Will I be like my mother? Will my body hunch and my mind blur? Will I lose my focus and my hearing, my train of thought and my body? Will I shrink into barely functioning, yelling to be heard or giving up because I have spoken too softly? At least she can’t hear the growing traffic noise on the street by her house or see the cracks in the tile or how worn the Oriental rugs have become. She doesn’t notice the chips on the fine china bird-patterned plates we grew up with. She doesn’t see the dust on the floo
r. She doesn’t even smell the mothballs that permeate this room where I sleep. My nostalgia in this decayed elegance scares me, and I grow sad remembering the past. I feel myself shrinking and slowing as I see these elegant people withering and dying like the flowers on the table. My mother was fifty-seven when she moved here, still healthy and vibrant. I am only fifty-one. Time becomes shorter and I fear the loss of my capacities, and of the meaning in my life, for her life does not seem deep to me. And yet, I love the sameness of the beach routine, for the beach is never really the same and yet the sea is always there, both the same and different, the colors sparkling brilliant, the whitecaps describing the pattern of today’s tides.