Two 88-year-old women on my route were waiting for me today, one near the beginning of deliveries and the other near the end. I carry their papers up to their doors, not because I'm such a nice guy but because they asked me to, coming up with little evasive hints and excuses and before I knew it, I was getting out of the car, rain or shine, unlocking their gates and doors, and hand-delivering their news.
Today, the one who looks exactly like the old woman who tempted Snow White with a poison apple, was hobbling out to the gate before I arrived.
"I was born here," she said, mentioning that her birthday would be the coming week. It was the first time I realized that she had never married. Her one sister lives about ten miles away. She spoke of her nieces, who help tend the yard.
The farmhouse is a storybook place, perfect for Hansel and Gretel to pop by for a snack, flowers, old sheds, raspberry bushes, old trees, her dog Coco. Lately, would-be thieves have been raiding her gas pump and her berry bushes.
"That tree was planted the year I was born," she pointed out. I was already late with the papers, but it was the day she was spilling the beans on her life. My video camera was in the car, but I didn't have the heart to grab it and document her confessions.
Hers has been a more circumscribed life than I imagined. No husband and no children, just the old homestead and her dog Coco. She spoke of the house and how it came to be built. She spoke of the time her parents took her and her sister to Colorado. She remembered not only the year, 1930, but the day they left, February 14. Another time, they had traveled to Yellowstone and Mount Rushmore. Once, they went to Brownsville, Texas, for some sort of Mardi Gras celebration and, for two hours, they had slipped across the border to go shopping in Mexico.
"So I have been out of the United States!" she laughed. "For two hours."
The furthest east she ever traveled was to Indianapolis, to visit relatives. She rode the train home, the one and only time she traveled on a train.
"Were you ever in an airplane?" I asked.
"Oh, no," she said, almost disgusted at the question. "I'm too dizzy for anything like that."
Her birthday is July 10. I'll put a card in her newspaper.
Alice, another woman who is 88, greeted me today as well, to ask if I had seen in the paper that her sister had died the previous week. I hadn't. She rambled a little bit, talking about relatives I knew nothing about. She told me about her sister, who was ten years her senior and whose last words were, "Just leave me alone!" They had been attaching her oxygen and she wanted nothing to do with it, apparently.
"It was a blessing," Alice said. "It was time."
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