Landscape Painting – A Short Short Story

Clare called the week before her eighty-fifth, insisting they gather at the University Parks in celebration of her birthday, ‘Wear a dress, Mum, I know you don’t want to, but it’ll be warm. And bring a hat.’ The choice of clothing and the forcefulness with which she told her to wear a hat reminded Louisa of her time as a mother. Perhaps motherhood never truly comes to an end, but she was beginning to realize that as you age, the daughters and sons you once cared for are suddenly standing in the doorway with arms crossed, waiting for you to put on the wide-brimmed hat before going out in the sun. 

Jeffrey had passed four months ago but his presence still lingered in the home they had shared for over forty years. There were a handful of mornings when Louisa would make coffee for two. She would hold two mugs under hot running water in the sink, she would fill up the cups and let them sit in the sun, the water steaming in the sunlight. When she heard the percolator’s growl on the hob, she emptied the cups and dried them with a dishtowel, pouring coffee into each one. It was at this moment, when she held a heavy cup in each hand, that she recalled the smell of lilies in the kitchen, the bouquets of flowers, mostly white, that had crowded the windowsills and the breakfast table. She had let the flowers wilt and wither after a week, she stopped watering them or trimming their stems, letting the vases grow cloudy and the flowers bow down over the rim. Louisa wasn’t lost without Jeffrey, she still made stuffed peppers on Sundays and dusted the bookshelves while they sat in the oven. She read the newspaper in the morning and completed the crossword puzzle in an hour or two. She went on daily walks with her camera loosely hanging from her shoulder.

A sense of solitude only crept in at dawn. Louisa woke with the sun and pushed open the bedroom window, she reached over and turned off Jeffrey’s alarm clock before it even began to ring, but every night, she would set it for the following morning. More often than not, she would walk down to the kitchen and notice the back door was unlocked, something Jeffrey always did before coming to bed. ‘Keep a routine’ is what her neighbour Margaret had told her, a veteran of widowhood, and so she did, she set alarms and left doors unlocked, giving neither of these actions or inactions much thought. 

Their life together had been ordinary, filled with Louisa’s photography exhibitions at local galleries and Jeffrey’s assemblies as the principal of the high school down the road. Their four children had branched out to seven grandchildren, all returning home for an occasional visit during the summer months. Their house on East Banbury had seen the regular evolution of a couple’s transition into retirement: the replacement of windows, then painting them white, the landscaping of the front yard, and the upkeep of their small backyard garden in the afternoons. This was all so unexceptional, Louisa thought. The children’s tantrums that would evolve into more emotionally strained teenage exchanges, the nights when she laid with Jeffrey, their bodies warm, finally next to each other after a day spent avoiding one another’s presence. The quaint queen-sized bed drew them back to a place of shared familiarity that was entirely their own following the distance they would stubbornly enforce on occasion. Some days had smoothed out uncreased, while others were wrinkled by parenting, the sending of one to their room, the hiding of sweets, the damp cloths pressed against fevered foreheads, the hours spent explaining their ‘time out’ and their wrongdoing, and the brevity of reconciliation between siblings. 

‘What is it, Mum?’ asked Clare. ‘Now that it’s just me, I feel like there are too many of you to keep track of, running off in your own directions. Look at them Clare, the cousins, all that energy after not having seen each other for months,’ Louisa replied. She felt the folding chair’s polyester material press against her skin and the initial dampness of perspiration under her thighs, she smoothed out her dress and extended her legs, light varicose veins purple in the sun. Josephine ran up to her and asked breathlessly, ‘What’s it like being eighty-five?’ her eyes wide in amazement that she knew someone who was eighty-five. ‘Well Josie, I have all the wickedly witchy powers of an old lady now!’ Louisa exclaimed. The grandchildren shrieked and broke out in laughter as they ran towards the nearby path. Clare reached for her mother’s hand, ‘I think we can manage a weekend like this next summer, maybe even a week-long visit,’ she said as she turned her face towards the sun and closed her eyes. Louisa held her daughter’s hand, ‘Yes, maybe a week-long stay,’ she replied, confident she would receive a number of postcards from her children next summer, briefly documenting their coastal excursions to visit ‘the other grandparents.’ Louisa looked up and traced the landscape before her, the hawthorn blossoms burst amongst the large trees that extended horizontally, their lengthy branches dipping towards the ground.