by Debbie Piercefield

My youngest daughter (who is twenty-nine) announced on her last visit home that she needs me to live until I am ninety, the year when she will celebrate her fifty-fourth birthday, an age she feels confident that she can let me go, an age where she thinks she will have come to terms with my impending death, because by then she will have married and birthed a couple of children and agreed to work at an organization like Pathlight, where the lives of the homeless are changed, and the adventures we shared for years at Lake Lure, kayaking in the early mornings, the paddles making small ripples along the still water’s surface, and the trips we took to New York City, one where she stood in a pale, yellow dress with spaghetti straps next to a sign advertising the show Chicago on Broadway, looking younger than her college aged friends, will be distant memories, and she will no longer have the need to end our weekly phone calls—pleading with me not to leave the house without a helmet— like she does now, a joke, but not really; the fear of me falling off a ladder or having a heart attack, like her father did, subsided, her panic attacks less frequent, but I can’t bring myself to argue with her that I probably will not live until ninety, cancer survivors rarely do, their immune system comprised, and I’m okay with that, although I’m on a kick, maybe for her sake, to walk two-three miles daily before I head into work, and again after dinner (well, sometimes if I have the energy), doing my best to track my steps, an imaginary fitness coach screaming from inside my head to move faster, raise my knees higher, the same voice asking me to think twice about reaching for the candy bowl that sits on the edge of my colleague’s desk, instead, jotting down the fruits and vegetables I eat weekly, as if a clean diet can save me, because I know it won’t, just as I know I can prepare for a hurricane, now that the season has begun in Central Florida, stocking up on batteries, bottled water, and canned goods, even purchasing a table top grill, so I don’t have to ask my neighbors to boil water for my coffee while we wait for the electricity to return; but all the preparations will not prevent a hurricane from roaring down my street, plummeting and stripping off the roof, or halting the water from gushing through the front door as the sea table rises, which brings me to what I really want to say to her—-that each morning for the past six weeks, I head outside, unwind the hose and water the Vincas and Blue Salvia, plants that should be heat and sun resistant, but wilt every afternoon, struggling to live, exhausted from the unseasonably high temperatures we have experienced this spring, and if the rains do not come soon, I will need to let them go, pull them out of the ground, their leaves too blistered, their blooms unopened, accepting that they have finally expired—because we can’t control the weather—we just can’t my love.     

Debbie Piercefield teaches writing, directs a writing center, gardens, and is an avid hiker (especially in North Carolina). She lives in Central Florida and has been published in Litbreak Magazine and Bending Genres Journal.