Nearing seventy, I find freedom in my aloneness. No one to tell me when to eat, sleep, or milk the cows. No looming parents hovering nearby to make sure I ‘act right’ and eat my vegetables, even the disgusting canned green beans, limp as seaweed hanging from a whale’s mouth. Now, I skip breakfast altogether or drink a chocolate smoothie instead of my mother’s porridge so thick the serving spoon stood straight up in the saucepan. I lived for the day I would leave home and be on my own at the age of seventeen, working jobs, and enjoying a paycheck that freed me from living under someone’s thumb.
My parents were replaced by husbands who hampered my good times and left me exhausted from trying to keep them happy despite my possessing a rebellious nature that couldn’t be confined to the ideals of others. I was driven by hard work, causing me to bear down on words, encapsulating them in spectacular sentences that filled a paragraph and then sighed with relief when I finished showing off my love of language. In college, I discovered my words possessed monetary value, and so I began to sell them. Eventually, I concluded freedom can only be found when soaring above the fray in a mystical bubble untethered by my own desires.