I’m seventy-one, widowed, and the mother of three grown children who love me, I suppose, in the rushed and scattered way adults love from far away.
One lives in Texas, one in North Carolina, one in Arizona.
They call when they remember.
They worry most when I mention my knees.
“Mom, maybe it’s time to think about more help.”
That’s how they say it.
More help.
A smaller way of saying less life.
So I paid the senior rate, put on the ugly black swimsuit I had ordered online, and walked into the locker room feeling ancient and exposed.
I had not been in a pool since I was nine years old.
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