"Being as I can't quite see the things I grow anymore," she told me, "I cultivate things that appeal to the other senses." The greenhouse was full of flowers that not only smelled sweet, but were soft to touch as well. Some of the plants grew exotic berries that danced on your tongue when you tasted them. I could see Miss Leticia more clearly in the greenhouse lights now. She was a heavy woman, but she wore her weight well. She had skin like dark chocolate, and her hair was a mess of steel wool pulled into a bun.
She led me to a little cast-iron table and chairs surrounded by staghorn ferns and lilies, but she walked a little too close and banged her shin against one of the chairs with a nasty clang. I grimaced, practically feeling it myself.
"You all right?" I asked.
"Yep. It wasn't me anyway―it was this thing." She lifted her skirt a bit to reveal steel braces that ran up either side of her shin, practically up to her knee. She had them on both legs. "Metal on metal―that's why it sounded so loud. I got steel rods in my back, too―and a pacemaker. Got a grandson calls me Nana Cyborg, on accounta all that metal." She laughed so contagiously, I had to laugh, too. "Then, after all that, I got these cataracts in my eyes, and I said, 'No more!' There'll be no more doctors touching this here body less'n it's to pretty it up for my wake." She laughed again. It seemed strange that she could joke so easily about dying, but then, when you're as old as Miss Leticia, death stops being the enemy.
"Now you just sit yourself down, and I'll go get that tea," she said. She went off into her cottage and returned a few minutes later with a tray.
"It's good to have a guest," she told me. "No one comes around but my son and that horrible wife of his. And all they want to talk about is putting me in a home. But I tell them I got a home."