Jacarandas, by Patrick Mizelle
[Editor’s Note: In February 2021, Patrick’s story was in a writing contest sponsored by Leading Age.]
Myra woke one morning at the end of May to sunshine pouring in around her bedroom curtains. She sensed the rainy season was finished at last as she threw open her windows to dazzling skies of cloudless cerulean blue. It felt marvelous to breathe. The jacaranda trees would be putting out the first of their astonishing purple blooms, she knew.
Breakfast and ablutions done, Myra dressed in a suit of jacaranda blue over a creamy silk blouse. She chose some faux amethyst beads and earrings and fixed a bright enamel monarch butterfly pin on the lapel of her jacket. Her shoes were sensible, black, “old lady” shoes, but there was no help for that, she thought, and felt good about her turn-out anyway.
She made her way to the front desk of the Golden Days Retirement Village to meet her driver, who took her downtown for a doctor’s appointment. Doctor Brinks had told her last month that the double vision she’d been experiencing was a small but inoperable glioma. Not to worry for a while, he’d said…”We can slow it down so that you have at least another good year or so before things begin to get ugly.”
Myra had no doctor appointment today, however. As soon as the driver pulled away, she caught a bus out front of the medical center. Half an hour later, she transferred to the excursion bus that would take her to her destination in another hour and a half.
The bus made only a few stops, so Myra settled back into her window seat. She thought again of the jacarandas, so vivid in her mind. When she was young and working in L. A., she’d loved to take a bag lunch to work and sit on a park bench beneath those glorious trees to eat it every day during their season. Some fusspots complained about the mess once the blooms began to drop in earnest, but she spent her lunch breaks in wonder until the very last flower fell.
One day, a man she didn’t know but recognized from the office asked if he could join her on her bench. They had brought the same kind of sandwich, a conversation ice-breaker, then found they had a lot to talk about. His name was Burke: a solid, manly name, she thought, to go with his good looks. He began to join her every day for lunch, and, when the flowers finished, they went out together. Engagement and a long, happy, if childless, marriage followed, until five years ago when Burke had quietly dropped dead from a heart attack at
church one Sunday. She hadn’t even known that he was dead until the congregation rose to sing.
Such were Myra’s reveries until the bus pulled up at the historic lodge halfway up Mt. Hood. Large patches of snow lay about, but the sun was still fierce in a clear sky. Myra got out and treated herself to the pricey but delicious buffet in the dining room. After lunch, she spent an hour or so with a glass of wine in front of the roaring fire in the lobby’s great stone fireplace before heading out for a walk.
Myra angled up the mountain more or less in a westerly direction as the late afternoon wore on. She paused frequently to admire the long views over the Cascades and the Willamette Valley. The air was so clear! Such a mercy there was no wind.