It was a small building, with the walls painted cream and the thick atmosphere longing in its lack of spark or energy, enveloping the old, declining lives of a forgotten part of humanity. Stepping into the air-conditioned shelter, the heels on my sandals clacked against the hard wooden flooring, making a loud sound that seemed out of place in the silence of the nursing home.
It was the first day at the nursing home. I walked into the elderly center with just a big stack of my paintings and a big heart. I was nervous, not really because I was scared or afraid, but more because I wasn’t so sure how it would go or how the people would react to me.
“Many of the elderly have been living here a long time, you might have trouble talking to them at first”. The director had told me the other day during orientation, which didn't do much to comfort me.
I hesitated as I walked into a room, where an old woman was crouched near a window, squinting at a something or nothing outside, looking but not truly looking at anything. Her face was as blank as paper before the poem. There was something lonely about the way she sat by the window, the way that so many of the people here sat their sadness on an elbow, which made you want to know her story.
“Erm… hello there! I’m Susanqi.”
I was self-consciously aware of the way the sound of my voice bounced against the walls of the room, floating around in the stillness of the room, like moth wings around the dim light of a lamp. I cursed myself for having such an unusual name, just one more aspect of myself that would probably alienate myself from the elders.
The woman near the window slowly turned around. Her face was tired and yet not completely forlorn and her eyes were the murky color the sky turns right before it rains. But when she saw me, it was magical: the rainclouds in her eyes dissipated and the wrinkles in her eyes, that just a second ago made her look old and sad, suddenly made her seem ancient but at the same time, magical and delicate. Like an unopened book collecting dust in the corner, whose story has yet to be seen or heard by the world.
“Hello dear.” She said, her voice coming in wisps, as soft as whipped cream and comforting as a gentle autumn gale.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Margaret.”
“Nice to meet you Margaret. I have a little something for you.”
Slowly, I took out a picture of a cat and a picture of a barnyard and put the two paintings in from of her.
What happened next was beautiful and tragic and magical and miraculous.
She took the picture of the cat and in a voice that was both soft and hard, both broken and alive, she said, “This- this looks just like my kitty-cat. When I was younger.”
I didn’t know how to react. I was scared to react; like the moon’s reflection in the clear water of a lake, the moment was beautiful- yet one touch, one sound, one movement could completely shatter the mirage.
“We had to leave her at my home when I came to this nursing home. I loved her so much and I’ve never forgotten her. I wonder if someone is taking good care of her. Oh I do hope so…”
Time seemed to stop and take up a mind of its own. Although sitting in this little dank nursing room, Margaret was already borne back into the past and it was impossible to bring her back.
Gently, almost as if the watercolor painting I had made was the Mona Lisa rather than a simple picture I brushed up of a broken down shack down in rural Maryland, she gazed at it with a child-like wonder and at that moment I almost forgot the woman in front of me was almost 80 years old and her whole life was almost behind her.
“This reminds me of my husband, back when we were young.” She croaked out faintly, her storm cloud eyes brimming with tears. If it weren’t so completely quiet in that room, you probably wouldn’t even hear her silky voice, as translucent and fine as threads of spider web on a dewy March morning.
For the next few moments, the silence hung above us, thicker than a summer sky in mid-August, right before the clouds reaches its capacity limit and in a relieving, cool wave every last drop comes rushing out. And just like that, Margaret also could not hold in the story that had been collecting dust inside of her for so many years, and a downpour of retaken memories came spewing out.

“We… we used to own a broken down barn in Kansas. Oh lord it’s such a long time ago… I hardly remember… He loved that damned barn too much and I was always on his case to move somewhere else, to the city, but no… him and that damned barn. Well I still left for the city, but he stayed at that barn. He waited for me to come back and I waited for him to come for me.” She sighed affectionately. “I can see him standing right there… see right next to the hens.”
She pointed to the porch steps depicted in my painting, almost as if her husband was really standing there at the edge of the barn beneath the cover of the barn roof, still the young man she pictured in her mind with one arm outstretched, beckoning for her to come back to him.
“You wouldn’t believe it now, but I was quite the lady when I was younger. All the boys, especially my husband, had always said I was beautiful.” She laughed, her laughter like the clear sound of water pouring into a tall glass and her eyes changing from dark storm clouds to twinkling night stars. In that split moment, she looked so young and so alive that I believed her.
“Well, anyhow, my husband’s dead now… long gone. But not long forgotten.”
For a few minutes, as Margaret gazed at the masterpieces in her hand, I gazed at this mysterious and magical masterpiece sitting in front of me. She was a work of art herself, worn and weathered with age, the kind of art that some people spend their whole life trying to figure out. Ancient and crippled, yet her soul was still alive, calling for life.
I left Margaret to look at the two paintings. When I peeked into her room again, her ghostly figure was still sitting at her place beside the window in her tiny room, but she wasn’t really there. This figure sitting by the window was merely an apparition. Margaret’s heart was in another place, another time period, another life.
That day, I left the nursing home, my heart heavy but brighter.