Spring

Spring



She emerged from her cocoon. For some reason she was wrapped in a Disney princess blanket when she would have preferred a William Morris print or Klimt's "The Kiss." The floating mattress under her hissed with each movement. It drove her crazy.

"This has been a complete shambles," she said.

After she broke her hip, her doctors and children told her she would only have to stay until she healed. Here she would have physical therapy and be good as new. Well, new people can't walk, Velma thought, and that is what they must have meant for her. Physical therapy. They rolled her into room where the therapist droned on about how he was going to win the lottery, if only all the staff would pitch in and buy a hundred tickets, and then he wouldn't have to work in this dump anymore. After half an hour of that, Velma was rolled back to her room.

Back home, her violins, her cat, and her other children were waiting for her. She was the only person in town who repaired violins correctly. If you took them to the music store you were likely to get Gorilla Glue squeezing out through the red mahogany. And her other children, the young ones who loved her more than her own children, who depended on her for their Suzuki lessons, who was teaching them to play the violin now? Six months in this nursing home. Her cat probably wouldn't even look at her when she got home, she'd be so mad about the desertion.

There was no sun here. Velma's room was on the north side where light never came through the window. A bird feeder hung outside but no one ever filled it. At least a pecan tree grew outside, but nobody ever gathered the pecans. Velma recalled seeing nobody in the back yard of the home. Inside, the noise made her want to rip her ears off. Everyone had a TV except her. They kept their shows at the loudest volumn, then left their rooms, leaving the TVs blairing about over-priced face creams you could buy by calling this number or evangelicals you could send money to by calling this other number. Why didn't the evangelists just sell face cream and save everybody time? She would roll herself close to the main door, trying to see the code visitors punched into the keyboard. If she could only make out the numbers...

"Velma, don't sit so close to the door, honey. People can't get past you."

"Please roll me outside for awhile. I just want to see the sunshine."

"Maybe later, honey. We don't have the staff right now."

"I won't try to run away."

"Maybe later."

For six months they told her later. She rolled back to her room, found her violin which she hid in the diaper drawer so the other residents wouldn't play with it, rolled to the window which never got light, and played the shivering parts from Vivaldi's "Winter."



The next day she was up and in the lobby when twenty or so of the old folks were lined up by the door to take the bus to the town's senior citizen center. So many wheelchairs lined up. Velma rolled into the que. When the volunteers held open the door for the caravan of wheelchairs, Velma rolled out with them. Instead of aiming for the chair lift, she turned right, keeping where the cars in the parking lot hid her. She kept her head down, rolling and rolling until she felt the warm fingers of the morning sun playing with the light hairs on the back of her neck. Velma lifted her head, feeling the sunshine for the first time in six months. She threw off the cocoon of her princess blanket, and lifted her violin and bow that she had hidden under Sleeping Beauty. With her other hand she held to the handle of the chair while cautiously, raising herself to her feet. Tilting her head up, she closed her eyes to feel the sunlight dancing across her eyelids, raised her violin to her shoulder and played Vivaldi's "Spring."



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