Flesh

She was suddenly gripped with the need to tear her clothes off. She had hated her body so long she needed proof that it was still a worthy enemy. There were mirrors all over her small house, but she never looked at them anymore except by accident, and even then she didn't see herself. Just the blur of a moving target. She'd stopped caring long ago when she realized her youth and beauty were gone. Good riddance, she thought when she thought about it at all. She said she liked the invisibility that her age and lack of effort (when it came to grooming or dressing up) gave her, when she ventured out in public--which was seldom. She rarely did anything physical these days. The drugs she took for bipolar disorder made her body fat and flabby. And there was no point in caring about such nonsense as the flesh. It dried and withered long before the rest of the body. She was once a lovely rack of bones to hang a dress on, but now she was a weighty carcass for some poor soul to find someday dead upon her bed. The bed was where she watched TV, read books, wrote the checks for her bills, and slept. The only reason to leave her bed these days was to walk, bare feet slapping on the concrete floor and then the tile to go to the bathroom, then back to fix coffee, let the dog out. Then the slap of the foot on the floor to let the dog back in, to feed the dog and then the slap of the foot as she traversed the room back to the bed. She wore yoga pants and a wife-beater T-shirt, a long sleeved cotton shirt or T-shirt over that. She called this sloppy get-up jammies. She lived in it.

Autumn came and after three years of ignoring the grapevines on the south wall of the house, they were like a wall of green and gold a foot deep hanging off the roof of the cottage, drifting across the glass walls of the greenhouse. The honeysuckle had become tangled in the grape. The stone work she'd done fifteen years ago was disappearing under this wall of vines. Even virginia creeper had crept into the mix and it worked it's way into the crevice where a wood beam joined with the siding at the east corner. The wild yellow roses needed pruning and so did the white. And so late in October one sunny afternoon after she had her coffee and cigarette, she grabbed her gardening gloves and went outside. She worked for several hours, occasionally drinking from a quart of water now and then. She would stand with the jug of water in her hand, sweat dripping from her jaw, and survey the work so far. There was a bit of damage to the house. Nature left to its own devices will overtake the works of man like kudzu gobbles up barns in the South. Eventually it all goes back to wild in the end. There are great puffs of dust that rise into the golden air when she pries the wall of vines from the south-facing wall. She takes shears to it rolling it into a huge ball of mostly dried sticks and dead leaves where spiders made their summer home. She wrestled it into the huge brown garbage can using all her strength to force it down so she could put the thorny rose shoots into the mix, but found herself shaking and hot. She peeled off the long sleeved T-shirt and gloves and threw them on the rose garden chair. She bent over and shook her hair, watching upside down as debris fell to the ground in the shaking. When she stood up, she was trembling. Time for lunch. But just inside the door as the screen slapped shut behind her she wrestled the wife-beater off her body, unfastened her bra, and stepped out of her yoga pants to gaze upon the full ripe body of an old woman.

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