The Lemonade on the Terrace

I am in my late twenties, on a business trip in the southeastern part of the state. Finished by midafternoon, I call my grandmother, in the southwestern part of the state, and ask whether I can come for the night. As if I had to ask! I arrive a couple of hours later and we sit out on the brick terrace that spreads itself beneath the maple tree, drinking lemonade and eating chocolate chip cookies. My grandmother, as I realize 25 years later, is interested in everything about my life, the life that has produced this young woman who has just come from a corporate meeting to sit on the terrace in a silk blouse, a linen skirt, and heels.

We spent many summer afternoons sitting on that terrace and drinking lemonade. I was a little girl in shorts and t-shirts, a student on vacation in jeans and turtlenecks, a lawyer taking a quick break, a young mother welcomed chiefly because of the accompanying three little towheads. Always the grandmother in the housedress and apron, always completely absorbed in everything I had to tell her. Always the brick terrace, always the lemonade.

If you aren't following Funky Winkerbeam in the comics these days, you should be. I had never read it until this week, after someone mentioned that one of the characters has cancer and, in a storyline that began on July 2, has elected to give up medical treatment and focus on the life she has left. She has had to explain herself repeatedly to those who love her. We discussed it last night, me reiterating the questions I had raised about choices as chemo robbed my stepmother of life as surely as her stage four cancer did, and my daughter commenting on our culture's terror of death. The comic strip character's name is Lisa, which is pretty much all I know about her, except that her choices reflect a courage seldom honored in our capitulation to the science of modern medicine.

Today her choice is about lemonade.