True-Blue

To be newly defiant and non-compliant.

Yesterday morning I was lying on my front lawn, face to the sky, trying to decide what kind of lawn mower I needed to buy. The hedge clippers beside me were my perfectly illogical stand-in for a mower.

The grass felt silky and the light was in between, not quite sunrise. After my husband died, I disappeared into myself. Grief can make you feel small without you noticing. But something shifted. Just like when I was in my teens, my latest decade is about self discovery and trying on new identities. My friend, Sheila, told me I would become many new versions of me. “Try them all on,” she said. And I have, reclaiming pieces of the girl I used to be, the one who tried things simply because she could.

“Have you lost your filter?” someone might ask.

No, I have not. I have simply moved past the territory of complying, fading away, bending to stereotypes, and into the frontier of being true-blue. It is an independence our grandmothers rarely had the social permission to claim.

So there I was, completely content on the grass, testing out a gymnast-level lying leg tuck. My doctor may call it a functional fitness test, but for me it is the ultimate age defier.

You begin the maneuver with the enthusiasm of a gymnast. One leg stays long, a steady anchor. The other begins its ambitious journey.

You hoist the active leg, guiding the thigh to drape over its partner, twisting the pelvis just so, until, with a final rotation, the sole of that foot meets the surface on the other side. Squarely. Flat. Unmistakable.

In that moment, I was not a widow with a lawn mower dilemna. I was the fourteen-year-old girl sitting cross-legged on my bed, folded into herself like origami. That girl is still present. I just needed to shake her awake.

It is a hilarious, private flex, a physical middle finger to the concept of time. As I admired the sky, twisted into a human knot, feeling a deep, satisfying flexibility, I heard a voice.

“Oh God, maybe I have lost it,” I said to myself.

I looked over and saw my beloved neighbor, her beautiful lab puppy, and what appeared to be two cups of coffee headed my way.

She was half whispering, half calling my name as she moved low to the ground, stealth like, as though entering a stakeout.

“Bren,” she said, “are you okay?”

For the first time, I realized how ridiculous I must look. I laughed out loud, my hand over my mouth because the sun was not quite up yet. It was trying too.

“What are you doing?” she asked, as I raised myself up and gratefully accepted the coffee she offered.

She looked at me, then at the hedge clippers, with a half smile and a half concerned glance. Laughing, I explained that I was planning to trim my lawn with hedge clippers while contemplating what kind of mower to buy. But in between, I could not help noticing the sky.

Coffee cups in hand, we both lay down on my front lawn, and taking a cue from us, her puppy did the same. We were silent for a moment, admiring the beautiful pink, crushed-rose hue that had appeared for the second day in a row.

Then she said,

“You should buy an electric mower. Make sure it is light so it does not catapult you across the lawn.”

I smiled to myself. I am pretty sure me winging wildly across my lawn with an electric mower would look normal compared to tucking myself into the blades of grass. Remembering my newly defiant, non-compliant emerging self, I said,

“Our neighbors will think we are nuts.”

She smiled and said, “Who cares, let them. And you are the nicest, most fun neighbor I have ever had. Please never move.”

Later that day, her son mowed my lawn and I ordered my mower. As the sun set, I felt an odd freedom I had not felt in a long time.

Turns out I am not finished with myself yet. Not even close.