A retired elderly woman lives next door to me. Everyone calls her Margaret. She used to be an art teacher at our town’s high school for over thirty years. After she retired three years ago, she seemed to lose herself completely.
Every time I took out the trash, I would see her sitting on a rocking chair on her porch with a cup of tea that had gone cold long ago. She rarely went out and hardly spoke to anyone. One time I said hello, and she just shook her head. “I taught for my whole life,” she said. “Now I don’t know how to do anything else. Those students don’t need me anymore.”
Her garden had gone wild too. Margaret’s roses used to be the best on the block. Now the weeds were almost knee high.
The turning point came one rainy afternoon. I was coming home from work when I saw Margaret standing by her garage door, holding an old paint box. Rain soaked her shoulders, but she didn’t move. I walked over and asked what was wrong.
“I was cleaning out the garage,” she said. “I found this. This was my paint box from when I was twenty. The paints are still inside, all dried up.” She opened the box. The tubes were hard as rocks.
“What did you paint?” I asked.
“Oil paintings. Landscapes, mostly.” She gave a bitter smile. “Then I became a teacher and never painted again for thirty years.”
That evening, I helped her clean out the garage. We threw away old lesson plans, expired certificates, yellowed awards. Margaret said as she tossed each item, “These things took up space, and I thought they were all I had.”
The next day, I bought a new set of watercolors from the grocery store and left them at her front door with a note. “In thirty years, you can teach many students. But you owe yourself one painting.”
A week later, I heard music coming from her house. Through the window, I saw Margaret wearing an apron covered in paint, mixing colors in front of a canvas. Her painting was still rough and unpolished, but her eyes were bright again.
Yesterday she came to my door with a plate of homemade cookies. “I figured it out,” she said. “Teaching for thirty years was something I did. It’s not who I am. Now I want to learn to paint again.”
She has started turning the soil in her garden. I suspect by spring, the roses will bloom again.
