Like many of the yards with nicer homes on them, Mrs. Maggie’s had a sprinkler system that was on a timer; though at some point over the years, her timer must have broken because the sprinklers would come on at various points during the day, and often even at night, all year. While it never got cold enough to snow where I lived, several times each winter I would go outside in the morning to see Mrs. Maggie’s yard transformed into a surreal arctic paradise by the frozen water from her sprinklers.
Every other yard stood sterilized and arid by the biting frost of the winter’s cold, but right there in the middle of the bleak reminder of the savagery of the season was an oasis of beautiful ice, hanging like stalactites from every branch of every tree and every leaf of every bush. As the sun rose, its light spread through her trees, and each piece of ice splintered the rays into a rainbow that could only be viewed briefly before it blinded you. Even as a child, I was struck by how beautiful it was, and often Josh and I would go over there to walk on the iced grass and have sword fights with the icicles.
Mrs. Maggie was, as best as I can remember, around eighty years old, and was one of the friendliest and sweetest people I had ever met, despite her quirks. She had a head of loose-set white curls and always wore light dresses with floral patterns over her frail, but not sickly, body. When it was warm and Josh and I would go swimming in the lake, she would sit out on her back porch and just talk with us. She never brought a book or a magazine, never had a crossword puzzle or a word-search; I think she came out on those days just to visit.
Sometimes we would swim out nearly to the center of the oval lake, and she would call us back, yelling not to swim too far, but we never listened. When we played close to the shore, she would ask us about school, and any time we told her what we were learning or what assignments we had, she would say that we should be thankful because she always had to work harder when she was our age. I once told her that we were building a spaceship; Mrs. Maggie said that we were getting off easy.
While the last weeks of kindergarten played out, Josh and I found ourselves in the lake nearly every weekend, and so nearly every weekend Mrs. Maggie found herself out on her porch. The Community group was wrapping up the Balloon Project, and on the day that we took our last pictures home, Josh had come to play at my house after school. Though the initial enthusiasm for the project had long since abated, taking all the Polaroids off the map and bringing them home had stirred the embers of our dwindling excitement.
When we were swimming in the lake that day, Josh asked how far I thought a letter might go if we put it in a bottle and threw it into the ocean. We guessed at this until Mrs. Maggie, who was eavesdropping, interjected and said that it would depend on which ocean it was and what the currents were like. She said, as she gestured toward the tributary, that we could even throw it into the lake and it might travel hundreds of miles.
I asked her if she thought the bottle would go farther than a balloon, and she looked at me quizzically as if she expected me to elaborate. I thought she already knew about the Balloon Project; I thought I had explained it to her before, but I told her about it anyway. She said that she had never heard of an experiment exactly like that, and that it sounded wonderful. Her husband, Tom, was a pilot, and she joked that if one of our balloons had been caught on the wing of his plane, it could have ended up on the other side of the world.
Mrs. Maggie said that Tom should be home any day and that she would ask him if he saw any balloons in the sky while he was flying. She was smiling so cheerfully that I didn’t want to upset her by pointing out that she had already told us that joke months ago.
When Josh and I started paddling toward the shore, Mrs. Maggie invited us in for snacks. This was fairly routine; she would laugh and say that she had made too much food or lemonade and would gesture enthusiastically for us to walk up the dock and onto her porch. It was a tempting offer, especially when it was hot outside or we had tread water for too long, but we would always decline as politely as young boys knew how; Mrs. Maggie wasn’t a stranger, but despite how kind she was, we were never comfortable enough with her to accept her invitation. I don’t know what Josh’s reservations were, exactly, but mine began the day I met Mrs. Maggie.
The first time I met her was the first time my mother let me walk home from the bus stop by myself. For the first few weeks of kindergarten, my mom had made arrangements with her employer to pick me up from school, but this meant that to make up for the lost time, she would have to leave me at our house alone for about an hour each day. We didn’t live very far from my elementary school, but the lines to pick up the students were always long; so long, in fact, that the students who rode the bus would often make it back to their houses before we made it back to ours.
Eventually my mom relaxed enough to let me ride the bus, and she would meet me with her car where the bus dropped me off. Many of the other kids that shared my bus stop, however, had their own keys to their houses, and I would get into my mom’s car and watch them run and skip home with their keys dangling around their necks or swinging from their hands. This made me jealous.
I pleaded with my mom to let me travel as freely as the other kids did, and gradually her reflexive dismissal wavered, and we reached a compromise. She gave me a key to the front door and attached it to a black rope lanyard; I wore it around my neck and felt that there was barely anything left to distinguish me from adults at that point.
About a month or so into kindergarten, I rode the bus home as usual, but kept one foot in the aisle this time. I was going to use my key for the first time, and we were nearing my stop. The bus braked, and I was first to stand as I waited for the driver to let us out. I poured out of the bus with the other kids that shared my stop and could see my mom waiting for me on the porch in the distance. As I closed the gap and passed the house that sometimes transformed into an ice palace, I met Mrs. Maggie.
“Chris?”
I didn’t turn and barely even noticed the voice.
“Chris! It is you!”
Turning to my left, I saw a thin old woman hustling across her lawn, her floral-patterned dress billowing in the warm summer air. I looked to my right and then behind me, but I was the only person in the street. She was calling to me. I started walking faster, but my confusion had slowed my pace, and she caught up with me with her careful but quick steps.
The woman stopped in front of me, put her hands on my shoulders, and looked steadily into my eyes. As she closed her eyes tightly and furrowed her brow, I saw beads of tears streak down her cheeks. I tried to move away, but she pulled me into her and wrapped her arms around me as tightly as she could probably manage.
“Oh, Chris. I’ve missed you so…”
I suppose I was scared by what she was doing, but I wasn’t scared of her. She seemed nice, and not knowing what else to do, I dropped my lunchbox, put my right arm around her, and awkwardly rested my still mending and plaster-encased left arm on her side.
“Hey!” My mom’s voice struggled against the wind as she jogged from our porch to where the woman and I stood.
My mother gently, but somewhat forcefully, wrestled me from the embrace and told me to go home. As I ran home, I could hear the woman yelling “Chris!” until I vanished into the house. Once inside, I put my backpack on the dining room table and sat down on one of its chairs.