Read an Excerpt
The Proposal
In the spring of 2020, my husband Wayne and I rushed back from our annual wintering grounds in the sunny mountains of central Mexico on what felt like the last flight to safety. We returned to a Kingston mired in the slushy interstice between winter and spring. Pandemic rules locked us down: Isolate at home, see as few people as possible, wear a mask, don’t touch, don’t hug, don’t share a cup, wash your hands vigorously after each and every encounter. We did as we were told; people were dying all around us at an alarming rate, most of them our age and older.
A year later, in March—so lamblike that the streets were suddenly clear of snow—I had just finished writing a biography of Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a remarkable woman I met when I was approaching forty and she was in her nineties. I have always loved older women, their seeming certainty, and I felt an intense sense of loss as I sent that manuscript off to its publisher. The older I get, the harder it becomes to find women who are older than me, but I knew Beth. Through my first winter in Canada in a decade, we became regular email friends, sharing a love of colour and dance that transports us both.
So I don’t know her well, but well enough to call her up.
“Would you like to get together?” I ask.
“Covid-19 is still with us,” Beth says sensibly. “How about a walk?”
——
I walk with Beth along the same route she takes every day: down her street to the corner, right down one long block, left for two blocks to a dead end, then halfway back and left past the French public school, right along another block, and right to complete the slightly wonky square back to her house. The properties we pass are large, although the houses are modest, built around the time I was born, when few families were financially secure and everyone was expected to plant a victory garden.
Two soaring maple trees hold the lawn in front of Beth’s house, a 1970s split-level bungalow built in what was once the backyard of the house next door. “Those trees are a gift,” Beth says. Her writing room looks into their canopy, a hieroglyph of branches against the winter sky, a lush landscape of leaves in summer. One of the trees is wrapped with a wide green ribbon, a vestige of Beth’s hundredth birthday last summer, when she refused a party but a troupe of Irish dancers surprised her with a set dance on the grass.
Beth lives alone, which is how she likes it. “For so much of my life I was surrounded by other people with their needs. Now I am free. If I want to go to my dining table and make things for a while, I do. I live for myself.”
Halfway along our walk, a thought strikes me and I pause. “There is something I’d like to talk to you about.”
She looks at me so intently I feel tongue-tied. Beth knows how to listen—until a few years ago, she was still working as an art therapist with veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress.
“It’s a vague notion,” I say finally. “I’m seventy-one. I feel I am entering a new stage, although I’m not sure exactly what it is. You’re almost a hundred and one; you’ve been moving through this landscape for thirty years—”
She points a finger over her head and twirls, tinkles an invisible bell in front of my face. “Ah yes, my journey. We ’ll talk about my journey. I’d like that.”
“It might be a book,” I say tentatively. “A road map—but not. And not a biography, definitely not that. More like this present moment—what the view is like from here, from where I am, looking forward, from where you are—”
She nods. “I’m at the stage where I’m most interested in looking back.”
“But not just that.”
“No, not just that.”
We play with the idea in the sunshine of this early spring day, tossing it back and forth until it has some kind of shape. We don’t give in to the temptation of tea together. Beth has had her first Covid-19 vaccination, but I haven’t. Even with masks, which we wear as we walk, we decide an indoor visit is not worth the risk. And so we part, promising to walk again next week. In the meantime, we’ll each make a list of what we’d like to talk about.
I drive away from Beth’s house, charged with possibility. We will talk—about everything under the sun.
