. Age. Overnight. I just woke up
this morning and I was old, wrinkled, grey.

My hair is grey, almost silver. Thin and sparse. Impossible to do a
thing with except tie it back and who would I do anything with it for
anyway, so. My skin is like a suit of clothes that doesn't fit anymore.
It also seems grey. Elephant skin. Baggy and wrinkled. I'm reminded of
an old joke- One day in the old folks home Edna is so bored, she really
needs some excitement, so she decides to streak. She runs naked down the
hallway laughing her head off. Bill and Harold, sitting there, see her
run past. 'Wasn't that Edna?' Bill asks. 'Think so,' Harold replies.
'What was she wearing?' asks Bill. 'Don't know,' Harold replies, 'but
whatever it was sure needs ironing.'- I like that joke. Now. My legs are
as scrawny as chicken necks. Looking at them I wonder how I ever manage
to stand. My feet seem too big at the end of those skinny legs. All
curled and horned, worn. Leathery. Turtle feet. My arms are more bone
than flesh. My hands are curled and crooked and creak when I try to move
them. It reminds me, when all is silent and I move about and my very
bones creak, it reminds me of crickets. Back on the farm. August
evenings. Cricket violins, their legs. No crickets here, here in the
city, and I miss the country. Don't quite understand how I can be
different from, how I can be the same as that young girl so long ago and
so far away. I feel the same. Inside. Always felt the same. Sweet
sixteen: People telling me I'm a woman now but I didn't feel any
different. Felt like that little eight year old girl listening to
crickets from her bedroom window. Same at twenty, married and carrying
Elizabeth, same at thirty, Elizabeth ten and Charles six, Susan four.
Lordy, lordy guess who's forty but I still feel eight. The tendons and
veins on my hands stand out like cords. Like rope. I run my fingers
sometimes in the sunken spaces. Valleys of skin. Wondering where the
flesh went. My belly sags like a balloon out of air. A balloon tied to a
mailbox for a party and left out overnight and morning comes and it's
shrunken and stretched thin. My hip bones jut out. Shards. Hard and
brittle. I have a fear of falling. The hair on my privates might as well
be gone. As if I were that eight year old child again. It is more silver
than the hair on my head. More thin. Might as well be gone. My bosom
too. Almost gone. Slack balloons like my belly. Nipples that gave suck
to three children almost colourless. Hard like stones. They seem too big
for what is left of my breasts. I can still feel him touching them.
Always feel him touching them. Years ago when they were full and ripe as
the rest of me. Remembering his touch, sneaked touches, when we first
knew each other. The illicit pleasure like nothing I'd ever known. And I
loved him so much.

I have decided to have an auction. Dispose of all his- all our stuff.
Just stuff. It was when he left that I realized he was old. I think.
That is how it happens. Someone goes away and you learn. Learn something
about yourself and the world. Like when my older brother Don went to war
and I loved him only as a younger sister could but he never came back. I
learned then about love and about war and about dying. I learned again
about love when he- not Don, him, he, my him- passed on. A hard lesson.
Spiteful, almost. Hating myself because I'm still her. And I don't want
to know any more about death. I have already learned enough, have been
trying to close my eyes and my ears all my sense to it for so long now.
But still it took him. Ignorance is never bliss. I miss him so much and
how is it possible he is not here. It was three months short of our
sixtieth anniversary. Such a number. Inconceivable. Maybe he didn't want
to know that number. Maybe he couldn't understand that number. Maybe the
number frightened him to death. But nothing frightened him. I remember
driving back to the city late in the night in the winter cold darkness
and the car stalling which it too often did on some lonesome desolate
country road. No sign of any other life around us. And I was scared.
Sitting there cold in the car with children asleep behind me in the rear
seat. And the snow and the darkness encroaching like the night wanted to
take us all away. But he didn't care. He went out into the dark and
looked under the hood and jiggled the whatnot that always made the car
go and of course it did and he smiled at my nervousness and teased me a
little but not in a mean way. Never.

If only I could auction off the memories. But who would buy them.

The city surrounding me is full of life. Of commotion. Of noise. Of
people. Everything I am not. I, and this childrenless, spouseless house,
I am like a church that no one worships in anymore. So often I find
myself standing in the middle of some room staring blankly at a spot in
space. Just space. Staring at space, not really anything- I shake my
head and it's as if I wake up from some dream and I wonder why I'm
staring at nothing. Is there something there- something to stare at?
There must be. But I just don't see it. I suppose it's something
outside. Not quite in this world. Not quite in the other. Sometimes I
believe in ghosts. At night in our big empty bed. Sagging in the middle
but it would be foolish to buy a new mattress now. At night, I lie awake
and I hear the noise of the city, the dull roar. Constant sound. It is
like a dome covering everything. A dome of noise. Keeping the silences
out. Except for this house. The noises of my body are louder than of
this house. I've lived here many years. The last of three moves. He
first took me from the farm to the town. The family farm went to his
eldest brother and there wasn't really room for him. Us. In the town we
were still close to both our homes, still part of our families. Then we
moved here. Farther away. But more business and he did better and we
lived better and there was more for the children. Then, when Susan, the
littlest, little Susan, left home to start her own family with her own
man, we moved again. To a smaller house. Not so hard to keep up. I liked
it, I admit, the best. I still like it. It is perfect. It has a big,
sunny backyard. I grow a garden. Which seems to get smaller year by
year. Sadly. Sort of like me. But it is nice to have the space and the
trees, here in the city, the green. The grass grows and one of the
grandchildren comes to cut it for me. Often little Timothy. He shovels
my walk in the winter too. It is difficult now. But then, first moving
in, it was just the two of us again. Empty then filled, at times,
holidays, filled to overflowing with  children and grandchildren whom he
loved just as much as I, then empty again. I remember becoming a
grandmother. It was not like birthdays- not just the same old me, eight
years old. It was a change, a tangible something. But now the house
always seems empty. Like no one visits anymore. Even though they do.
Maybe not enough. I don't know. It is lonely and I feel like a lost twin
and the noise, the sounds, the life of the city encroach upon me and hem
me in. Drives me further into myself.

I will have an auction. A sale. There are too many things. I do not need
them. And they remind me. Of things. Of him of course. Impossible not to
see him in that faded armchair. Impossible not to feel him in bed beside
me. Upon the mattress that needs replacing anyway. I will get a new one.
I will get all new furniture. I will empty the house and start again.
With only the things I need. My needs are simple. There is only one of
me and I am a small person and slight and there is little I need. The
children think I cannot organize an auction. Do not realize I've
organized helped with, been at many a sale. I do not need their
assistance. They seem to think I will be cheated or taken advantage of.
Because I am old. Yes. I know I am old. But I can manage. I have managed
them, my children, into the world. It is my hands that held and bathed
them and spooned food into their mouths. They are everything to me. I
have already started to plan. The auction. And they do help, the
children, and I thank them for that. But they keep trying to take over.
Take control. Displace me.

There are so many people here. Crowded in and I can barely squeeze
through them and Charles makes me sit. I am, I find, grateful to do so.
Let the people swirl around, looking at my things, judging, pricing,
preparing to take away parts of me. It is so like an old auction back
home, back in the country, but different. There everyone would know
everyone. But here it is strangers. Some of them I know. The neighbours.
But most I have never laid eyes on. Elizabeth is out front, selling the
smaller items. The individually priced things. Trinkets. Books.
Whatnots. The auction people have set up on the back porch and the crowd
gathers in the yard. I can hear the auctioneer's speeding speech. It is
so fast. Once I could make sense of it. But now it is beyond me. I do no
hear as I once did. Little things are lost to me. The children told me
they didn't do auctions like this anymore. It's not the way it's done.
That I would have to send the items out to some sales barn. But I
couldn't have that. I found these people, this company. Yes, me, myself.
Nothing is impossible. They agreed to do things out of the house, the
way it used to be, the way it should be. I wanted it here, this way. So
I can see the things going. See who buys what. Know that that memory is
with them, that that other is with them. It is like saying goodbye to
everything. Everyone. Which would be impossible in some distant looming
sales barn that I wouldn't be able to get to because no one would drive
me and I'm too nervous to drive myself anymore.

Everything will be auctioned off.

The people flow around me, sitting in my old rocker, flow around me like
water and it is as if I am already gone. Already a spot of nothing,
something to be stared at when you half fall asleep on your feet.
Something sometimes seen when the mind whirs off on a tangent. They flow
around me like old-time movie pictures. Fast speed. Jerking and abrupt.
Until all is gone and everything is dark and I am all that is left. I am
the only piece of furniture left in this empty shell of a house.

Except even I have been auctioned off.

Somehow nothing has been replaced. Somehow I've grown old. Nothing is
replaced. Except me. I am being deplaced. Displaced. I am going to a
home. For people who think they are eight-year-olds but aren't anymore.
I begin to wonder if the auction was my own idea. Did I really carry it
out myself? How did I get them all to come here? It was so much like
home, back, years back, when mother was still alive. Father alive. And
him. Him. But can I leave this house? I have not left. I am still here
in this house of so many years and they cannot make me leave. I sit in
this rocking chair. Each rock creaking against the rugless floor. In the
couchless, chairless living room. Pictureless walls. Kitchen empty and
faded. Everything growing dimmer, as if the life were being sucked out
of it. I cannot let them take me and will sit here in silence in this
silent house as long as it takes. To make them realize. I am no longer
afraid of the darkness. When evening comes the darkness is complete. My
eyes take hours to adjust. Grow used to the dark. Finally, cat-like, I
can see in the dark, see all there everything is to see. Irises rounded
hugely open. The walls of my eyes, the walls of my sight, the walls of
the house closer and closer. Right next to me. All around me. Closing
in, touching my withered body, all sides of me. All four sides of my
body. Four corners of the world. World like my body, this house like my
body, my body like.my body.

Somehow I'm old.