Become a Crazy Old Lady in 3 Easy Steps
1. Garden naked 🌷
I grew up across the street from a woman that the neighborhood collectively referred to as a crazy old lady — I’m sure you had such a woman in your neighborhood.
Let’s call my crazy old lady, Martha, because I’m certain she’s still alive though there’s no chance in hell she or anyone she loves will ever read this. Martha was notorious for three things:
Leaving her car running in her driveway for hours.
Her dogs escaping out her front door and roaming the neighborhood.
Doing her gardening in her robe with nothing on underneath.
Each of these signature traits of Martha were revealed to me over a period of time like a Greek play, but without a chorus commenting on the dramatic action. As each of these character traits were revealed to me, my own character developed and I learned something new about life. In the final act, the defining moment of both Martha and me, I saw her from the window of our living room, bent over and pulling weeds in her front yard garden with nothing on but a light robe. That’s right, nothing underneath.
I remember feeling conflicted about what to do. I sat on the couch hoping she would go back inside and no one else would see her. It was only seven in the morning, surely no one else was up yet and I could keep this secret, our secret. I could protect Martha. But I also couldn’t believe Martha would do this, even considering all the times I retrieved her loose dogs. But I wanted someone else to confirm I didn’t hallucinate this scandalous image before me.
I ran to find my mother at the kitchen table and begged her to look out the front window. She reluctantly pulled herself away from her crossword and coffeecake to quiet my incessant begging. I waited for her in the kitchen and when she returned she was cackling like a witch. But she didn’t say anything to me, only patted me on my little coconut head, and went back to her crossword.
Once I was a teenager, I barely saw Martha any more. It was less often that I was staring out the window on a Saturday morning or home to help her wrangle her loose dogs. I was at a volleyball tournament or working at the pet store or at friends house. But when I did get home at night, my neighbors were often on their stoops or in their driveways drinking beers and talking shit. They always welcomed me over even though I was only sixteen, and I would swell with pride at being included in their adult conversations. They had real gossip about the neighborhood, stories that I lived through, but went right over my head as a small child.
On one of these nights, Martha came over to say hi. She was pleasant and nothing about her seemed crazy at all — though she was only in her robe. She seemed to me just a woman and I couldn’t really remember why my mother had called her a crazy old lady in the first place. She only paused to talk for a minute or two and as soon as she left, my neighbors started laughing. I didn’t know what was so funny. They all seemed to know something I didn’t know. But then someone brought up her habit of near naked gardening. Something I had only seen once and didn’t find funny at all —and apparently forgotten about.
I haven’t thought about Martha in over ten years, but she’s been on my mind in the last week. I happened to walk past her car the other day and while it was sitting in her driveway idling, I noticed a bumper sticker supporting a woman’s right to choose. I was shocked to see that sticker on her car. Crazy ladies don’t have correct opinions on bodily autonomy, I thought. And since then I’ve been reconsidering everything I thought I knew about Martha.
Where did her title of crazy old lady actually came from? Was she outspoken? Did she argue with the people of my rather conservative neighborhood? Was she gardening nearly naked to piss people off? Were her dogs escaping to express their free spirits?
Through these questions I realized this was another one of those childhood memories that I had to reconsider because the lens that shaped the world in my youth was warped by the adults around me. And while I have largely unpacked and thrown away those opinions forced onto me, it’s these personal revelations that really hit the hardest. The moments where I recognize someone’s humanity after I peel back all the judgements placed on them.
And through this peeling, I saw a bit of myself in Martha, and I would even argue we could all find ourselves in the crazy old lady of our neighborhood. Catch me outside, half naked, plucking tomatoes from my garden.