The Boy Who Brought The Coats Back

The winter my body quit

I am seventy years old now, and this past year my body finally sat me down for a talk I had been putting off.

It is my heart. The doctor up in the city has a long name for it, but what it comes down to is that the muscle is tired, and it does not pump the way it used to, and I cannot do what I did at fifty. I cannot carry the bins of coats up from my basement. I cannot stand at the rail for three hours sorting a whole season in. I get up out of a chair and the room goes gray at the edges and I have to hold the counter and wait for it to come back.

I retired from the cooking four years ago, when my legs could not take the standing. But I kept the closet. The new principal, Mr. Garvey, a young man with a kind face and a whole head of worries, told me I was welcome in that building as long as I wanted to be, closet and all. I came in twice a week on my own steam and kept it stocked, and the children still came to the window, except now the window was the office window and the secretary knew the password.

This September I tried to do the fall sort the way I always had. The coats had piled up over the summer in my basement, boxes and bags of them, and they needed washing and mending and tagging and carrying in.

I got through two boxes and I had to sit down on my basement stairs for twenty minutes before I could climb them.

I sat there on that step with a child’s coat in my lap, a little blue one somebody had dropped off, and I understood, the way you understand a thing all at once after dodging it for years, that I could not do this anymore.

I cried on that step. I am not ashamed to say it. Earl was gone and my hands would not work and my heart would not hold and the one thing I had built that I was proud of, the one thing, was heavier than I was.