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Excerpt from Aunt Nell's Hidden Past

Deah, Indie Author

It had been a month since Nell moved into a suite at the memory care facility. In one of her intermittently lucid moments, she had agreed to live where she would get round the clock assistance, if needed. On the surface, she appeared to take to living at Meadowbrook like she was on a new adventure in Europe, despite feeling depressed about trading her independence and the comforts of her home for a schedule that suited the staff more than the residents.


Eased into the facility's routines, she was bathed, dressed, fed, and left alone for an hour or two before any health care assessments started. Staff left her sitting in her own teal and tan geometric patterned recliner brought from the house. She had insisted on sitting close to her suite’s French doors leading out to the quadrangle so she could hear birds calling to their friends in the mornings, watch squirrels chase each other up and down the tall white pine, and enjoy the sun's warmth on her face.


In this quiet hour, Nell engaged in morning meditation, as the 80-year-old called her reveries. Her thoughts circled from the realities of aging out of independent living, back in time to the decades when life was populated with adventures and secrets, protectors and provocateurs.


While seemingly mesmerized by bees pollinating pink azalea blossoms in the quadrangle today, her memories were wandering around the late 1960s when she met the dashing Argentinian in a Parisian neighborhood playground near the Louvre. Isandro spoke only a little English. She remembered speaking no Spanish that wasn’t in her Berlitz multi-language phrase book. He had managed about as much French as she had, which was enough to ask where a good restaurant could be found when deciding where to eat, and whether to visit Versailles or Montmartre.


But they had not needed a lot of foreign vocabulary to communicate. Their connection had been immediate, sensual, and compelling, as if their souls had known each other in many lifetimes.


With her indigo eyes, his soulful brown, and their animated facial expressions they conversed fluently, a brief touch here, a laugh there. The chance encounter turned into a weekend of long walks through French museums, decadent meals at sidewalk cafes along the Seine, and two marvelously erotic nights in her room at the auberge.


It was the kind of escapade she had been warned against having by her uptight, older sister. And it was precisely the kind of adventure that had made her feel like life was simply marvelous.


Nell remembered Isandro with vivid fondness for an hour before the daydream was interrupted by an orderly wanting to help her walk down the hall for lunch. Afterwards, for a few minutes, her mind recreated the thrill of feeling lost in Isandro’s dark, sensual eyes. The memory of how he'd made her mind and body feel liberated and ready for anything wouldn't let go of her for the rest of the afternoon.


Some long dormant reservoir within her re-experienced the open innocence of his smile, vulnerable and sexy simultaneously. Even now when she had trouble remembering where she had lived this last month, she had not forgotten how Isandro once made her feel daring and desirable. The recollection sent fresh tingles throughout her nervous system, stimulating a smile of youthful delight.


Some part of Nell was aware that she was slipping away into the fog of an octogenarian, that some of the best parts of her life, of herself, were disappearing. When others saw her as agitated, what they could not see was the inner sense of urgency that pressured her to remember the reasons that had guided her decisions.


It was the remembering that kept her alive, not the pills. Not the doctors. Not the nutritionally balanced, low sodium, low sugar, low taste diet.


And no matter how many years had raced by, she still felt the need to guard all the secrets of her past.  


In her diary after the weekend with Isandro all those decades ago she pasted a Polaroid of him and herself in the shadow of Rodin’s Thinker and wrote: “Perhaps I was naïve to trust a stranger with such intimacies, and lucky it turned out so nice.” But those were different times, and she hadn’t yet learned to be cautious or suspicious. Those lessons came soon enough. Back then, in her 20s, she was simply following her bliss, and curiosity.


Unlike life now, where there was no new bliss, no spontaneous fun, and little to stimulate curiosity. Afternoons at Meadowbrook were consumed with other strangers trying to get her to make pointless decisions about meals, mail, and mundane activities beyond daydreaming.


After only a few weeks there, one day was so much like the next that Nell’s life in the present flowed in gentle circles of ennui and random visitors, punctuated by the unspoken memories of long held secrets. Then she would be fed her evening meal with medication, and readied for an early bedtime.


This routine was making her feel even older than 80. She vowed to keep her staunch self-sufficiency from disappearing into dependence on others in getting through the day.


But now all tucked in for the night, and with Clair de Lune playing on her bedside iPod, she drifted back to Paris, and Isandro. It was there, because of him, that her life had taken a direction she had never anticipated.


And had never talked about.

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