Eulogy in Chartreuse

Buhl/Castleford, ID

The sight of chartreuse breaks my heart. Even three years on, I catch the glow of that color and turn my head, hoping to see you. But of course I don’t see you. Though the acidic glow remains, you are forever gone.

I still live in the desert, but I no longer run the sage covered hills like I did when we were neighbors. No, I run the tame paved roads that mark the one mile sections of farmland where the corn grows so tall in the summer it makes the air still and as humid as a jungle, the stalks casting an insufferable shade that I run through faster to get back to where I can breathe.

“It’s always such a beautiful sight to see you cresting those those hills” you messaged one evening after we met at the top of a steep one. The sun was going down and the wind was raging. Not even your day glow green could compete with the fire of the sunset and the light turned it brown. You didn’t run any more. And you never were a trail runner. But you admired my determined fortitude, watching me cross the grid of washed out dirt roads in all weather.

Everyone got old at once, but in a cheap neighborhood where everyone moved to wait to die, with my clan being a most notable exception, I suppose it was bound to happen. Choppers heralded the departure of another neighbor, the rotor beat setting the dog to barking at the sky and the the neighbors to gawking. We would simultaneously text “Still alive?” to one another. I was bound to live years longer even as I felt I was dying, one malevolent white cell at a time. Your lungs and heart were gradually failing, but you you would text back “I’m not ready for my chopper ride just yet.”

We’d sit on our respective hills, each of us living on equal high points, the highest of all the houses and watch the neighborhood for trouble or comedy. Most of our commentary could be handled by text, but every so often, something was so juicy or so dangerous, it required a meeting. “Hang on, I’m headed over” I would text and then trek across the grey expanse to discuss the latest neighborhood drama. “I put clothes on for you” you would say almost lasciviously as you threw open the door in greeting. “I’m so honored” I would reply. But in truth I was. You were old enough to do what you wanted without interference from bored, sick housewives. I knew you didn’t put your clothes on for just anyone.

The great horned owl showed up one summer day, somber and brown. The huge male perched on you your back porch, sometimes for days at a time. An avid raptor watcher, I was envious at first that he chose you. But when he kept returning it started to feel ominous. I’d see him when I drove by, but you knew he was there. “I guess he just likes me” you concluded one day and I chilled. The owl came back every few months, then weeks, eventually days, a harbinger of something. As ominous as the funeral tattoo of the helicopters.

Still you golfed and we ate chicken fried steak at our weekly late breakfasts. You were on prednisone to buy a little time. I was on dexamethasone hoping for a remission. Both of us wishing for different forms of relief living an entire lifetime of age difference. Cranky and tired, comparing bloodwork, there were days only we understood each other. Almost fifty years separated us in age, but my health was just as precarious, some infection trying to kill either one of us at any time. By the point we brunched, I was used to discussing your prostate.

On day ten of an unremitting migraine you offered me viagra and nice dose of weed. Desperate, I almost took both. I’d tried ten different vasoconstrictors at high doses to no avail. We both read the same study on viagra and migraines. “Maybe vasodilators are the answer.” I concluded. “I’ve got it, you’re welcome to it. Some weed would probably be fun if nothing else.”

“The two of us high? I don’t think there are enough donuts in Wells or the whole county!” I laughed. You shrugged with a grin.

The neighbors gossiped, but you didn’t mind, nor did I. You were flattered that they thought I would give in to whatever allure you had left . I hadn’t a care left give. And from our vantage points on our twin hills, we saw a lot more of them than they knew. Most of it ugly.

I finally moved away. You weren’t sad, you were all for the idea. You didn’t like me living in isolation with so little help or opportunity. To you I was marginalized and forgotten in those lonely hills, undervalued and taken for granted. We made plans for you to come north, to golf the gorge and bowl. They were the most unique golf courses in the western part of the country, maybe the whole country, the last original wood floor bowling alley in Idaho. But you never came.

I found out on Facebook just after the new year. Your kids knew who your friends were and should have made some effort to break the news quietly. But, I’m sure it was no surprise to you, they just broadcast it to the world letting everyone be shocked between cat memes.

I rage cleaned nonstop for three days. Again, you probably were not surprised by that.

You left a note, addressed to everyone. That made it to Facebook too. I had it with your kids, but you weren’t exactly a fan either.

My son asked me how you died. We had never discussed it really. I said you had died when it happened and you were old, especially in his young mind, so he really didn’t question it. But we were talking about you one day and he was older and more aware, he wanted some explanation.

I told him I was pretty sure, though it was ultimately speculation, you had a pretty good dose of THC and sedatives, probably had a beer and one of those orange cakes you liked and then just went to sleep, content with a life lived with abandon that you filled with all of the things you hadn’t done earlier. Content that you had gotten tattoos and piercings, had wild affairs, spoke your mind, delighted the children of Wells and perturbed your own ungrateful children.

Three years on, the houses on the high hills sit empty, the desert reclaiming them. The wood parches, the glass etches, the shingles lift and the dust sands away the paint. No one watches over the neighborhood anymore. No one gossips about the gossipers now.

Chartreuse is no one’s favorite color, but yours and it flatters no one, but it suited you some how. Sometimes I think I see you for a second as I charge up the hill and out of the corn deadened bottoms, expecting the wind to rise and you to stop in plume of dust. But the silage trucks roar by, stirring the too humid dustless breeze and a newly fledged owl hoots in the day.