My Children Booked Me Into A Retirement Community That Bans Dogs And Said It Was “Time To Choose.” So I Called The Widower Down The Road Who Had Two Empty Bedrooms And An Old Bloodhound

It started with the tomatoes. Most things in my life have, one way or another.

I have lived on Sweetgum Road outside Tifton, Georgia, since 1974. My late husband, Bram, and I built the house ourselves on two acres his daddy left him, and we raised two children in it, and I have grown tomatoes in the same bed along the south fence every summer for fifty-one years. Better Boys, mostly, and a few Cherokee Purples, which are ugly as sin and taste like heaven.

Last August I went out early to pick before the heat got bad, and I stepped wrong on the edge of the bed where the railroad tie has gone soft, and down I went. I didn’t break anything. I want that on the record. I bruised my hip something terrible and I scraped up my arm on the tomato cage and I lay there in the dirt for maybe ten minutes, looking up at the sky, waiting for my knees to agree to stand up.

Pudge stayed with me the whole time. Pudge is my dog. He is a corgi mix, ten years old, fox-red with a white chest and a white tip on his tail, and short little legs that make him look like a loaf of bread somebody put feet on. He lay down in the dirt next to me with his chin on my shoulder and barked every thirty seconds, loud, until our mail carrier heard him from the road and came running.

I am seventy-five years old. I got up. I went inside. I put frozen peas on my hip. And I made the very great mistake of mentioning it on the phone to my daughter that Sunday.

Corwin and Simone

My son, Corwin, lives in Atlanta. He is forty-eight and works in commercial insurance, and he has always been a careful boy, the kind who read the instructions on a board game twice before he’d let anybody touch the pieces. My daughter, Simone, lives in Charlotte. She is forty-four and a pharmacist and she is not careful at all. She is the one who calls.

I love them both more than my own life. I want to say that first, because the rest of this story is not going to make them look very good, and they are not bad people. They are frightened people. There is a difference, though it took me a while to remember it.

After the tomato bed, they started talking to each other. I could tell because they started saying the same things in the same words. Mama, you’re out there by yourself. Mama, what if Pudge hadn’t been there. Mama, what if it had been your head.

I told them it wasn’t my head. I told them I had my phone in my apron pocket after that, which was true. I told them Bram’s cousin’s boy came by twice a week to mow and I had Mavis from church on Wednesdays and the mail carrier every day but Sunday. They listened, and they nodded on the video call, and then in October they drove down together, which they have not done since Bram’s funeral, and they sat me down at my own kitchen table with a glossy folder.

The Brochure

It was a very nice folder. I will give them that. Heavy paper, and photographs of smiling white-haired couples playing cards and doing water aerobics and eating salmon at tables with linen napkins. Haverford Pointe Senior Living, it said, in curly gold letters across the top. Independent and assisted living, just outside Macon. Forty minutes from Corwin’s office, an hour from nobody else.

“It’s beautiful, Mama,” Simone said. “They have a salon. They have a library. They have bingo three nights a week.”

“I don’t play bingo,” I said.

“You could learn,” Corwin said.

I turned the pages. There was a floor plan for a one-bedroom unit with a kitchenette. There was a pricing sheet. There was a list of amenities that went on for two pages. And then, on the last page, in small print under the heading Community Guidelines, there was a line that said, Haverford Pointe is a pet-free community.

I read it twice. Then I closed the folder and slid it back across the table.

“Well, that’s that, then,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere I can’t take Pudge.”

Corwin and Simone looked at each other.

“Mama,” Corwin said, in his careful voice. “We already put down the deposit.”

“Time to Choose”

The deposit was twenty-five hundred dollars. They had split it. The unit would be ready the first of December. They had already called a moving company for an estimate. They had been planning it, I found out later, for six weeks, on the phone with each other, without ever once asking me.

“What about Pudge?” I said.

Simone reached over and took my hand. “We found a lovely rescue in Valdosta that takes senior dogs,” she said. “They’d find him a family. A good one. With a yard.”

“He has a family. He has a yard. He has two acres.”

“Mama, he’s ten,” Corwin said. “You’re seventy-five. You can’t be bending over to pick up after a dog. You can’t be walking him on that gravel road in the dark. He’s a trip hazard. That’s literally what the brochure says. Pets are a leading cause of falls in seniors.”

I looked at my son. I looked at the dog, who was lying on the kitchen floor between us with his chin on his paws, looking from one face to the other the way he does when people raise their voices.

“Pudge is the reason I’m sitting here talking to you,” I said. “If it weren’t for him, I’d have lain in that tomato bed till Thursday.”

Simone started to cry. Corwin did not. He folded his hands on the table and said the thing I have not been able to get out of my head since.

“Mama, I love you. But it’s time to choose. Bingo or a mutt.”

I don’t know if he meant it to come out like that. I think he had practiced something gentler and it came out wrong. But that is what he said, and it sat there on the table between us next to the glossy folder.

They went back to their hotel. I sat at the kitchen table for a long time after they left, with the light going down outside and Pudge’s warm weight against my feet. I thought about what Bram would have said. He would have said, Margery, nobody gets to tell you who you are at your own table.

Then I thought about Kurt Farrow.

The Widower Down the Road

Kurt Farrow lives a half mile east of me on Sweetgum Road, in a yellow farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a tin roof that rings like a bell when it rains. He is seventy-seven. He was the band director at the high school for thirty-six years, and both my children marched in his band, Corwin on trombone and Simone on clarinet, badly. Everyone in Tift County over the age of forty can still hum the fight song he wrote in 1981.

His wife, Cordelia, died four years ago. She and I were in the same circle at church for thirty years. I sat with her at the end, some afternoons, so Kurt could sleep. After she passed, he did what a lot of men do. He went quiet and stayed in. I brought him casseroles for a while, and then I brought him tomatoes, and after a while he started walking down the road in the evenings with his dog to sit on my porch and talk.

His dog is Hank. Hank is a bloodhound, eleven years old, with ears that drag on the ground and a face like a sad old judge and a howl you can hear in the next county. He and Pudge love each other. It is the most ridiculous thing you ever saw. Hank lies down in my yard like a collapsed tent and Pudge climbs right on top of him and goes to sleep.

Kurt and I sit on the porch on those evenings and talk about our children and our dead and the weather and the Braves. He has said to me, more than once, in the way a man says something he means but does not expect to be taken up on, “Margery, that house of mine has two bedrooms nobody’s slept in since Cordelia’s sister moved to Tampa. If you ever get tired of rattling around down here, you know where I am.”

I always laughed. He always laughed.

That night after my children left, I picked up the phone and called him.

The Phone Call

He answered on the second ring. I could hear the television in the background, a ball game, and Hank snoring.

“Kurt,” I said. “It’s Margery. Were you serious about the bedrooms?”

There was a long pause. The television went quiet.

“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life,” he said. “Why? What happened?”

I told him. All of it. The tomato bed and the folder and the deposit and the rescue in Valdosta and bingo or a mutt. He listened without saying anything, the way he used to listen to a band run through a piece before he told the trumpets they were flat.

When I finished, he said, “Margery, can I tell you something? I fell in my kitchen in June. Slipped on Hank’s water. Lay there for an hour before I could get up. I didn’t tell my boys because I knew they’d say exactly what yours said.”

“Kurt.”

“I’m fine. I’m just saying. You don’t want to go to Macon. I don’t want to go anywhere. Neither one of us should be alone out here on this road. And those two dogs would lose their minds with joy.”

“People will talk,” I said.

“Margery,” he said. “We’re in our seventies. People talking is the most exciting thing that could happen to either one of us.”

I laughed so hard I had to sit down.

Then we made a plan.

What We Worked Out

We are practical people, Kurt and I. We were both married for over forty years and we both know that love is mostly logistics. So we sat down at his kitchen table the next morning with a legal pad and a pot of coffee and worked it all out, the same way I imagine Corwin and Simone had worked out Haverford Pointe on the phone, except we did it to each other’s faces.

I would take the bedroom at the back of the house, the one with its own bathroom and the window that looks out on his pecan trees. He would keep his room at the front. We would split the groceries and the light bill down the middle. I would cook, because Kurt’s idea of cooking is a can of chili and a sleeve of saltines, and he would do the dishes and the yard and anything that required a ladder, because I am not allowed on ladders anymore and I know it. We would each keep our own car and our own church pew and our own friends. If either one of us fell, the other one would be there in five minutes. If either one of us got sick, the other would make the phone calls.

And the dogs would have run of the whole place.

My own house I would rent. Mavis from church had a great-niece, a young nurse named Amberly Sutton, just starting at the hospital in Tifton and looking for a place with room for a garden. I called her that afternoon. She came out that evening and walked through every room with her hand over her mouth and then went out back and stood at the south fence and looked at my tomato bed and said, “Ms. Sowell, can I keep this?”

“You’d better,” I said.

The rent would pay my share at Kurt’s and then some. I would keep the house in my name. It would still be mine. It would still be there for Corwin and Simone someday, the way Bram wanted.

Moving Day

I did not tell my children right away. I am not proud of that. But they had not told me about the deposit for six weeks, and I decided I was owed a little time of my own.

I called Haverford Pointe on the Monday and told the woman in the office very politely that I would not be needing the unit. She said the deposit was nonrefundable. I said I imagined it was and that she should take it up with my son.

Then, on the first Saturday of December, the day the moving company had been scheduled to take me to Macon, the moving company came. Kurt had called them and changed the address. Two young men in gray shirts carried my bed and my dresser and my sewing machine and Bram’s old recliner and four boxes of photographs a half mile east down Sweetgum Road and into the back bedroom of the yellow farmhouse with the tin roof.

Corwin and Simone drove down that same morning to help me move into Haverford Pointe. They had not called ahead. They were going to surprise me.

They pulled into my driveway at ten-thirty and found Amberly Sutton on the front porch in a pair of overalls, hanging a fern.

The Yellow House

Simone called me from my own driveway. She was not crying this time. She was shouting.

“Mama, where are you? There’s a girl living in your house!”

“She’s renting,” I said. “I’m at Kurt’s.”

There was a silence on the line that went on so long I thought the call had dropped.

“Kurt Farrow’s?” she said finally. “Mr. Farrow? The band director?”

“He has two empty bedrooms,” I said. “And an old bloodhound.”

I heard Corwin’s voice in the background say, “She’s WHERE?”

They drove the half mile down the road. I watched them come from Kurt’s porch swing, where I was sitting with a cup of coffee and Pudge in my lap. They got out of Corwin’s car and stood in the gravel and looked at the house. Hank got up off the porch boards, ambled down the steps, walked straight up to Corwin, and leaned his whole weight against my son’s legs, the way bloodhounds do, until Corwin had to put a hand on the car to keep from tipping over.

Kurt came out of the front door with a dish towel over his shoulder.

“Corwin,” he said. “Simone. You two want some coffee? Your mother made biscuits. I’m told I’m not allowed to touch them until the gravy’s done.”

Corwin looked at Kurt. He looked at me. He looked at the bloodhound leaning against his knees. And then, slowly, his face did something I had not seen it do since he was sixteen years old and dropped his trombone in the middle of the homecoming halftime show. It went from red to something like surrender.

“Mr. Farrow,” he said. “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

The Talk on the Porch

We had biscuits and gravy at Kurt’s kitchen table. Kurt showed them the back bedroom with my quilt on the bed and Bram’s recliner in the corner and my photographs on the dresser. He showed them the grab bars he had installed in my bathroom on Thursday with his own two hands. He showed them the list on the refrigerator with both our children’s phone numbers on it, and Mavis’s, and Amberly’s, and the doctor’s.

After breakfast, Simone and I sat on the porch swing while Corwin and Kurt walked the dogs down to the pecan trees.

“Mama,” Simone said. “Are you and Mr. Farrow, like.” She made a face. “Are you together?”

“We’re housemates,” I said. “We split the light bill.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting,” I said. “I’m seventy-five years old, baby. I’m allowed a little privacy.”

She laughed. Then she stopped laughing and put her head on my shoulder like she used to when she was small.

“We were so scared,” she said. “After the tomatoes. Corwin had nightmares. He told me he dreamed he called you and you didn’t pick up and he drove down and found you in the garden.”

“I know you were scared,” I said. “But you didn’t ask me what I wanted. You just decided I was a problem and went looking for a place to put me.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“I’m sorry about bingo or a mutt,” she said finally. “That was Corwin. He feels terrible. He just doesn’t know how to say it.”

Down by the pecan trees, I watched my son kneel down in the leaves in his good Atlanta slacks and let Pudge climb up into his lap and lick his face. Hank stood beside them like a patient old judge. Kurt stood a little off to the side with his hands in his pockets, giving them room.

“I think he’s saying it now,” I said.

Sweetgum Road

That was eleven months ago. I am still in the back bedroom of the yellow farmhouse. Amberly Sutton is still in my house, and this summer she grew the best Cherokee Purples I have ever tasted on that south fence, and she brings us a basket every Saturday. She replaced the soft railroad tie on the edge of the bed. She said she didn’t want anybody else falling in it.

Corwin calls every Sunday now. He asks how Pudge is before he asks how I am, which I have decided is his way of apologizing. Simone came down for the Fourth of July with her husband and they stayed in the front room, and Kurt set off fireworks in the pasture that Hank howled at for two solid hours. Haverford Pointe never refunded the deposit. Corwin says he considers it tuition.

Kurt and I sit on the porch most evenings. He reads the paper to me because my eyes get tired. I tell him when the trumpets on the radio are flat, and he tells me I’m wrong, and I’m usually not. Pudge sleeps on Hank. Hank sleeps on the porch boards. When it rains, the tin roof rings like a bell, and the dogs come inside and lie in a heap on the rug between our two chairs, and the house is so full of breathing that I can’t hear myself think.

I fell once more, in September. In Kurt’s kitchen, of all places. On Hank’s water bowl, of all things. Kurt was there in under a minute. He helped me up and sat me down and put frozen peas on my knee, and then he went out and bought one of those weighted bowls that doesn’t spill. Neither of us told the children.

Some choices aren’t between bingo and a mutt. Some choices are between being kept safe and being kept alive, and the people who love you most don’t always know the difference. I didn’t know it myself for a while. It took a dog in a tomato bed and an old band director down the road to remind me.

If you love someone who is getting older, pass this along before you put down a deposit on their life. Ask them first what they want to keep. Sometimes the answer has four short legs and a white tip on its tail, and sometimes it lives a half mile down the road.

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