COUNTING BLESSINGS BECAUSE SHEEP MAKE TOO MUCH NOISE

I am grateful for many things; some days, there are too many to remember.  Tonight, sleepless, I will try.

My daughters are brilliant creatures, sparkly and unique.  One little butterfly flutters, unhindered, because I can give that to her.  One desperately wishes to fly, or flee, but all I can give her is love and advice, and sympathize with her at the clipped state of her almost-grown wings.

My darling love exists as a perfectly magical concoction of easy quiet charm and intellect, kindness, integrity, and beauty: all soft hazel-green eyes and perfect black hair and a laugh that passes through walls and pierces my heart.  He writes things that make me shiver and smile, sometimes at the same time.  I think I dreamed him into being.

My home is full of nice places to sit.  That’s all any home really needs as praise.  My daughter would praise the quality of its back yard, and the freedom she has to sculpt it into her world.  Me, I like to sit.  It’s still too cold for me out there.  Pretty soon, I’ll be singing the praises of the bike trails, but not yet.

I can fix things and build things, thanks to my Papa.  Old plumbing and I are old friends, and I can hammer and saw and piece together what I have to keep a home in working order.

My hands do my bidding, and my walls and my blanket chest and my closet can vouch for that.  Paintings and blankets and dresses without zippers or buttons…

My mind works in ways that make me feel competent in this world.  I adapt, rarely feeling like an odd bird if I am given a chance to see how the other birds do things.  Then I do things my way, and things just work out somehow.

I have just enough money in the bank each month to pay my bills and have a little left over.  That feels right and good.  Lean times will come again, and that’s fine.  I can squeeze a penny until Lincoln cries, so that we can have hot fudge sundaes down at the Dairy Haven whenever we like: my version of balancing the budget.

And balance…that one, I’m learning.  I am grateful for the chance to fail and try again at maintaining balance.  Just recently, things got quite out of whack.  Today, I adjusted my thinking and gave myself the option of failure, which was a success.  There are not just second chances, but third and fourth and…here, the daughter would interrupt me to remind me of the “infinity”.

Speaking of failure, I got an A on my last essay, and an A on my last exam.  Grateful to have accomplished that in the midst of out-of-whackness.

My list ends here tonight.  Not sleepless any more.

Easter is this Sunday.  For the first time in years, I won’t be a Pie Lady in my pink apron and rainbow pearls; instead, I’ll get enough sleep and stay on top of my readings.  I miss pie, but I belong where I am for now.  For that, I am grateful.

 

JUNK IN MY DREAMS

I treasure my dreams, and treat them as privileged vignettes into my subconscious.  When that tiny window throws back its shutters, you can bet I’m looking in and taking note of who’s undressing in my head.

It’s always me, but the me that keeps quiet and makes wishes, and the me that shushes the fussing so that I can get on with the business of Real Life.

I dream of tiny houses that overflow.  Rooms stack upon one another like toy blocks, and improbably cantilevered porches and balconies project from the pile.  I see the houses from outside, mostly.  My hands are busy with rocks and sticks and dirt and flowers and every manner of yummy growing thing, but I watch what floats out of the windows and onto the lawn.  Sometimes, washes of color waft into the air.  Other times, letters made of soft, pliable stuff bounce out, and I try to read what they say.  Babies’ noises happen, accompanied by mommy and daddy noises.  Whose baby?  Whose mommy?

Blankets on the grass hold babies sometimes, and I hold the babies.  Other people come and go, versions of loved ones in other times, but the babies stay.  I ask the babies who they are, but they never tell, so I just hug them and bounce them and let them fall asleep in my arms.

I find tables set for twelve, with my dishes, in that garden.  The pitchers and plates hidden in my real cupboards, improbable quantities of them, show up in my dreams.

Chairs also play very important parts.  Chairs aren’t just chairs, now, are they?  A chair has a relationship with the body it supports. I love chairs, especially ones that make noise when I sit.  I gather homeless chairs from the sidewalk and bring them home, and with baling wire and glue and screws and hope, I try to make them sturdy, try to make them feel useful again.  This is reality.  In my former husband’s basement is a collection of worried chairs.  They need to be rescued, washed clean of mildew, polished, and put to use.  I worry with them.

In dreams, these chairs and others live outdoors and in, on porches and on the lawn.  People in the dreams prefer one chair strongly over another, claim them, and the chairs are happy.  I want the chairs to be happy when I pick them from the street.  Seeing them, still creaky but strong and polished, makes me feel hopeful.  Why chairs?  And why do I grab them dirty from the curb, even in my dreams?

In the dreaming house, shelves line the walls.  Nothing is hidden, because everything is pleasant to see.  I run my fingers over the feathery edges of stacks of papers and smile.  Some are fresh and stiff, some crumble just a little when they’re touched. Hiding papers in cabinets is the work of fools.  Paper should be touched and seen, like books.  Words on paper are so powerful…why do we want to stuff them into little prisons and call ourselves “organized”?  I’ll never own a file cabinet, dreams tell me.  I don’t own one now.  My love worries over his papers, but I like seeing the piles of things in his house.  He’ll see the magic in those piles some day.  Until then, I stack them on shelves alongside papers of my own in my dreams.

The tiny houses in my dreams are made of other people’s junk.  Nothing is seamless.  Nothing matches.  If nothing matches, everything fits and everything is welcome.  If everything is junk, nothing is junk.

I don’t analyze the junk in my dreams, I just watch.  My subconscious keeps itself busy, and I enjoy the show.  I talk a little about the stuff in my sleeping head, but it really matters to no one but me, and talking too much leads to questions being put to me: what does it mean?  How do you feel about that?

Simply, the junk in my head means something important, but I allow the images to muster action or drift away into forgottenness.  The stuff sifts itself out, without my help.  I feel good about that.  I learn things about myself without working too hard.  I’ll probably build some shelves out of things I find on the street this spring.  The dishes want to be seen, as I understand them.  I’ll brave the basement that isn’t mine any more to rescue the chairs and make them sturdier, and coat them with enough marine varnish that they’ll endure life indoors and out.  The little babies, well, I’ll keep borrowing them and giving them back.

 

 

POP STAR ATE MY BABY

So, we’re experiencing a phenomenon of fast-forwarding here at the Cottage.  My baby has opinions, and I’m not talking about food preferences or “this is itchy” kind of stuff.

She thinks things through and makes life suggestions to me, The Mommy.  Sometimes, she’s right.  I do need to trim my nose hairs and carry less driftwood and fewer rocks in the car.

Getting the big bedroom is one case in point.  She made her plea, didn’t gripe or whine–never has whined in her life, but I’ve seen it happen to The Unfortunates, the mommies who pull a squeak toy out of the great baby grab bag of the Universe.  She had good reasons, and I agreed.  Big room, it is.

Now, she has taste in music.  She has grown up listening to everything from The Beatles to The Dead to Gaga to funny raunchy drinking songs from Ren Faires.  “Dough, I use to buy my beer…Ray, the guy who pours my beer…”  Now, pop music has entered her head.  I’m talking POP, not edgy in any way.  Sure, she can and does sing that thrift store song in an edited-for-parents version, to gig me for my taste in used clothes that might have belonged to someone’s (VERY FASHIONABLE) grandma.  But One Direction?  Selena Gomez?  She’s been sucked into the tween machine at seven.

I’m going along.  Grandma bought her a Pop Star magazine subscription.  The posters went up the moment she walked through the door.

I was on the phone with Grandma when she quietly muttered, “Where’s the tape?”

She closed her bedroom door for the first time today while she hung her pop stars on her walls.

Then there’s the hat issue.  I love putting cute hats on that little round head.  She now only wants to wear one of two: an owl, because she saw someone on my college campus wearing one like it and it came from her awesome Aunt, and a crocheted granny-square hat with a flower, made by Two Crow Crochet.  That one, she says, makes her feel like a cool girl, a teenager.  No one else has that hat.  I have one in black; hers is more colorful.  She actually calls it her Cool Hat.  Even her tiny Goth-to-be friend digs that hat.

Grandma hit a home run with Pop Star, but Two Crow takes the cake on headgear.  I kind of took credit for that one, even though I didn’t actually buy it.  It was a gift…that I can’t pull off of her little round head.

At least I can find balance here.  Her favorite hats really do rock. Her taste in music still includes some things that we can both enjoy.  We’ll always have Gaga, and she only knows the beer version of Do-Re-Mi; I can endure One Direction until she “discovers” The Dead Milkmen and Suicidal Tendencies and D.R.I. and The Sugar Cubes and The Violent Femmes and…

A mommy can hope.

 

Oh, and if you want to see some cool hats that you will love as much as my kid does, go to this address: https://www.facebook.com/TwoCrowCrochetAndCake?fref=ts

FURNITURE AND OTHER HISTORY

When Mary nearly married into “new” money, and she and her fiance almost bought an estate near Downton, she asked her outrageously wealthy husband-to-be with what they would furnish it.  He told her that they would buy new furniture.  The idea had not occurred to Mary.  In her family, one inherited household goods.

Know what happens when a dirt-poor girl moves out of the house?  She takes any stick of furniture that the family can spare. Chances are, her parents and theirs did the same.  I furnished my first apartment with no output of cash whatsoever, and it felt like home.  I grew up with that chair, that clock, that quilt, and so did my mother.  When I want to change things up, I hand these things off to other family members.  Everything stays in the closed loop.  Useful objects are treasured and preserved.  No one will ever wash the Cornbread Spoon in soapy water.  Well, he did once, but we’re not together any more.

No, it wasn’t over the spoon, but almost.

My kitchen could be completely functional with only what my grandmother gave me and what I inherited when she died.  Her pots and pans and spoons and skillets came from many places, but mostly from her granny and her mother-in-law.  I cut bread with a knife used by my German great-grandmother and I fry bacon in a skillet used by my great-grandmother’s Daughter of the Revolution mother.  I mash potatoes in the same bowl, serve meat on the same platter, and bake brownies in the same pans that were used in my childhood.  No one bought them during my lifetime, or maybe even in my mother’s.  These things just…are.  The Cornbread Spoon is still the Cornbread Spoon, and that’s that.

Some things have rotated among family members so often that I can only vaguely remember who finally made (great great) Aunt Kate’s bedstead stand upright again after getting damaged in storage.  It was her wedding bed, and then my aunt’s, but I don’t know where it lived in the decades in between.  Aunt Cindy used it until my mother needed it and Cindy needed a bigger bed.  Then my mother needed a bigger bed, and it came to my daughters.  They abhorred sleeping alongside one another–one kicks, one talks–and it came to me.  Now it’s back to my youngest daughter, who will probably take it with her when she leaves home.  She knows that she has her great-great-great aunt’s bed.  That means something, like the Cornbread Spoon means something.

It means that we value quality things because we unwilling or unable to replace them with quality things.  If that bedstead has survived so many generations of Prott-Goss-Hartlieb-Tevis shuffling, it can outlast us all.  We just keep getting different mattresses.

Some things we gleaned from the house bought by my grandparents after Papa’s retirement.  The other family took what they wanted and left the rest.  Oh, that’s some good stuff.  A real craftsman-mission rocker lives with me, and four chairs–two pairs, not alike–and a kitchen table whose legs rotted away at the bottom so I cut them off to make a coffee table.  Somewhere in the family, there’s a parlor table that matches mine, but mine is a little warped.  That’s okay.

I have a set of dressers from that house, midcentury modern and heavy as lead.  My cousin has a dressing table from the 20s in pieces as side tables now, and the matching armoire belonged to my baby daughter until it was dropped in a move.  I let it go, but I mourn it.  My mother used it when she left my father, and the sound of the doors of that armoire opening and shutting reminded me of peace and freedom and the power of being a woman.  The bed belonging to that set was hers, too, until she got married.  Then, for a very short time, it was mine, but it was too short…literally.  I am long.  People used to be smaller, like my tiny mother.  My head touched the top and my feet pressed flat on the bottom when I laid flat, and it stayed in the house where it started, the New House, when the house was sold.  They probably threw it out.  That’s okay, too.

My grandparents’ first dresser, taken from my grandfather’s family home,  lived with me after my first marriage, but  my temporary He took it outside and painted it kelley green one day while I was at work.  I saved the mirror from that green fate, and my shock and disappointment made him take an axe to the frame and the drawers, still wet with fresh paint.  I never really understood why, but I don’t have that husband any more, either.  I do have the mirror.  And the axe.

When I moved into this little cottage with my small daughter, the sole brave friend willing to help me move asked if I had ANY FUCKING FURNITURE MADE IN CHINA.  His back suffered at my lack of modern, mass-produced chipboard.

The furnishings given to me by generous friends with fat wallets and good taste, to add to what I took away from my marital home, have become symbols of emancipation, heavy and solid in their own right.  The few things I’ve acquired after the move are, as a rule, older than I am.  I’m not an antique snob, I just don’t want to ever buy another of that THING again.  My desk will outlast me, and if I am very lucky, my daughter will tell her family about the time that her mama went to an estate sale just to see the inside of a cool old house–common occurrence–and left with a nineteenth century library table tied to the top of her Honda.

I like my old things, because they are a part of my heritage as a poor, small-town, Midwestern woman.  We save.  We take care.  We remember.

FOR SUNBEAMS

 

Calendar, calendar, calendar.  Spring?  Come on.

No green in the treetops, just grackles.  I check every morning, right after I locate my glasses. Sure, a daffodil or two has done its thing around town.  The butcher said that a customer had opened her pool on St. Patrick’s Day last year.  That would be fine by me.

We found signs in the back yard today, despite the chill.  The daughter can translate anything into Spring, and incite celebration.  We don’t have a daffodil here, but we have the tiniest blue and white flowers in the lawn.  We have clumps of grassy leaves, winter squill maybe, that deserved to be photographed.  Of course, the moss that grows bristly hairs had to be deeply inspected and documented.  Her beaming smile, over these tiny tiny discoveries, was Spring to me.   She had hoped that a handful of maple-leaf buds was really a handful of bugs, brown and scaly.  Sorry, baby.  We kept them anyway.

Tomorrow, if I am very lucky, the sun will wake me again before the alarm.  This bed and this window conspire to improve my wellbeing until the days really do turn into a new season.  Light blasts through that tall, bare window on cloudless mornings.  Today, all sun.  No clouds for the first time in a long time.

Maybe this is the lifting of the fog.  Maybe unexpected waves of melancholy will ebb away on the sunbeams.  Maybe those daughter smiles are sunbeamy enough…

For the chance to see morning before I open my eyes, I risk sleeping with a bare window.  The neighbors’ views are blocked all around, but a determined peeper could get an eyeful in the night.

Totally worth that risk.

I QUIT.

People often feel as if we are trapped, when we live in a society where we see so many problems.  Unemployment, terrible recession, reduced opportunity, low pay, bachelor’s degree just to get a clerical job.  How do we make these barriers scalable?  How do I make these barriers scalable?

Where do my passions lie?  Where do I excel?  What makes me feel useful?

I jumped into a nursing education to be a unit of facilitation to better the world.  Better the world, what a set of words to put together.  I couldn’t do that, so I do this instead.  I study people’s interactions, and apply other people’s theories…to get good grades, and earn a degree.

If I force myself to march in lockstep with the university reward system, rather than really understand the reality of what I make of myself in the process, my time here is a prison of my own making.  Unacceptable.  Where can an alterative be found?  How can the process become meaningful and useful?

What to do, and where to go with this knapsack of knowledge?

(How much will really stay with me?–a worry.)

Betterment of the world, abstract and undefinable.  Helping individuals, plan A.  Helping society, plan B.  This is my admission that I have no idea how to do that.  I have no idea, and the scariest part is that my lack of awareness fills every waking moment with a feeling of detachment from my actions.

My displaced goal has become getting the A.  The original goal got swept aside somewhere.  It’s time to turn inward for a while, and look past the finish line of B.A. and G.P.A and G.R.E. and any other symbol of success.

The grades still matter, and I can’t help but enjoy the good ones.  I plan to take the time to retake classes to make bad ones better.  I quit the blind march, the comforting group lockstep, and I throw myself against the barriers with every fiber of my being.

This is my official notice.

 

 

CONSEQUENCES OF HUMMING

Today, the family I lured to myself has grown by one and shrunk by one. For a long time, we were four. I was a member. I belonged, and I was essential. We made a new baby, and the family was solidified by her birth, though getting to that point hurt deeply.

My pregnancy was neither expected nor welcomed. I dreaded telling him, and his response broke my heart just a little. He sat up from the couch, where we had been stretched out and watching TV. Sat up, put his head in his hands, and lamented that he already had two children to put through college. How could he afford another? Where would we put a baby in that old house? One of the kids would have to share a room, unfairly. They would resent the baby, not want to be with him through the week any more. He might lose stake in his unofficial full custody…

I had already thought of all of these things. He just said them out loud. Now, he doesn’t remember saying any of it, but that’s not a surprise. Bad things go away for him, even if he’s done or said the bad thing. Maybe especially when he’s done it.

We were not married, and he had no intention of marrying me. He was still married to his wife, who lived just down the street on our block. That would have to be dealt with, not on his schedule, and he was angry and worried. They had been separated for years, but the divorce wasn’t something that either of them wanted to address. He wanted full custody and to make no payments. She wanted to save her pride.

They found a way to save her pride and give him what he wanted. I hoped for some sort of commitment offer when everything was signed, safety from the sadness that I knew would come from having our baby born into uncertainty. Instead, I signed up for welfare benefits to pay for birth. My pride was shattered. He refused to discuss marrying me, no different than before. Carrying my first and probably only child came wrapped in anxiety and shame. Sitting with my mother in the welfare office made me cry. She bought little toys for the toddlers who grew fussy in the waiting room, tried to make light of the sadness and frustration that saturated the air in that ugly place.

My baby, beautiful and perfect, was born into her mother’s poverty and her father’s middle classness. We left the lovely, falling-apart house and moved into suburbia and four bedrooms plus dining, family, and rec. The rent was higher, but his salary was higher, too. Her nursery was decorated on almost nothing, but he bought the crib that I chose, and the linens for her bed. He paid for her formula and her diapers, and rocked her while I slept in the evening. We took turns on the sleepless nights. I fell fast into depression, and he into despair. He had not wanted this, but he tried to make things easy for me. I took meds to keep the sadness away, but they really changed nothing. My spirit was broken, but I had a most wonderful thing: my daughter.

I had seen the old pictures of him with his son, pudgy and smiling little happy boy. I listened to his stories of swimming every night after work, in the South, in their horse trough of a pool. I had hoped for that joy, but I got tolerance and limited patience. Work was more stressful for him now, he said. His first wife had been a natural mother, with no depression after her babies were born. She never felt desperate and strained from lack of sleep. What I heard was that I wasn’t as good at being a mommy. Maybe it was true. She loved being pregnant, loved the attention. I just cringed when anyone asked questions about my big belly, because invariably, my left ring finger was inspected. It was bare. Hers had not been, for either baby. Her life was different. She knew how to demand that he read three books to his babies every night. She could storm and stomp and make him do. I refused to storm, but just spoke. He did not do, so I hoped instead, and I loved them all enough to make everyone okay again.

The kids did resent the baby, but not exactly like I had expected. They liked her, but disliked me now. I didn’t have the energy to play like I had once played. Meals became less peaceful because I went to bed when he got home, and he rocked the cranky baby through supper most nights. Their mother reminded them of how much she had done with them, even when her youngest was a newborn. Did she not understand that three is harder than two? And that I had not the benefit of ever having only one little person to care for? The kids needed me more than ever, and I had added a baby to the mix. My resources were stretched, and I was too emotionally thin to know where to ease the pressure.

I learned to micromanage, and I hated myself for doing it. I imposed schedules, routines, timetables for every single aspect of our lives, and we looked great. Perfect picture. Except I couldn’t remember who this man was, this man that I eventually married. He had become a very strange stranger. His voice, heard across a room at a party, sounded like a memory. His face looked unfamiliar and distorted when he looked at me. I was just as strange to him, I think.

My heart raged all of this so loudly, every day, every day. I needed to scream it out, but when I began, tears made me incoherent and stupid. I said it, but really, it was just another dissatisfied hum in my own ears, unanswered, unacknowledged.

None of this matters now. I needed to say it, to no one after all.

EARTHQUAKE DOLLHOUSE AND OTHER TREASURES UNDERFOOT

Treasure crunches under your feet.  Look.

Where do you walk?  Do you look down?  Or do you just move forward, feeling time pass, feeling slower than you might like to be?

The Doctor wished for a bike on Mars.  I want to slow down and pick up pebbles.

Tonight, I walked to the port and skirted the edge of what used to be the river.  The river moved and left behind a bay, long and narrow, forked at its end by a v of marsh.  The real river shifted west just a bit, and though I very much wish I had a boat to reach the strip of trees that now makes the bay–a kayak would be nice–I was content with my inspection of the edge of the bay.  There on the edge of the used-to-be-river, I found treasure.

A water bird’s scapula, sandy and damp but bleached bare.

A snail shell, white with lovely caramel striations.

A rusted, flattened nut.

A big stick, which might be handy for future explorations, even though I have a perfectly good one at home, and so does the daughter.

A tiny rock, all crystals, and a bigger rock, with a face of crystals.  I might have stepped on geodes, but I don’t know how to see them yet.

Some things stayed.  I took photographs of a failed attempt at a swastika on the sea wall and other mysterious combinations of letters and numbers and shapes that must mean something to river-going people.  A little boy made of cellophane stayed.  He would have just crumbled in my pocked full of stones and bone…

In this place, things fall down and no one picks them up again.  The back of a beautiful white-painted brick house fell off, and now the rooms look like washed-out dollhouse rooms, from the river.  Closer, the house fascinates and terrifies and makes me want to rewind to before its falling.  Eras of interior decoration show in the peeled wallpaper.  The bathroom might have been pink once, if that really was the bathroom.  Roses bloom in a ground-floor room, and swirls of mint green fade in another.  Dining room and kitchen? The fireplace is another hole within a hole.  The ceilings show their innards: thick boards laid with thinner ones, plastered and tiled underneath, holes where lights once hung.  Corrugated cardboard boxes now, drooping, waiting by the curb.

I might steal a brick.

The back yard is thick with young trees and spring bulbs.  The trees have taken advantage of the brickfall, but the bulbs ignore it.

I lifted four small iris roots from near the sidewalk.  I’ll take them home and plant them in a pot, and maybe I will see what color the lady of house liked her irises to be.  We all have strong opinions about irises, yes?  If they are yellow, she was practical and neat.  Purple, and she was prone to wearing unlikely hats.  Pink, and she cut the crusts off her sandwiches as a matter of course.

This place has secrets, and no one is telling.  That’s fine.  I’ll pick up the treasures from under my feet and write stories of my own.

(I didn’t steal a brick after all.)

WE ARE THIS KIND OF PEOPLE

We avoid conflict with one another, because if our own kin doesn’t love our silly selves, who does?

We are women.  The men came later, and some have stayed and some have left.

We do not yell, unless it’s really really necessary, which it’s not.

We tell our secrets to one another, with admonishments of, “Promise you won’t tell,” so we don’t have to repeat ourselves to the rest of the family.

We accept every new business venture with enthusiasm, even if it’s the third one in three months.  Changing minds, perfectly okay.

We share our food, our money, our homes, and our children.

We keep babies overnight.

We paint and draw and craft and build and write, every one of us.

We battle little demons without speaking of them, because we all have a matching set.

We do not cheat or steal, but we might lie to save your ass from going to jail.

We have messy houses and clean for company the first one or two times they’re coming.  After that, it just doesn’t matter as much.

We practice kindness.

We spend quality time looking at stuff in thrift shops, together, on separate sides of the store.

We can hold our liquor, or we don’t drink at all.

We save our toddler words and use them forever.

We have names, some chosen by toddlers, that don’t match our birth certificates.

We wear out the “Help From My Friends” segment of the Woodstock video.

We can cook turkey, but the stuffing never quite matches the memory.

We brag about one another to strangers, but rarely to one another.  We know we’re pretty cool.

We were all born a little too far apart, then the babies showed up in perfect sets of two at a time.

We marvel at one another’s hideous errors in judgement, but we don’t judge.

We don’t see one another enough.

We are taller than you, except for a couple of us.  They’re tiny.  No middle, no average.  Clothes shopping is a bitch.

We buy gifts for one another months in advance and then forget where we put them.

We wrap stuff off of our own shelves for birthdays, because we know you’ll like that better, anyway.

We let our kids pick out their own clothes, no matter what.

We were raised by Yellow-Dog Democrats, but some of us have swung the other way, and that’s okay, too.

We don’t talk politics; time is too short, and none of that really matters.

We will take your pet in, but don’t expect to get it back.  We might keep your kid, too.

We know that we are temporary.

We understand that we are all doing our best, or not.  We keep doing, which is the important part.

We are this kind of family, this kind of people.

BLESSINGS WASTED: ACADEMIC EDITION

If we perform poorly, they feel like failures.  They feel disappointed that we weren’t paying as much attention as they think they deserved.  They want to be dazzling and engaging and have their words bore into our hungry little brains.  We have not all met their expectations, which means that they have not met their own expectations or those of their superiors.

What if we, the idiots, just don’t bother to try?  What if we resent their criticism and rail back in end-of-year reviews?  What if we just really don’t give a shit, and they pay the consequences?

They want to stand at the front and be heard, and teach, and learn and research and write and publish and move ahead.  Accolades, grants, awards, respect.  Adjunct to associate to full.  This takes the cooperation of us, the glazed-eyed masses struggling to meet deadlines.

One of them cried in class in front of us, after kicking us out of the room early the night before, for one boy’s failure to define a term.  He cried and apologized to us.  I had been angry first at the boy and then at him for targeting that boy, and punishing us all for that individual’s failure.  The early dismissal was just a shaming technique, and manipulative.  He should have known better, as a psychology instructor so proud of his PhD, and on his path to being a counsellor.  He ended up being a real asshole that one night, and the next night, he cried.  I felt yanked around, not empathetic.

Some of them cry over our failures in the privacy of their own homes.  Some of them rein in their flexibility and take away our freedom to make mistakes or get sick without losing our good marks.

They earn those degrees and apply for this job.  They expect to have to test us and read what we write, right?

I just want to sit them all down, offer them a piece of good pie, and a decent cup of coffee, and tell them that it’ll all be okay.  Some of us will pass, some will fail, and if they really really hate making marks on the papers they demand, they are free dismiss class forever.  Go home to husbands, wives, partners, babies, dogs, cats, empty apartments, and recharge those academic batteries.  Maybe weave a basket. Paint a picture.  Write something silly.

In the meantime, I watch this breed of human carefully.  I even managed to fall in love with one of their kind.  They all need to start hugging in the hallways or something, because getting paid a living wage to share knowledge is a blessing that few people will ever enjoy.

Life is good, dammit, and most of us are trying our best.

 

OOH, LOOK! A PICTURE!

BECAUSE I MISS HER WHEN I HAVE TO SHARE HER

All day long, I make sure that she has brushed her teeth, combed her hair, washed her hands, eaten a bite or two of something Not-Nugget, and thrown away her banana peels.  I end computer time. I turn off the TV.  I send her out to play in the fresh air, and call her back in when she might be cold, which is judged by my own body temperature.  I remind her that I love her the most, even more than Grandma loves her, no matter what Grandma says.  I make her swallow her medicine and put on shoes and wipe her butt and her nose, not in that order or even sequentially.  In doing all of these things and so many more, I must irritate the hell out of her, though she doesn’t rebel, only sighs patiently at my mommy-prattling.

Still, she reminds me to find Ted, or finds him for me, before bed.

Still, she wants to talk about her day, and asks me about mine.

Thank you, small daughter, for loving me back.

WEREWOLVES WELCOME

Werewolves scare me less than other officially scary things.  Vampires, not so much.

Real scary things come in human form, especially in the form of nice people.  There lives inside some of us a monster, capable of atrocities that make news headlines, or don’t, depending on the setting of the crime.  A dead man in a dumpster behind Walgreens on the north side won’t make the paper, but a dead young mother from the suburbs makes the front page.

I married one of those monsters in a nice-guy mask.  He was a medic, had trained in martial arts, was awarded Illinois Sensei of the Year, and taught women’s self-defense classes with me as his assistant.  He also lost every job he had while we were married for sexually harassing co-workers, but I didn’t know that until years after he left.  He never struck me, but intimidated me into allowing him to stay in my house by threatening to hurt people I loved.  He followed me everywhere, turning up at Target, or on campus, or at the craft store when I had left without telling him where I was going.  He burned my grandma’s photos of me, because that version of me had existed before him, and he wanted every trace gone.  He woke me up in the night to call me a whore; I wasn’t a virgin when I married him, and I needed to be reminded of my evil ways.  He brought out a Bible, and tried to sit me down for lessons on how to be a good wife.  A good wife, I can be.  A Bible-quoting Christian, never.  I was raised to choose my own way, and I chose to worship nothing and revere everything.  Pagan, heathen, reverent of every possible higher power and dismissive of none, my way ended up not fitting into a single book.  My lack of acceptance of Jesus as my lord and savior earned unpleasant consequences at his hand, requiring regular reminders of my sins.

His favorite sensei advice was, “The archer does not know when the arrow will fly.”  In other words, if you have a weapon and know how to use it, you won’t need to ponder the right time to let things happen in your own defense.

One dark, before-dawn whore-reminder morning, he startled me out of sleep and I broke his nose before I even really woke up.  The arrow had flown.  I’m surprised he didn’t break my arm, but I can thank my dogs for that.  They always threw their big bodies between us at times like that, when he boiled over and his eyes stopped seeing.  I came out with only a bruise on my chin from his elbow, just a result of his hands flying to his bloody face. Then I ran; his nice-guy mask lay in a heap on the floor.

 

I worked at a flower shop in the city then, and rode a bus, with a transfer at Union Station.  Every morning, I stopped in to visit The Cookie Man, from whom I bought fresh coffee and muffins, and now and then he gave me a special treat, something not yet on the menu.  His kids worked with him one day a week in the summer.  He rode in the Moonlight Ramble with his sons and wife, volunteered and donated at the shelter down the street, and never met a stranger.  I liked him.  He had two Golden Retrievers, too.

One summer, he had his wife killed for trying to divorce him.  I recognized him on the news at work.  He had given me a free cranberry muffin that morning, a new menu item to try out, while his wife was dying in their kitchen.  By supper time, he had made the news, and I watched him being led out of his beautiful suburban home in handcuffs.

He had hired a former employee to stab her with he own kitchen knife.  When he brought his sons home, they all found their mother dead, a part of the plan.  That was supposed to be his alibi: at work all day, picked up the kids from soccer practice, and uh-oh, Mom is on the floor.  Nice-guy masks terrify me. He knew, and he purposefully let those boys see their mother.  Monster.

Now,  I am wary of the man with the perpetual smile.  The kid with his jeans drooping to his knees? No problem.  The guy whose head never has a single hair out of place?  Creepy.  Show me some flaws, and open the door a crack to what lies within.  Then, we can talk, a little.  Until then, my disinterested public mask isn’t a mask, but a filter.  I watch, and learn, and keep my demeanor mild.  Fewer and fewer people get in, but when they arrive in my life, I know when to throw off the filter and open my arms and my heart.

No one could call me jaded–too much silly in me, too much love, too much dancing for any little reason, but no one can call me naive, either.  The monsters lurking in nice-guy masks have a stink to them, and I know it now.

WE ARE HERE, NOW

We might have moved, of course.  If not for other, short, solid branches of family, our roots could sink into any fertile earth.  On the trip from here to the frontier, I imagine life without branches, smooth and unsnagging.   Where would we go?  We would head west, south, toward the sun.  We would lift our roots every spring and repot into a mobile planter, and roll around the world.  Come fall, maybe return to our starting point, maybe not.  She’s adaptive enough to live an unschooled life.  She makes lessons for herself out of sticks and rocks, and just a little input from me would craft an education.  Home and school, already, have no division.  Life is school.  Life is education.

But, she is from here now.  We are from here.  Here is good enough for right now, because strong, thick branches of family spread from our stout mother-daughterness.  She needs those connections, and to know how to get to the grocery store or the library or her school and back home.  Before long, she’ll be on two wheels in this big town, and she won’t get lost.  We stay.  We make friends, the kind that stop in for no reason.  We know our neighbors, and we know how much back-yard silliness we can get away with.  The answer is lots and lots, even messiness in the name of play.  The next warm afternoon will find us out back  on a mission, to clean up and prepare for spring.  We know where we will be for the summer, and fall, and winter, and another spring: right here.

Here is fine.  If I were just Me, I would certainly have moved away, or bought a bed on wheels.  Birds can live happily in a camper.  So could a dog.  I so wanted a dog.

If I had been just Me, not from here or anywhere any more, my address would shift with the seasons.  A truck and an Airstream –or a Volkswagen–and a dog without an urge to eat finches, and an internet connection to the University of Phoenix would suit me nicely.  Sundresses and sandals, with warm things only for accidents in navigation or visits to cold-climate friends.  A doll-sized kitchen and a big, big bed, and bravery, and a bike.  Bravery in large doses, and pillows in large numbers, and Nutella every day and port wine cheese and crackers and bacon and eggs and tomato soup with grilled cheese, and fresh corn and Cadbury Mini Eggs in season. I think of those because they’re in season, and I missed them last year.

We are We, for now.  She will grow up and leave me very soon, and the Airstream might happen before then anyway.  When she leaves, I will look back on the thirteen or thirty years yet to come and feel like I need more time right here, watching her sing and play and grow and become her own version of a Me, but not me.

Now, I need to clean the finches’ cage and freshen their nests.  They are my tiny prisoners, and I try to give them a good life.  My daughter is my tiny warden, and I try to maintain my own good life in the bounds of our rootedness, for the good of the We.

So far, so good.

 

DAMN THE PLAYPLACE

I blame the Playplace.  We drive through, but we don’t go in.  The Playplace keeps our butts planted in the car, and I’ve always prepared an excuse before offering the Nuggets or granting a request for them.

Just the Nuggets alone disturb me.  I grew up loving them.  Because of Nuggets, I know how to use chopsticks.  Before Nuggets, I made my own, inferior chopsticks out of actual sticks.  Gram thought I would poison myself by eating off of green wood, but I had done my homework.  Mimosa wood is not toxic.  When Nuggets came along, they were packaged with Asian-inspired sauces and disposable chopsticks.  No one seems to remember this!  I ate the food, including the incongruous fries, with my uncrooked, unbendy, unsmelly chopsticks.  At eight, I washed them in the McDonald’s bathroom and dried them under the hand blower, and slipped back into their amazing red paper sleeve (with handy how-to instructions printed on it).  All Gram had to say about my obsession was, “At least she’s not gonna make herself sick with that old green wood.”

But, no more chopsticks come with Nuggets.  The two almost-Chinese dips still maintain a tender spot in my heart and belly.  Now, I keep chopsticks in the silverware drawer of my adulthood.  Always will. The daughter adores Nuggets for themselves, not what comes with them…but Ranch dip is essential. Ranch dip wasn’t one of my choices as a child, as far as I remember. It was still just salad dressing, runny.

The Playplace of my childhood stood outside and got rained on.  Now it just steeps in its own bacterial filth.  Hand sanitizer?  Useless to the kid hiding in the top bubble with his finger up his nose, and every kid to enter that bubble after him.

That bugger kid and all of his snotty comrades are responsible for my daughter’s stuffy nose and sore throat.  Always, ALWAYS, a few days after a Playplace experience, comes the virus.   Was the fun with her little best friend worth it?  She would probably say so.  She was so happy to be invited, and I was happy for her happiness, and prepared to play nurse with Tylenol and Little Noses in a few days.  Trade-offs don’t have to suck.  We take it in stride, she better than I.  I miss class, she misses school because of fever, and we do catching-up as best we can.

We do as best we can.

I should be finishing my outline.  I should be reading the next chapter.  I should be in class.

Instead, we will reluctantly get dressed, drive five minutes to the pharmacy, replenish the OTC supplies, and probably drive through McDonald’s without stopping at the Playplace again, dammit.

RIGHT ABOUT NOW

Right about now, getting sleepy, seriously considering how to get myself to bed as nicely as possible, I need a snack.  Every night.  It starts with, “Did I eat supper?”

Sometimes, I forget.  I do love to eat, but if no one else needs to be fed, sometimes it slips.

So, right now, I can’t remember what supper was made of.  Something went into my face at supper time, but my body needs…something else.  I’m a little cranky, and little confused at not remembering what or if I ate, and a whole lot hungry.  Hungry, but too tired to do much.

Milk, chocolate, Hershey’s, because milk is just so gross without modification.  Cheese?  That requires spreading onto crackers, a real crumb hazard in bed.  Banana?  Such a commitment.

I used to have a sign on my bedside lamp: DO NOT FEED THE LISA (no matter how hungry she says she is or how sad she looks) AFTER NINE P.M.  I wrote it myself, because post-baby, the jeans fit, and then suddenly didn’t, again.  Jeans are expensive when you’re tall, if you didn’t know that.

Right about now, after thinking of what to eat, if I should eat, why I always want to eat right before bed, how it’s better to plan for these things in advance but never do and then end up crabby with myself…

Forget it.  I’m going to bed.

PICTURE DAY

Picture Day, the add-on one that never happened when I was a kid, happens tomorrow for the daughter.  She’s completely nonchalant over it.  I intend to change that, baby girl.

What about the outfit?  We’re going shopping.  I hadn’t budgeted for clothes this week, exactly, but she has asked for “new” new clothes exactly twice in her life.  She has been raised in the best that thrift stores have had to offer, and has never complained.  Grandma splurges on her shoes, for sure, but that’s a brand new thing. The child loves nice shoes, and I wish that I could borrow them: usually black with sparkles or rainbows or rainbows AND sparkles, and funky shapes like boot-high Chuck Taylors.  Come on!  When does Mom intend to drop sixty bucks on sparkly size ten Chucks for ME?  I can hope…and hope…

The daughter has only recently begun expressing opinions about her clothes.  My clearance-rack collection for fall contained some real losers, but I still thought that anything with a peace sign was automatically on the cool list.  Nope.  Peace signs on a brown background, no.  Peace signs on black, yes.  Brown is not her color, I now know. No brown shoes.  No brown pants.  Something about brown is embarrassing or unflattering.  Also, no bib overalls, no short puffy skirts unless they are meant to be worn OVER skinny leggings, and please please please no empire-waisted pastel anything.  That stuff is for dress-up, not going in public.  No khaki of any kind, or olive drab, or navy.  Navy looks like black that forgot what it was doing before it got to the finish line in the dye pot.

None of this comes as much of a surprise.  Those general rules, except for bibs for gardening, have come straight from the mouth of Mommy, about Mommy herself.

Thank goodness–CAN I SAY THIS LOUDLY ENOUGH?–I don’t have body image issues.  Thank goodness I am a human coat hanger despite my chocolate consumption, and when curves have blessed my frame, I’ve enjoyed every one while it lasted.  Thank goodness I think I’m damn fine for almost-forty, and I accept time and gravity as they approach.  Born ugly, I can now say to the world, “Fuck you.  I am this, and I call it beautiful.”  My girl will never hear me complain at the woman, helpless, in the mirror.  She might think that khaki looks like puke next to my–and her–baloney-fair skin, and she’ll be right for thinking that. So does pale yellow, another banned color, and peach.  Peach looks lovely on her, almost monochromatic, but my hair turns green near the color.  The daughter looks at me but sees herself.  I have to be beautiful inside and out, with that kind of gaze upon me.

Picture Day in my childhood was full of excitement when I was very little, and dread when I was older.  My own beautiful mother’s compliments were never quieted by my classmates’ insults, but the contrast injured my spirit.  Which of them was right?  My idea of a good outfit rarely matched what was in style.  I’m sorry, but baggy sweatshirts and skinny jeans didn’t look good on me then, and sure don’t now. Neon pink?  Gag me with a spoon.

I wonder what my small person will choose for Picture Day from the limited selection at the store tonight?  I intend to say yes to whatever she loves.  Aunt Beth wants to fix her hair in the morning, too.  This is a big day.  She is beautiful, but last year’s pictures show a tired little girl in everyday clothes.  We forgot.  This year, she needs to shine, so she can look back at second grade and be reminded of when we were so very young and life had become easy and beautiful.

BLESSINGS NOT WASTED: CUPCAKE EDITION

Once, I stared so long at a total stranger that I felt creepy.  He was a Daddy, capital D, and off-limits.  He only had eyes for his sweet little brown bird of a daughter, quiet, intent on her party craft.  My role was to dole out blobs of icing for heart-shaped cookies, and pink M&Ms, and those chalky hearts with words stamped on them.  My role was not to ogle other children’s handsome fathers.

Like that, my self whispered.  Find a man like that, just like him, that man who loves quietly out loud and smiles those beaming smiles at his small person.  That man I would love forever.  Who could tire of those green eyes–no, hazel–yes, green, such a contrast to black black hair?  He pushed his hair absentmindedly behind his ears while he watched the cookie being dabbed with frosting.  He was tall, too, taller than I was–am, with long legs that folded underneath him easily when he bent down to be eye-level with his tiny girl.  My nose might not even reach his chin, if we were face to face, but my arms would surely wrap all the way around him twice…the whispers went on, and he stayed somewhere with me.  He was the one I could never have.  He surely held a beloved place, a permanent place, in someone else’s lucky heart.  A man like that happens once in a lifetime, not a blessing to be wasted.

To my delight and dismay, he attended every single party that year, my year of room-mothering with a different title.  I had to duck and dodge to avoid staring all year long.  The offering of extra cupcakes to  parents became an endurance trial.  I loved being the cajoler–have a cupcake!  We’re just going to throw them out, DON’T WANT TO WASTE THEM, please take two, they’re delicious!…until I made my way to his corner.  His smile almost hurt, and I blushed painfully every time he accepted or declined.

I was wrong about only one thing.

A decade later, I know exactly where my nose reaches.  He kisses my forehead if I don’t turn my face up.  My lips land in exactly the perfect spot, the place where collarbone frames a dip in the shoulder, at the curve of his neck.  I twirl his hair in my fingers, always between haircuts, always a little in his way, and so soft.  I know the taste of his skin, and the smell of  fresh laundry warming on his body.  His eyes are every color, and in a beam of sunlight, they glow pale icy blue, like a Siamese cat’s in the dark.

He does hold a beloved, permanent place in someone’s lucky heart, and it is mine.

TYPOS

I don’t even care.  You all know I can spell.

SLEEP AND OTHER IMPORTANT THINGS

This day, I read things on the internet.  I wrote a thing for the internet.  I compared my words to other people’s, and I don’t know how I stack up.  Being objective is impossible, of course.  I am also kind of a mess anyway.

The last two nights of sleeplessness have left me absolutely wrinkled, crumpled, wobbly: think of an anemone two hours out of the vase.  What did I do before I had the Magic Sleep Medicine?  How did I turn off my brain when my body wanted to stop?  I practiced patience last night, and soothed myself in the old ways.  My feet rubbed the sheets perfectly smooth at the bottom of the bed.  My hands, I bargained into relaxing underneath my pillow, flat and lax in the cool.  I told my body to go to sleep one limb at a time, one digit at a time, one vertebrae at a time, like Gram taught me to do.  Still, my head prattled on, with its entertaining voice, twirling thoughts into sleep-preventing announcements.  Important Things, every one.

One Important Thing had to do with the struggle between my body and my mind.  Oh, what does accidental silence sound like?  My mind never rests, my ears hear even in a vacuum.  The noose-tightening hum-and-squeal worsens with time, loud in my head against the pillow without other sounds to make me forget its company.  The noise makes me think about the noise, like the concern over having anxiety causes anxiety.  Embarrassment over blushing makes me blush, when nothing but embarrassment over being misunderstood as timid can actually embarrass me.  Roundabout reasoning like this occupies my almost-asleep thoughts, and solutions or revelations pull me fully into consciousness…again.  Last night, I fought that battle between body and mind for who knows how long.  Four hours?  The last glance at the phone read 2:40.

I squeezed out a few frustrated tears, anger at failed meditation, and slugged down four Benadryl.  An hour later, two more.  Slept, drugged, heavy with relief.  Barely knew when morning came, when the small person began to talk to me.  She always wakes up with something important to say.  We take our dreamlives seriously around here, plotting them at bedtime, sharing in the morning.  The dreamtalk sometimes makes us late for school.

The morning came moments after sleep, really.  I saw pink light before I fell asleep, so…two hours?  I stayed in bed for another hour, but once I wake up, up I stay.  One person bears the gift of sleeping-in, and he gives it freely, even when I would rather spend those sleepful hours awake with him.  But he lulls me back into dreams, good ones always, with such surety, that I obey gratefully.  On my own, things are different.  Morning is morning.

Important Things keep me awake; the ringing in my ears supports the cause of my busy brain.  My doctor callsme a sleep-worrier, but worry doesn’t fit what goes on in there.  No name, yet.  The thoughts are made of things that I never say out loud.  I maintain a private conversation with myself, sometimes made of nonsense and sometimes made of brilliance.  What happens when you tuck yourself into bed?  How does that veil fall so quickly for you, sending you over the edge, with soft twitches and smoothed breath?  I watch, entertained and envious.

Tonight, back to the Magic Sleep Medicine.  I have to drive to the pharmacy, which I am much too tired to do.  I’ll do it.  I have to.  Last night’s two paltry hours proved it, after I had hoped that my comfortable tiredness would allow me to have real sleep–normal, other-people-style sleep.

I will sleep tonight, sedated.  That has to be good enough for now.

 

TITLES MATTER

This room is not my bedroom.  It is my bedsit.  Compact, bright, stacked high with pillows and quilts and books, and full of bed.  Desk, older than I am, chair, older than the desk, and a shelf as old as my father would be minus his age in high school shop class when he made it. Trunk, age unknown, but not musty.  Suitcases, every one musty.  A bit of mustiness goes along with the Bedsit title.

The living room in my childhood was the Front Room.  The Back Room was really a walk-through to the bathroom, but sometimes it was a bedroom or a laundry room.  The Front Room acted as sitting room by day, bedroom by night.  We all would have felt grand in a house the size of the one I live in today.

This is the Cottage.  That was The Old House.

I might rename the living room.  The English have so many names for the room where people gather.  Salon makes me laugh.  Inviting someone into my salon?  Nope.  Parlor indicates some other space, less neat, where the family does its thing.  Sitting room sounds like a nice place to have tea.

The living room could be the Front Room here.  There’s no foyer, and it is at the front of the house.  It’s not the Family Room.  I’ve had one of those, once, and it didn’t suit me, but I spent almost all of my time in there.  To have a Family Room requires another room that is not a family room and not a bedroom or a kitchen or a den, and I don’t have one of those to spare.   No spare room, but enough room.  Perfect.

So, here in I lay in my Bedsit, with my beloved unclutter.  Clutter is stress-inducing; what I have stacked about me is calming.  See the difference?  Titles matter.

I have decided to call the front room The Parlor, or maybe The Sitting Room.  We LIVE all over this little house, so why name it Living Room?  We’ll see what sticks.

It’ll never be the TV room.  Oh, I hate that TV.  Bah to TV.  The TV stays because I don’t live here alone.  People who have titled TV Rooms seem to spend so much time staring at that pretty screen that they don’t do much thinking.  Judgy much? Sorry about that, especially if you have a TV Room.  Do your thing.  I know people who never turn it off, who sleep to the sound of sitcoms.

(Shush, pretentious me.  Go sit in your Sitting Room and drink some tea.  First, get dressed.  It’s late, and you haven’t left your Bedsit except to get coffee.)

SPRINGING BACK

I don’t spring forward, I spring back.  My wintertime melancholy smooshes me into a drippy wad of muddy woe, and with the daffodils, I feel resurrected when the days get longer.

Until about the age of twenty, I thought I was broken.  At six, I sat on my cold swing, hatted and mittened and snowsuited, motionless when I could have been moving.  I had been bundled up with orders to go play, but I couldn’t. The February trees were all branches, no leaves.  I doubted that any leaves would sprout, ever again.  Playing wasn’t on my list of things to do.  Winter had done its job on me.

My grandma noticed.  She walked with me every day, winter or summer and the times in between.  The last, snowless, gray days of winter were spent looking for signs.  A green tongue of a bulb’s leaf pushing through the dirt was one.  A certain bird, or even better, a V of geese, another.  “Spring is coming, baby, and there’s another sign,” she reassured confidently.  To her, winter was short, but to me, it ticked by in minutes, not days.  She didn’t let me stay in bed.  She woke me up, every spring, when I knew in my heart that I had died with the green things the fall before.

Seasonal Affective Disorder didn’t exist when I was six.  Learning about such a thing at twenty unbroke me, but didn’t change the on-the-ground facts.  Having a name for my distress, worry, eventual shivering sureness that the days would stay dark did make me less angry at myself for the baseless worries.  Spring always comes, and I celebrate every thunderstorm.  Rebirth, and nothing less.  Same at six.  I danced in rain, too fast out the door to hear the PUT ON A JACKET, too cold, and welcomed warmer days with a cold every year.  Best. Cold. Ever.  Warm days, home from school, the best days of spring.  Seasonal Affective Disorder blessed me with snot and sore throats and sick days when I was six, and blesses me with them every year.

I have to stand in the rain. Just have to.

Last spring, during my annual resurrection, I was too busy being brokenhearted to remember to run outside.  The rain was already warm when I noticed, and my heart was done being broken.

Now, I think of those warm thundery times and remember other resurrections.  My whole soul came back to life last year, in those very first weeks of spring-almost-missed.  My whole body woke up, head and heart and spine, propelling me like a slingshot into the world, to dance whether the rain came or not.

Fall still hits hard, and winter has done the usual damage; this spring, I will pull us all out into the rain together.  I am not alone in my doubting the coming green days, and I am no longer doubted.  My smooshed state is okay for now.  People I love understand very well.  My love, especially, understands very well.  That’s good, and new for me.

I talk to my small person about signs of spring, even when she doesn’t need them like I need them, yet.  Maybe never, if she’s fortunate.  We still search for green things in the gray, and she celebrates with me, for me.

Expect happier things from me when the days get warmer.  My public self on social media is quiet about the inner grayness, quiet about many things.  Writing at length, where people might read the gray-blah-sorry me, makes me uncomfortable.  Why don’t I stop?  I hope the discomfort signifies a need for change.  Here’s the whole deal, unfiltered as far as I can manage.

March 10, 2013.  That’s a holiday.  If I’m lucky, it’ll rain.

 

 

ONCE UPON A TIME

Once upon a time, there was a girl, me.

Once upon a time, I grew up and found a family to love.  I so needed to find one.  Mine had gone away, stolen by time and sickness and circumstance.  I was alone, and made myself not so.  This is how it happened.

Gram and Papa left.  Papa first, not suddenly but quickly and readily,  then after a blissful year or two of lunches and shopping and road trips, Gram followed, slowly and reluctantly.  Followed? No.  She wouldn’t have willingly sought him out, but she might have passed him on the street and chatted about the kids for a minute, in the ether.  She might have even cooked some soup right there, since it’s the afterlife and all, and who needs a kitchen to create soup when you’re not bound by earthy physical law?  The soup would be as far as she would go.  They did not love one another when they died.

With  Gram and Papa gone, there was nothing left to do.  The gardens continued to grow, but why pick tomatoes that no one wanted to eat?  Everything had been an act of love and respect for the family.  Painted windowframes, weeded sidewalks, trimmed trees, and retrieved newspapers had all said Love.  Grades earned, meals cooked, laundry folded, and floors swept had all said Respect.  But Gram and Papa were gone, and no one else noticed the weeds or lack of them in the cracks of the front walk.

When the friend from far away came for lunch, he hugged me on the hill at school as though he was drowning.  Only Papa had died, but Gram would soon leave, too.

His wife had begun to openly hate him.  She had fallen in love with everyone else.  He didn’t know how to parent his two small people alone.  He was without family and friends were here, not where he lived.

This was a place for me.  He was alone and heartbroken.   I could help.  I needed help, and I needed to be loved.  I needed to take care, to be with, to feel present and necessary.

GOOD NIGHT, BEAUTIFUL BOY

I compose love letters in my heart all day long.  I love very, very much.  Maybe he hears the love, like a dog hears a soundless whistle, as we exist seven blocks from one another.

 

I do not talk to him on the phone. We have frugality to thank for that, I tell myself, and limited minutes on our cell plans, and little time really alone to say things in the tone of voice that the words deserve.  Instead, he reads my love a few characters at a time.  He makes words his life’s business, and he sculpts full-blown people and places and emotions from the words that I can only use to call the sky blue.  With my simple words and his powerful ones, we’re settled now–if six months or a year can be called settled–into patterns passed between us in adherence to an unwritten but essential schedule.

Sometimes, a few words, correctly timed and punctuated, change a whole day.  To linger out loud over goodnightbeautifulboy might lessen its power.  So, he gets good (oh, I want all of the best things for you, you lovely person, darling precious appreciated adored cherished deserving you)–night (such a long day, and I am so glad that we saw one another, wish we had seen one another, know I’ll dream of you if I’m living right, imagine what the day would have been if we had spent the whole thing as Us together in the world and not just in our thoughts, what will it be like to watch sleep come over you when your bed my bed becomes our bed)–beautiful (dizzyingly most handsome creature, unaware of your charm your grace your charisma because it is of the most delicate ethereal rare kind)–boy (when I look at you I see you at three, thirteen, twenty-three, eighty-three, my boy in the shape of a full-grown gorgeous tall lean lanky kind of man who will never not be my sweet boy)…

 

My love letters take little time to read, but in between the words there exists a space hopefully filled with one wet thundery spring, one  ovenish summer, and the beginning of an autumn of smiles and smoldering, and of interlaced fingers and tenderness and awe at the good fortune of having stumbled upon this jewel of a man, my beautiful boy, my love.

 

HOME

I want to go home, but I tore it down and filled the hole with its rubble.  I ripped out the blooming things that remained, and plopped them into temporary places, and abandoned them.  Some of them, I crept back to rescue from rented yards, but without their rich black native soil, they died.  The potted life is too harsh, too dependent on fallible humans.

The lawnmower, not mine, left behind, visits in dreams.  So does the shed, now vanished, and the swingset I forgot to carry away, and the clothesline poles that I never could have moved alone.  Irises blamingly bloom, and where did the bridal wreath go?  Into the dumpster with the rest of the house?  Vanished.  The screen door should have been saved, and the bathtub.  The backhoe cracked the cast-iron in two, even when I had begged for it to be carefully removed before the first smash.  I still hear the screen door smack shut, feel the always-dirty brass handle in my fingers.  The rusty screen smelled always like dust and coal oil, like Papa.

In these dreams, I see and touch and smell home.  That yard was my solar system, the house the sun.

Should I have watched?  Would seeing the house cave in make the dreams less enduring?  One day it was here, the next it was gone.  My grief embarrassed me, because the man who funded the demolition, my husband-to-be, was proud to see the falling-down house come down, and shocked at how many dumpsters it filled, and eventually became angry at me for not just selling it before he spent the money.  The expense, not my money, kept me quiet.  I stayed away for the beginning and the end of the knocking-down.  He could not see me mourn boards and bricks.

I did scrape one load of soil from the basement hole, and in doing so, impaled my lost flute on the tine of the bucket.  One scoop was enough.  The last thing I looked for before setting the demo crew loose was that flute, and I found it after all.

No one was allowed in the house when we lived there.  Gram was ashamed.  The neighbors had nice things, probably, but I don’t really know.  Their doors did not open to me; they had no kids my age, no reason to think I would want to come in. When I lived in the house as an adult, my dog would have done damage to any guest; the single time I had a visitor, the dog threw his body against the bedroom door, crazed, until he bloodied himself.  It took only minutes, but I never let anyone else in after that.  I loved my dog too much, and anyway, they house was…shameful.  Residues of Gram’s not-good-enough clung to the crooked floors and the stained ceiling, perhaps, but I loved the familiar imperfections.  She once said that she had hoped for better for me.  I had always hoped to never have to leave.

All of it is gone now.  The gardens and trees fell when the new owner built the “modern luxury villa” with that “spacious wooded yard”.  Only desperation made me sell my spacious wooded yard.  The money helped me to leave a bad situation, get a running car, pay a deposit on a rented house.  My little rented cottage is a palace compared to the Old House, as we all still call it.  The Old House really only had room for two, even though it held a family; one tenant would have been more comfortable, but nothing about the house was comfortable by modern standards.  Central heat, insulation, windows that opened, those were all things that other houses had.  My house was built of scraps from a Baptist church blown down by a tornado.  I think the history of its parts gave it some kind of power; the house had already been through hell.  The Baptists did not rebuild.

When, some day, another house comes into my life, I will know exactly where to go to find home, and I will stock it with the people I love, planted, growing, blooming.  For now, home is wherever I can find the people I love.  I feel “at home” in my big little cottage, especially when I can open the door to friends and family and neighbors-becoming-friends.  The daughter would like a “big house”, but big houses require big incomes and big work to keep them tidy.  The little house suits us fine for now, and for now, I will call it home, and be grateful that my girl has a big yard for now.

She informed me that she does want to live in a big house some day, but she wants to keep exactly the same yard.

That’s my girl.

STRANGERS LIKE ME

Today, I met a man whose wife is dying right now. He came to see someone else, and found me here instead. We talked for an hour or so, and I hope he comes back tomorrow or at least next week. Next week’s conversation will be different, since I won’t be alone.

He told me that at 65, he has never been in love. His wife of forty years is near her end, and he feels a guilty relief at not having to pretend to love her any more. Did his brutally abusive childhood make him want too much out of a woman? He has longed for an equal partner for his whole life, and has only found that when a woman loves him, he wants something indescribably different than what she is. His own mother and the other adult women in his boyhood used him and beat him, and he never knew even a hug from a woman until he was grown. He has been quietly looking for his soul mate while raising children and grandchildren with the woman he married, a woman whom he cares for, but cannot love. He hopes that it’s not too late for him.

Now, I know that man. I like him, and I hope he comes back and tells me more about himself. I told him a little about my failures at love, and the marriages that accompanied them, and my success as it stands today. I have that One, and I am unshakably sure of it. There’s no ring on my finger to prove anything, but metal and minerals don’t matter a damn. That sweet, sad, unjaded man agrees.

We all have our stories. How do strangers decide whom to tell their tales of love and war? Why did this man quietly say things to me that most people would never admit to anyone? I have reams of stories in my memory, pages and pages of people’s joys and woes. They’ve told me across smeary bar tables, gleaming deli cases, marble bakery counters, and now a heavy table littered with scales and tools and tiny chemical bottles. When I am a stranger, I hear more than I sometimes want to hear, but some things need to be said out loud. I listen, and I comment, and when asked, I share a little. Strangers like me. They are like me. We all have our stories, and sometimes no one to tell.

In this strange place, where everyone knows everyone but me, I will hear more than I want to hear. What I want and what happens can be different; this makes me a better person. If I can listen and not judge, but really hear and empathize, I will most certainly be stronger for it.