damselfly press

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The Painting

My boys are four and two the summer my mother throws out one of her paintings. It is a scene of a lake and trees, surrounded by a handmade frame she’d crafted from some old pieces of ceiling molding. She’s on one of her crazed clean-out-all-the-crap kicks, and she has decided that this particular painting isn’t worth saving. So there it sits, on top of a pile of rickety furniture and dust-caked knickknacks, out by the side of the road in the afternoon sun.

As I pull my red station wagon alongside the curb, Mom looks over and smiles her big smile, wiping her dirty hands across her jeaned thighs. From the back seat Billy and Steven yell “Hi, Grandma!”

Mom helps me unbuckle the boys and haul them out of the car.

“What you doing, Grandma?” Billy asks.

“Cleaning. I have a lot of old stuff I need to throw away.”

“Mom, that painting has been hanging over the living room sofa for years. Why’d you decide to get rid of it now?” I ask.

“I never liked it,” she says.

I think about taking it, but honestly, I’d never liked it either. There didn’t seem to be anything special about it. It was like one of those generic landscapes you see in the furniture department of Macy’s.

The boys and I head around to the back of the house to spend the rest of the day playing in the pool. My parents had bought an above-ground pool, four feet deep, twenty-four feet round, a few years earlier. “For our grandchildren,” my father said.

“I’ll join you guys soon as I finish with this mess,” Mom says.

Mom is like a big kid. She loves the water and spends so much time in the pool that she gets those crinkly-wrinkled fingertips and toes all the time. Usually when we arrive at her house on summer days I find her out back, half asleep on a blow-up float, one hand dangling off the side playing with the water. The sun shines on her multicolored bathing suit, emphasizing its fluorescence, and her fair skin looks tan from the crowding of all her freckles.

Once her grandsons arrive, though, that is the end of her relaxation. They climb the ladder in a hurry, pulling at each other, trying to be the first one to jump in and splash Grandma.

We aren’t in the pool long that day before Mom joins us. “My back is killing me,” she says as she slides off the side of the deck and into the water.

“You finished throwing out all your junk?” I say.

“I’ll finish later. I thought I’d give you a break, play with the kids.”

My boys are already good swimmers, but as soon as Mom is in the pool, they cling to her, taking turns riding on her back, and then climbing up on the deck and jumping into her arms. Her energy seems endless, and I take full advantage of her generosity. Now I am the one lounging on the float, paddling my hands to steer clear of the commotion my boys make.

As I lie there, eyes closed, mind drifting, I am pulled back by the laughter of my boys. I let her delight them; I need her to attend to them. On my own, alone at home with them, the episodes of joy, of innocent mayhem, are meager. Often bored with motherhood, missing my days working at the museum, my time with coworkers discussing exhibits and lectures, I know I am cheating them. When we are at home, I have schedules, rules, activities planned for them, and I can see my obsession for purposeful enterprise crowd out their playfulness.

My mother observes me. When she comes to my house, she comments on the orderliness, the quiet. “When you kids were little, our house looked like a tornado hit it,” she’d say, and I take those words as an insult, the slight I believe she means them to be.

Now I float and am happy that my boys are having fun.

A week later, I run into an acquaintance, Brenda, at the grocery store. She tells me she took the painting off the pile of trash outside my parents’ house, and it’s now hanging in her dining room.

“You’re kidding? My mother painted that!”

“Really? I love it.”

“Well, now you know who the artist is,” I say.

Mom is proud and thrilled when I tell her about Brenda and the painting.

“Wow, so someone liked it. That’s nice. That’s funny,” she says.

We are sitting by the pool again, the boys in the water with my sister, Deb, and her kids.

“Hey, Deb, did you hear that? Someone has my painting hanging in their house.”

“Yeah. Vicki told me. I wish you’d told me you were getting rid of it.”

“How come you didn’t want it?” Mom asks me.

I am annoyed by the question.

“I don’t know. I have nowhere to put it.”

“You just didn’t like it,” she says, turning her face away, blowing cigarette smoke up to the sky.

“Well, neither did you. You didn’t ask me if I wanted it anyway.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says, adding, “I know it’s not your style.”

Mom thought I was a snob when it came to her painting and her crafting. Because I had gone to college, and majored in art history, she assumed I thought myself too sophisticated to appreciate her dabbling.

My going to college was still a touchy subject between us.

Back in my senior year of high school, as our family sat around the dining room table eating dinner, I told my mother and father about the parents’ meeting for college that was coming up. My father spoke first.

“You’re not going to college. We can’t afford college. Besides, you’re a girl; you’re just gonna get married and have kids anyway.”

Mom added, “Just get a good job, like your cousin, with health insurance.”

Following her advice, I went ahead and got a job as a bank teller. But two years later, I quit. I wanted to go to college. Mom thought I was nuts.

“You have a good job, with benefits. Why would you quit?”

I applied for financial aid and loans, moved on campus, and after graduation I was hired at the university art museum. When again I had a good job, Mom apologized for not having been more supportive.

Once in a while, though, she still let it be known how she felt: my college degree made me act superior to her. And sometimes, that was true.

Two years later, September. My mother has been dead for three months.

This morning, I have an hour to walk before it’s time to pick up my boys from school. It is cool out, cloudy; the night before we had rainstorms, thunder, lightning. But now blue is beginning to peek out between the clouds, and I walk briskly along my usual route through town.

I climb the hill of Stewart Place, where Brenda lives. In front of her house, I see a pile of soggy cardboard boxes leaking old books and magazines, a rocking chair with a broken leg, and my mother’s painting. It sits on the ground facing the street, my mother’s name brushed in white paint in the lower right-hand corner. The frame has warped with the rain, and the image ripples across the canvas, splashed with mud.

I’d heard Brenda was moving. Obviously, my mother’s painting is not going with her. I know I have to take it home, rescue it.

I stop and pick it up. It is heavy, and I have a long walk. I’ll have to come back with my car, so I move it away from the road, onto the front lawn and hope I get back before it is taken away.

I drive back with Billy and Steven. The painting is still lying on the grass. I lift it into my car by the passenger side door and slide it between the front seats, through to the back, between my boys.

“Guys, do me a favor, hold on to Grandma’s painting, okay?”

“Okay,” they say, each putting a little boy hand on the warped wood frame.

“You know what we’re gonna do?” I say. “We’re gonna get Grandma’s painting cleaned up and put it in a new frame, and we can hang it in the living room. We can look at it everyday.”

Billy cocks his head to one side, examining the picture. “I like it,” he says. “It’s pretty.”

- Vicki Addesso has kept a journal for 30 years, the wellspring for her stories. After a career in museum education, Vicki concentrates on writing. She’s completed a collaborative memoir, Still Here Thinking of You, with three other writers, excerpts of which were recently published in the online journal The Living Room.

On the Face

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I like my face. It’s been faithful to me. It’s there in the mirror every morning when I wake up, my friend, my confidant. We commiserate together over whatever obstacles we may have to overcome in the day ahead- over the state of the economy versus the state of our checkbook, over the number of tasks required versus the number of minutes in the day, over how much patience we will have to exert through the drama of teenage daughter angst and agony. My face empathizes with me, with my every mood, never betraying me by gloating when I have screwed up or laughing when I want to cry. We are a team, presenting a united front to the world through every triumph and every crisis. We’ve been together a long time.

Yes, my face has changed over the years, so much so that looking back at younger photographs of me is somewhat of a puzzle. What is it exactly that has changed in the face I see in the mirror? My eyes are the same, my smile, my nose, my chin, but it is still not exactly the same face as the one I see in those recorded moments of the past. It seems the years have added new details, not bad necessarily, just new, different.

According to a plethora of recent advertising my face is unacceptable. It has features that are undesirable and detrimental to my social success, at least by some standards. One ad states, “parentheses don’t belong on your face.” It promotes filling and erasing the naso-labial folds that lie on each side of the mouth with a synthetic, cosmetic facial filler. Hmmmm. I inspect my face a little closer. Yes. I have parentheses; right there, two slight, curved indentations running from my nose to my mouth. Right there on my face.

I like parentheses. I’m a writer; I use them all the time. They are useful, necessary. They clarify what is important. As I wear the parentheses on my face I am busy attending to the important things in my life—my family, my home, and my place in the world. But there is a small voice inside of me that occasionally tries to convince me that spending money to create a face that presents ‘a better me’ is okay, it’s not shallow, it’s not selfish, that I’ve worked hard and I deserve to pamper myself. But that small voice is quickly silenced by the voice of personal responsibility. I cannot in good conscience spend money on a temporary fix, on one that will inevitably be lost in the aging process anyway, because even though those parentheses may disappear for a time, the rest of me is still getting old. I can’t erase my work worn hands, the ones that have scrubbed floors, (sorry, it does have to be done occasionally) bathed babies, pulled weeds, washed dishes, and helped me earn a living. It’s not possible for me to shed the thinner more fragile skin that covers my entire body in exchange for the supple, resilient flesh of my youth, so why would I want a face that doesn’t match the rest of me? It would be like wearing an Hermes scarf with my most comfortable sweats.  

Parentheses have gained notoriety as one of the most popularly used emoticons; the left is a frown, the right is a smile. How appropriate to have a set of them on my face, framing my mouth that frowns and smiles. I have a great smile, a little crooked, but I want to keep it just as it is, that spontaneous movement of my face that accentuates my eyes with a fan of little crinkles and plumps my cheeks into soft, round apples, and deepens those parentheses into symbols of pure pleasure. There’s something unnatural about a smile that does not allow the face to move as it meant to.

According to one definition, parentheses are used to designate or amplify a word, phrase, or sentence inserted in a passage from which it is usually set off by punctuation. So. My facial parentheses are amplifying. I investigate a little more closely. Yes. They do amplify. They amplify all the experiences I have had throughout my life, the ones that have created who I am. This is where I agonized over my failed first marriage, this is when my oldest daughter gave birth to my first grandchild and I held him in my arms, this is the day I found that lump on my breast, and this is the night I fell in love with the man of my dreams. These parentheses are symbols that amplify a life of emotion, experience, and hopefully of wisdom gained.

In writing, parentheses are explanatory—they explain, make known, they give the reason for, show the logical development of. The parentheses on my face explain where I have been, that I am a person who has laughed and cried, raged in anger, and been overwhelmed by life’s gifts of joy. They show the logical development of my life. They explain me. I smooth the lines on my face with my fingers, trying to see what I would look like without them. Younger? Maybe. Better? I don’t know, but I like my face the way it is, parentheses and all, I’m used to it. It’s been faithful to me, so I will be faithful to it and stand by it and help it as much as I can to age with grace.

Parentheses also take note of those things which depart from the theme of discourse. I am taking exception to the persuasive efforts of the media and of the cosmetic procedure industry, to a society that disdains aging so much that they persistently attempt to persuade people to erase any signs of it, to hide the evidence.  I am setting myself apart, departing from all the foolish, inexperienced and shallow individuals that want me to forget that life is short and fleeting, that these parentheses are signs that I am a survivor; I have survived longer than many. I am departing from the theme of discourse that insists beauty lies only in an unlined face.

In the passage of time parentheses signify an interlude, a space that lies in between. That is where my face and I are now, in between. We are in between youth and old age, in between birthing children and children giving birth, in between growth and decay, in between the span of years that comprises what will be our whole life. My friend, my face, will be there,. If I am blessed with a long life, one day I hope to wake to see a face that resembles that of my grandmother’s, with not just parentheses but an intricate map of fine lines over crepe paper skin that will tell of where I have traveled, and who I have loved, (well, maybe not everyone I’ve loved), it will be a map to help point my grandchildren in the right direction, toward acceptance of themselves and others in spite of imperfections, and one that may begin to inform them of who they are and where they have come from, and  show them that there is no shame in wearing a face that is testament to a life fully lived.

- Colleen Card has spent her life surrounded by the cornfields of the Midwest, observing the decline of the small town and its values. She recently completed her MFA at Butler University in Indianapolis and lives with her husband, daughter, two Miniature Schnauzers and a cat in Carmel, Indiana.

Cartography

I made Mousy after my mother told me I’d be happier if I were thinner.  That fifth grade year I loved baking cookies and reading in my room.  I had grown soft in my cheeks and thick in my middle and my pants were too tight. I could’ve joined the track team or cultivated a taste for celery or saved up for aerobics shoes. I didn’t. Instead, I shut the door to my room and started sewing. I had purchased a pattern with my own money. It had more than a dozen small curved pieces to cut and shape into a potbellied mouse. Our town didn’t have a store that carried plush or satin or plastic eyes like the picture on the pattern envelope, so I made Mousy from scraps.   I sewed the mouse alone by hand and years later gave her to my daughter who has placed Mousy on the windowsill over my sewing machine.

My daughter likes to bake cookies and lie in the hammock and paint with watercolors. She would much rather read than run. At eleven, she prances into the living room with her buttons straining open on her blouse and jeans stretched tight around her hips and thighs. Just last week we raided the closet for fresh hand-me-downs. They fit then. They don’t now. When I see my daughter’s belly pop over the top of her pants I silently wonder if she’s too fat to be happy.  My unspoken words shock me.

Through high school I romanced the family scale to get thin and stay that way. I secretly carried a pocket calorie counter and debated the ratio of alcohol to calories in regular and light beer. Was the lower calorie count worth the smaller buzz? I ran six miles every day. I rode my bike the thirty-mile round trip to school and back. I did push ups, pull ups and leg lifts. It worked, but instead of seeing the tightly curved profile I had created in the bathroom mirror, I saw a roundness that would never be right. Then I embraced a new discipline.

When my daughter was a baby, I meticulously mapped the curves of my body alone in my sewing room while she slept. As I looked at her perfect forehead and tiny nose and ears, I wanted to stop time and be with her forever; at the same time I wanted nothing more than to escape. I never guessed how badly she would make me want my solitude. With practiced stealth, I eased myself away from her crib and walked away. Crossing the floor I knew which boards creaked and which were silent as I crept to my sewing machine. I shut myself in the far bedroom and checked for the closed window so the wind wouldn’t rattle the door. Alone and half-dressed, I measured distances: hips, crotch depth and waist. Every day I sewed and ripped seams urgently until she woke up and I could be with her again.

My ability to imagine flat, two-dimensional fabric into three dimensions grew along with the knowledge of my body’s contours. I discovered a short rise and a tight circumference to the curve of my hips. I learned my well-muscled calves protrude like outcropped boulders and keep the back of my pants from falling straight down. I found that my shoulders measure an inch wider in the back than in the front, so without extra fabric across the back, my shirts gap at the neck. Those years of nap time solitude at my sewing machine added up to a carefully constructed mathematical model of my body. There is nothing ambiguous about how precise measuring, calculating and careful cutting can create a shell that perfectly matches my shape. I get a custom-tailored fit in anything I sew. The explicitness of my understanding brings me closer to myself. In surveying my curves I fell in love with what made my mother worry.

I love this body enough that it has rubbed off on my daughter. We stand naked in the bathroom. As her bath dries on her skin she grabs my waist and turns us both to the mirror. She says, “Mommy, you and me, our bodies are beautiful.” She is awkward and out of proportion as breasts rise from baby fat. Faint stretch marks etch her hips where they swell quickly. Two babies and gravity have drawn my breasts down, and everywhere my skin has lost its elasticity. Old stretch marks I’d never noticed before have become like channels of erosion in a sinking landscape. I have lost some of my perspective. My body keeps on changing and this new territory will elude me unless I map it. I need some time with my measuring tape and pattern paper. The twin acts of fitting and stitching will allow me to retrace the shape I’m in.

There’s more, however, to this journey than I can know at once. I live with Crohn’s disease, which when it flares hurts so much I stop eating to make the pain go away. This can start a slip into a valley of starvation, yet I love the feeling of fat falling away as much as I love the bit of belly in the good times. I step on the scale and along with the fear of sliding into uncontrollable illness, I feel elated that I have dropped five pounds in a week.

Then I want new pants. I want them to cut close to my hips since I’m smaller than usual. I have just finished measuring and begun the first calculations. My daughter breaks in. She only gets interested in me when I get interested in myself. And I still feel the contradiction of wanting to be with her and alone at the same time. What was going to be a me-fest threatens to become a dress and a jacket for her.

With only a little reluctance I welcome this intrusion, this interruption of my plan. A survey of my stash of fabric turns up a piece of bright salmon linen to pair with a black and pink tweed. She has chosen a well-drafted dress that will size down with ease. I’ve always imagined passing on my love and knowledge of sewing to her. I imagine we will take happy turns at the machine and she will hand stitch at my knee. This dress will bind us together.

At first our joint project is exciting. I find out in measuring her fifth grade curves that they are a close match to mine. My 37-inch bust is her 36, my 29 inch waist, her 28. Even her shoulders and the distance between her breasts and the distance between mine are in perfect proportion. I proceed with the biological elation that I have truly reproduced myself. She’s a little me.

Before we sew, we tissue fit. I adjust the pattern and pin it to her body as though it were the garment. This takes time and concentration. The first thing she does is get impatient. It comes with a long suffering sigh and arms lax between her legs and reluctant silent engagement in everything we do. She reduces her verbal responses to eye rolls and shrugs and grunts.

My elation quickly rolls downhill. I won’t be mirroring my solitary celebration of my own body with a celebration of hers. It will be hard work with a ragged emotional edge. Only once in a while do we go fifty-fifty: she at the machine, me at the iron and then the reverse again as I grope for a way to tend her curves by measuring and cutting and stitching. Hours later, her dress is done. I’m tired and she’s not happy with the results. She doesn’t even pretend for me. She retreats to her room to read a book.

I feel sad we didn’t become of one mind at my old Singer. Later, slick from the shower, I by-pass the bathroom scale. I wipe the mist from the same mirror in which my daughter admired our bodies. With my hands I map and remap this undulating ground I live in. Most of what I make doesn’t last as long as Mousy. Inches and pounds come and go. Solitary silent concentration and practice with tape and pattern remain. Again and again I will measure and map in an act of intimate geography.

J.F. Dean sews to be alone. She learned fitting when her part-time salary was too small to dress the part. She mothers two teenagers while growing flowers and vegetables near Puget Sound.

I Wonder If He Felt Me Write Him Dead

I killed my father. And it felt right. If you read my forthcoming poetry collection Gonesongs (Bellowing Ark Press, 2011), you might think my father is dead. More than one of the poems implies it, after detailing his harsh personality. In another collection, The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House Press, 2011), I declare him dead outright in the poem “Standing at Daddy’s Grave.”

My father is, as far as I know, very much alive. Any misunderstanding by my readers of that is not an error of understanding on their part, or due to any confusing poetry gimmicks. No, it was deliberate. I lied.

Does that matter? Poetry, unlike creative nonfiction, rarely purports to be fact, though we poets are ever thieves. We are squirrels, stealing interesting tidbits and shiny pieces of stories and lives not our own, hoarders of images and words, threading them into our work wherever it fits our inspiration best. The “I” of poetry, we argue, is a general one, not a poet-personal pronoun.

My father is removed from my life by choice – his – and at the root of that choice lies a blazing, destructive addiction to anger, alcohol and drugs. I am very much like my father in many ways. My temper can be whipped to froth in moments, I find the concepts of retribution and vengeance attractive. If it were a viable career alternative, I might have been a vigilante. Like my father, I am passionate about any number of things, my affections can be fickle, and I am enamored of instant gratification. I am subject to random whims to be incredibly kind almost as often as I am to be cruel. There is no way for me to parse how many of our similarities are due to nature and how much to nurture. Because of this, I live in fear of becoming him, but also of forgetting him.

I did not consider the ethical implications of those poems (the patricide poems, if you will) at the time. I did not debate whether to include them (though I did question whether I wanted my mother reading them). They belonged in my narrative. They felt right; they felt good. They belonged in my story of myself. And because my work is in print, un-erasable, he is dead to those who have read my work. To people I will never meet, who will never hear or read me admit my duplicity. I don’t know why it bothers me so much. Actually, I do: I am a person who believes in the power of language, the magic of the written word, and the energy and intent we put out into the universe. In a sense, my lingering mix of guilt, X, and satisfaction all boil down to one thing:

Learning to live with my work is a lesson in humility. Sometimes shame, sometimes peace, but always humility. To all of those people who never knew my father and know my work, he is dead. They have, somewhere in their heads, closed a door upon the possibility of ever meeting or knowing him. That branch of possible, for those readers, is gone. I think about this more than I should.

My father is rarely mentioned among our family anymore, and whenever I am reminded he is still out there, I find myself surprised. In writing his loss (and death), and in holding onto these poems for so long, I have come to believe the story the way I have written it, instead of the way it was and is. Ninety percent of the time, I treat my father – and his memory – as though he is dead, as though I did speak at his grave, as though I came to terms with the death of a rough work-hardened man who was difficult to know. It allows me to sleep. It allows me to live my life without wondering if every car I pass is his, if he is looking for me, if he would talk to me if I could find him.
And so, I struggle because the lie – and it’s a whopper – has been worth it. I don’t agonize over trying to impact his decisions. I don’t punish myself for not being the person who can make him walk away from his bad choices. It moved him from the foreground to the background of my life and emotional landscape, and I function quite well (if not entirely honestly) within this arrangement.

Do I owe my readers the truth as I know it, or the truth as I write it? I don’t know. Writing my father dead is an act of power for me, but it is also a polite curtain drawn over some ugly realities. Some things are not poetry. Cocaine-fueled rages and crimes committed by a crackhead I used to call Daddy are not poetry for me, though I may address them in prose. So far, readers who know both my life and my work well have allowed me this separation. Will new readers who don’t know me be as generous?

I buried my father alive with words and it brings me peace. It also gives me a sense of rekindling the power of language. At the worst point, he would call me late at night, in the grip of drug-fueled paranoia, anger, or regret. I pleaded, cried, raged and reasoned with him to no avail. I made myself ill with worry. I wrote down the best arguments I could think of so I could be clear-headed and be sure to give him my most effective words, and my beloved language failed me. Perhaps I failed it. In either case, the result was the same, and I did not save my father.

The man I remember as wielding a sledgehammer with ease and bending thick ropes of copper bare-handed, I killed with little more than a piece of paper and a bit of ink. It hurt me to do it, even as it freed me. I wonder if he felt me become mighty at my ability to make him small. I wonder if he felt me write him dead.

I wonder if I will feel it if he erases me.

When I saw him last, years ago, he still had a clover tattoo on his upper left arm, each leaf inscribed with the name and birthdate of my brother, sister and me. I don’t know if he he did have the ink gone over with something darker. I thought it might feel a little like death, to have your name erased by one of those who created you. In some old myths, when God erased your name from the Book of Life, all who had known you forgot you existed. You were wiped from the memory of the world.

I’ve had some of my own tattoos covered up with others. If you know it’s there, you can always see that first tattoo underneath, slightly warping whatever comes after, surfacing in lines not-quite straight, shapes that don’t quite fit. The overwrite always hurts more, the skin there more tender, a reminder of the prior claim of that first inking. If my father did erase or overwrite us, I hope it hurt like hell, the way it did for me.

- Colleen S. Harris works on the library faculty at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She is the author of God in my Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2009) and The Kentucky Vein (Punkin House, 2011).

Build Us A Home

A crane descends and rips the roof from our home while my sister and I watch from the front lawn. Neighbors gather on the gravel driveway across the street, shielding their eyes from the sun, pointing and gasping as the crane almost swings our roof into the crab apple tree. Mother screams, and I wonder what they’re saying about us. About Father, who is scratching the nickel-sized bald spot on his scalp and pacing the yard with small quick steps. About Mother, squinting up at the crane with her hands on her hips, waving her arms at the orange vests and yellow hard hats atop the machine, who look and sound threatening with inflated muscles and barking voices, but who, we’ve been told, are here to help. About my nine-year-old sister and me, sitting here in thick pockets of grass, watching the cold, steel arm of the crane thrash our roof like a dog with a bone in its mouth.

An airplane flies overhead, and I wonder if its passengers can see the contents of our roofless home: a refrigerator covered in stickers, mismatched sneakers strewn by the front door, Mother and Father’s master bedroom, their pink bathroom, the broken shower. From the sky, I imagine our pale yellow home looks like the two-story plastic dollhouse Father bought me last Christmas, with scattered furniture, cluttered rooms, and my family the miniature inhabitants. Stuck in our places, we wait for a stranger to reach through the open top and re-arrange our messy lives.

For months leading up to its reconstruction, Mother complained about our squat ranch-style home.

“There is no room for my fabric in the study,” she said. “And not enough cupboard space in the kitchen.”

Father ignored her, waving his hand as though swatting a pesky fly. This was his home. He bought and renovated it long before other families moved to our three-block subdivision, our only neighbors the leaning cornstalks that waved from where our street dead-ended into a field. He was the one who laid the bricks for Mother’s flowerbed, who built and painted white the wooden trellis that arcs over the garden—the one that he planted—in our backyard, the garden that grows the tomatoes, squash and cucumber we eat every fall, spring and summer. He had given us all of this; what more was there to want?

One night Mother slipped into the bedroom my sister and I shared. She sat and fussed with the comforter, tucking it in, un-tucking it, tucking it in again.
“There is no room for my fabric in the study,” she said, wringing her hands in the lap of her gauzy pink nightgown. Even at twelve years old, I recognized the face of disappointment: leaky eyes, wobbly smile, a heavy head that did not dream of chalked sidewalk, humming lawnmowers or houses the color of Easter eggs, light blue, yellow and peach.

The morning after our roof is removed, the stranger arrives. His name is Frank, and he’s here to build our new home. He gathers us around our kitchen table and shows us pictures of sleek, tiled bathrooms and smooth, winding staircases.

“Pick what you like,” he says. “You can have anything.”

Mother stirs, while Father scratches his bald spot and squints at the pictures. He is always hesitant. Hesitant to agree to a family vacation at Disney World. Hesitant to move us out of the suburbs, away from his parents’ farm. Hesitant even to marry Mother, who was only twenty-three—eight years younger than him—when he picked her up in his blue Chevy truck for their first date.

“I hadn’t gone out with many men,” she told me one morning while readying herself in the bathroom mirror. I sat on the toilet seat, watching, trying to learn the names of the tiny metal tools she used to shape her features. “None of the boys liked me because I didn’t have a chest. Boys only care about boobs, remember that.”
I told her she was pretty. With silky black curls and a neck as long and white as a candle, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, even more beautiful than the models in the fashion magazines piled beneath her bed.

“Your father was the first man to tell me that,” she said. “That’s why I married him.”

She powdered her cheeks and told me Father proposed on top of the roof of his parents’ peeling white farmhouse. It was the Fourth of July. The heat clung to their skin like wet towels, but they huddled close together anyway, watching fireworks fizzle down the edge of a sky so blue and dreamy they were afraid they might fall into it. They talked about growing squash and tomatoes in a garden. They talked about playing house: Mother Father Children.

“Maybe we should get married someday,” Father said. He did not have a ring.

Father finally decides on the winding staircase and four spacious bedrooms—one for me, one for my sister, one for him and Mother each.

“Now you can escape my snoring,” he says, laughing. Mother smiles and points to a picture of a Jacuzzi.

After more squinting, Father is pleased. He shakes Frank’s hand conspiratorially, as men do when they know they have done something manly. Frank promises to return over the weekend to hang up plastic in the living room. He tells us our home will crumble during the construction, but the plastic will hold its pieces together.

“Like an earthquake,” Father explains before tucking me in. “Some splitting and pulling apart, only this will be much less scary.”

As promised, Frank returns toward the end of the week. He stamps his muddy boots on our welcome mat and tosses his jacket across Father’s armchair, revealing a thin muscle t-shirt that snaps tightly across his broad chest and an orange tan I suspect he keeps year-round.
He covers our home with large sheets of plastic. Plastic conceals the carpeting, the couch and the chairs. Plastic hangs like a shower curtain above the entranceway to our living room. My sister and I stomp on it, delighted to hear snaps and crackles beneath our feet. Our whole house smells like rubber.

Frank takes me aside and tells me he will leave the television uncovered. He grins and squeezes my shoulder like we’re old friends sharing an inside joke. But Frank is not familiar. I turn away from his elastic smile.

Now that I’m twelve, Mother tells me I should start focusing on grown-up things like hairstyles and bikinis and men. Real men, not the plastic dollhouse men I play with when I’m alone in my room. One afternoon during the construction, we sit at the kitchen table, flipping through pages of her bra catalogues, when she asks if I know any boys. I can only think of one: Mark, who passes me gross notes underneath the tables in seventh grade science class and says things to me on the school bus—how he thinks my butt is nice and how he wants to mount my Everests, which I’m pretty sure are boy code for boobs.

Mother talks about Father, about how he doesn’t touch her enough. Don’t I know how that feels, not to be touched?

I don’t. I imagine wearing one of these lacey black bras for Mark, twisting the delicate clasp between my fingers and letting my boobs fall and swing free like the women in Mother’s magazine, except that I don’t have boobs, not real ones, not yet. My nipples are soft and pink like mosquito bites.

Frank works on our second story for a few days. I hear him stomping around on the roof while I watch TV in the living room. Mother takes time off from her job as a nurse to supervise the construction while Father walks his mail route. She spends afternoons on the roof with Frank, sometimes coming downstairs to peer in at me through the plastic cocooning our living room.

Some nights Father doesn’t return home until late because he likes helping out on his parents’ farm after work, harvesting corn and digging in the vegetable garden. On these nights Frank stays late. Mother puts on a movie in the living room for my sister and me, so she and Frank can have adult time in the kitchen. They drink from long, slender bottles, nibble dainty crackers, and burn candles that smell like exotic spices or forests. I’m not sure what they talk about, but they bend their heads close together like the girls and I do on the playground when we’re spying on cute boys. Mother stops acting like Mother and becomes a different woman, one who speaks brightly, wears clinging red dresses and oversized gold bracelets that chime when she moves. I wonder if this is who she’s always been, and maybe I have never noticed.

In the kitchen, Frank is telling Mother how talented she is, how she never should have given up her cello. Mother dreamed of becoming a famous musician. She had studied cello in college and played in a few local orchestras but quit when she moved from the city to the suburbs with Father. In her bedroom, Mother’s cello lies inside its coffin-shaped case, black and lined with red satin like something put to rest.
Frank and Mother are still having adult time in the kitchen. Their giggles are like the laugh tracks on sitcoms. Automatic, empty, loud like a slap.

One humid afternoon, I’m sitting behind the plastic hanging in the living room, flipping through channels, when I stop on a soap opera. A mustached man is gripping a woman by her shoulders. They’re screaming at each other. Then, they’re kissing. Their hands roam up and down each other’s bodies; the woman’s lipstick smears across her cheeks, lips and neck. The man reaches beneath her shirt. She reaches beneath his, and then they’re on the couch, tangled in a pretzel-like knot of arms and legs.

My cheeks burn. I look around for Mother, but she and Frank are on the roof. I return my attention to the man, his bronzed shoulders and hard stomach. I imagine what it would be like to touch him, if he would feel chiseled and smooth like my dollhouse men. I study the woman, the playful way she swivels her hips and tosses her cascading, wheat-colored hair over her shoulder.

Afternoons at three, I watch the man and woman while Mother is on the roof. Inspired by their movements, I make up my own. When they kiss, I pucker my lips. When they embrace, I wrap my arms around my shoulders, touching my neck, my chest and my legs. I kiss my arm just to see how it feels, skin and lips pressed together. After the show, I practice my moves in front of my bedroom mirror, sashaying like the characters on TV until I hear Mother’s footsteps on the stairs, returning from the roof.

The show ends at four. Right on cue, the man and woman stop kissing and return to screaming at each other. Today, I switch off the TV but keep watching as the shadows of a man and woman fill the dark screen. The man pulls at the woman’s curly hair, and she laughs and slaps his hand away, holding a finger to her lips to quiet him.

The two freeze, suddenly aware of an audience.

“Honey?” my mother says.

Several days later, Father and I drive his blue Chevy truck to the Postal Service store where he will buy new walking shoes. I am restless, impatient. Lately, it feels like a hot, red balloon has risen in my chest, expanding with each breath, dropping whole and heavy into my lungs. It’s so humid; my knees are sticking together, my bangs plastered in wet curlicues to my forehead.
Father points to a withered, dry field alongside the highway. Cornstalks sigh and slump, exhausted from the sun’s glare. He tells me about a day twelve years ago, when Mother drove on this same highway to the doctor’s office where she worked. She passed this same field, richer and greener then, because it was part of the land his family farmed.

Mother looked out her window that day and spotted Father’s outline in the tractor’s cab, his gloved hands, strong jaw and dark skin. She pulled her car over to the side of the highway and scaled the fence that separated her from him, sweeping like a wild wind across the field in white tennis shoes and green nurse’s scrubs.

“I just needed to see you,” she said, climbing into the tractor’s cab.
Father laughs at the memory.

“I was afraid she would be late for work,” he says. “I just kept thinking, ‘she’s going to get dirt all over her pants.’”

Two weeks later, Frank is gone, along with the plastic. The front yard scabs over with leaves and leftover debris, flakes of plaster sprinkled like snow over the grass. The crane has eased the roof back into place, leaving us with the dulled expressions of those who have returned home from an exotic vacation. Bored, we wander our new bedrooms, uncertain what to do with the empty white walls, how to fill the overwhelming space.

“They looked bigger in the pictures,” Father says, sighing and scratching his bald spot.

Mother returns to work at the hospital and stays late into the evenings. She buys us microwave dinners and paper plates. Plastic knives and forks. Father tries to cook but burns almost everything, which means pancakes. The three of us eat them drowned in butter and syrup off plates balanced on our knees while we watch cartoons in the living room. In our new home, there are no rules.

Though the construction is over, our neighbors sometimes still look at us from their driveways or pause in front of our home when they’re out walking their dogs. At first, I think it’s because our house is the biggest on the block, and they’re jealous of its size. But then they start asking me questions when I’m outside playing basketball, like “How’s your mom?” or “Where’s your dad? I haven’t seen him out lately.” Father isn’t out because he’s hiding in his bedroom with the heavy velvet curtains drawn. Sometimes he sleeps through whole days, and no one knows if he’s sad, mad, or sick with something. Mother hides in the study, which used to be my yellow bedroom. It holds the parts of her she now has space for: fabric, her cello, jewelry boxes stuffed with dangly gold pieces too big for her ears and wrists.

Like our neighbors, I’m noticing things, too. The vegetables in Father’s garden are soft and rotting. Mother is playing her cello again. I sometimes see her late at night, slipping out of our home in red heels I spy from beneath my bedroom door, thudding softly down the carpeted steps. I lie awake in the dark, listening for her keys turning in the lock, the squeal of our front door opening and shushing closed behind her. All around me families are moving in and out of their homes, regrouping into separate units, so it feels possible this might happen to me. I focus my eyes on the faded glow-in-the-dark stars I’ve moved from my old ceiling. I fight to keep them open so I can make sure Mother returns but fall asleep until morning. I wake to the sun filling my new room through my new blinds, to the long, low sounds of Mother’s cello. Father is still sleeping. He makes no noise at all.

- Amy Bernhard is a graduate of the University of Iowa. Her work has been published in Palooka Literary Journal and The Daily Palette. She lives and works in Iowa City, Iowa.

The Bird’s Nest

Two thousand and eight Chinese Tai Chi Masters move in unison on the TV screen that hangs on the waiting room wall.  Close-ups reveal fierce dark eyes, but when the camera pulls back the performers’ bodies form massive, pulsing circles in the middle of the “Bird’s Nest,” the Olympic stadium in Beijing.  Unhappy to be back in a hospital waiting room, I lose myself in the watching.  “It’s incredible that two thousand human beings can create such perfect circles!” a commentator says.  The Tai Chi masters, dressed in white uniforms, jump and twist, then land on the ground and freeze as one.  Their movements are controlled, somehow weightless.  Fabric billows around their taut bodies.  I wonder how they know exactly where they are, and where they fit, individually, into this colossal experience going on around them.

To the left of the TV, large red letters spell out EMERGENCY across two wide doors next to a registration desk.  My husband, Jean-Paul, and I rushed to the hospital after a nurse called to tell us his mother had fallen out of her wheelchair.  It must be the hundredth time this has happened in the last year and a half, since she was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.  Judith refuses to consider moving into an assisted living facility or paying for in-home care, even though the biopsy caused swelling in the brain and she is paralyzed on the left side.  She relies on us to handle all of her needs even though we live in another town and both work. 

She wheels herself around her small Cambridge house, a telephone clipped to the collar of her shirt.  Each time she falls, she dials 9-1-1 and the local fire company sends an ambulance.  If her door is locked when the EMTs arrive, they are forced to climb through a window.  Usually after they’ve put Judith back in her chair she refuses to go to the hospital, so they are forced to leave her alone in the house.  Sometimes we never even find out it happened.  Tonight they apparently over-rode her angry protests, because they transported her here.

A voice crackles over the PA system.  “Mr. Stevens, Mr. Stevens.”  I glance around the half-filled room and see a man I assume is Mr. Stevens.  He stands up and walks toward the doors.  I have been waiting at least an hour for my own name to be called, or for Jean-Paul to come back out to the waiting room and tell me what is going on.  The doors open; Mr. Stevens walks through.  The doors close again.

Tired and frustrated, I turn back to the television.  I think about the Olympic motto: “Faster, higher, stronger.”  When I was young this dream seemed possible, even for me, a small-town gymnast in upstate New York.

Now I watch the Tai Chi Masters’ punches and kicks, hear the force of their unifying “kiais,” or yells.  Tai Chi was one of the arts I practiced in my thirties when I studied martial arts.  I remember part of the form we learned.  At the beginning we held our hands in just the right way, then lifted our arms slowly with our elbows slightly bent.  We arched our wrists, then reversed them so our palms led the hands back down as we breathed.  In a slow, sweeping motion, with a turn at the waist, we switched direction and formed circles with our arms, one arm up, the other down.  “Imagine you are cradling a large beach ball,” our instructor used to say.  The goal was connection, a sense of peace, the perfect circle.

The performers in the Bird’s Nest now encircle a group of schoolchildren.  The children hug backpacks to their chests and smile as they watch the flow of activity around them.  The commentator explains the symbolism involved.  The circles represent the current generation as it protects the generation that follows. 

I wonder if Judith ever protected Jean-Paul.  She was emotionally fragile even before the brain tumor.  A tall, blond beauty growing up in Missouri, she married her first love at twenty.  They moved to Massachusetts with their son when he was six, but divorced just a few years later.  Judith stayed in Massachusetts but became anorexic and depressed, had bouts of rage and hysteria.  When Jean-Paul was eleven, she packed her bags and threatened to move out.  He had to block the doorway until she calmed down and agreed not to leave him alone.  She was an unusually talented painter and sculptor, and settled into a career teaching high school art.  For the next thirty years, she rarely dated, even though she remained slim and striking.  She told me once that Jean-Paul’s father, who died at forty-seven, would always be the love of her life. 

The P.A. system intrudes again.  “Maria Sanchez?  Maria Sanchez?”

I try to ignore the interruption and turn my attention back to the Tai Chi Masters.  My throat has tightened over the thoughts of Judith, and I want to keep my feelings under control.  She did not ask for this horrific illness.  She would give anything for the last eighteen months to be a bad dream.  Still, I feel my shoulders and neck start to stiffen, and I shift uncomfortably in the hard wooden chair.  I have no desire to be here tonight.  I don’t even want to be myself in my life.  I would rather be in China, in that stadium on TV.  I would rather be a Tai Chi Master.  At the very least I would rather be home, watching the opening ceremonies in the comfort of my living room.

I notice a man in the waiting room.  He is cradling a little girl in his arms.  She has dark eyes and little black pony tails wrapped inside gray, shiny coils.  They look like Mickey Mouse ears.  The girl doesn’t appear to be injured or ill, but she is crying.  The man holds her and comforts her with gentle words.  She notices the television mounted on the wall while tears stream down her face.  The instant she sees the Tai Chi masters all dressed in white, moving in unison in perfect circles, the little girl stops crying.  She just stares at them in wonder, and starts to watch.

Judith told me once that she hated everything about her teaching career except, of course, her students.  She was known to champion the underdogs, the kids who didn’t fit in.  At night she taught adult education classes.  She set her own dreams aside for the future, when she would have a hefty retirement fund and a comfortable pension.  When she finally retired with that pension in hand, her mortgage paid off and her son long grown, she started pursuing the things she wanted.  She opened a business applying permanent cosmetics.  She purchased closets full of shoes and new clothes.  She bought a Porsche Boxter.  Then she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

The Tai Chi Masters are leaving the stadium.  A new group of performers pours into the arena and melts together to form a huge dove.  A swarm of bodies, thousands of bodies, runs back and forth until the wings of the dove appear to be flapping up and down.  The huge human bird is flying!  I shake my head in disbelief.  I cannot imagine how they are doing this.   I think about the people of China, such a huge nation, putting on a show for the world.   It strikes an emotional chord in me.  They are trying to establish a new China, a new era for their country.  Everything they demonstrate is beautiful, flowing, flying, as if nothing is more important than hope.

We learned recently that my mother-in-law’s tumor is growing again; the doctors can’t help anymore.  The average patient with her type of tumor does not live longer after diagnosis than she has now lived.  Chemotherapy and radiation no longer work.  Judith is furious, terrified.  She blames everyone, including her son.  She has accused her friend Fran, a frail woman of eighty who has visited every Saturday since Judith got sick, of wanting to steal all her money.  She has insisted I want her to die. 

When all of this started I felt grief and compassion; by now I am worn down and tired.  Every day now is painful and difficult, and we have had little time for ourselves.  I am ashamed of my thoughts on this side of those doors, while my mother-in-law lies in a hospital bed.

A man just walked through the doors.  He is talking to a woman who sits in a row of chairs right behind me.  “We’ve decided to keep you here,” he tells her.  “We were planning to send you home, but we spoke to your insurance company and we’re going to keep you for the night.”

I force my focus back to the television.  How do the performers do it?  Yet another group has entered the arena.  They are dressed in glowing green costumes and have formed another massive circle.  So many circles.  They are hoisting themselves onto each other’s shoulders, setting up for something big.  The camera pulls back and then, yes, I see it!  It is the Bird’s Nest itself, the Olympic stadium!  The stadium has been reconstructed, within itself, by thousands of human bodies.  Now it is somehow flashing white and green.  Ninety-one thousand people in the stands are enraptured.  Each has been given something to hold up.  They are holding lanterns, thousands of red lanterns with lights inside that flicker like cherry stars.  The commentators are beside themselves, and so am I.   The sight is so stunning that I can hardly breathe.  One commentator says, “You might as well put away the trophy for Opening Ceremonies.  This is it, no one will ever match it.”  Everything on the screen is surreal, deeply and intensely beautiful.  Everyone in the Bird’s Nest is joyful and safe, oblivious to the world outside.

The PA buzzes to life again. “Kathy, please call the front desk.  Kathy, front desk please.” I swat at the noise mentally as if it were a fly.

The performances at the Opening Ceremonies are coming to an end.  The dancers turn and swirl, run off the floor.  Announcers speak in French, then English, then Chinese.  The parade of athletes begins.  Men and women led by flag-bearers march into the stadium.  Some teams are dressed in suits, others in colorful folk costumes traditional to their cultures.  I can’t tell what order they are marching in; it is not alphabetical, at least not in English.  The announcers’ voices ring out over the loudspeakers and echo through the Bird’s Nest.  They say the name of each country as its excited athletes arrive.  They flood in, the “youth of the world,” answering the call from four years ago to assemble in Beijing. 

I am no longer part of the “youth of the world.”  I am forty-five, twenty-eight years past ponytails and balance beams. 
A commercial interrupts the parade of athletes.  I look at the clock and think about the time.  It is after 9:00 p.m.  Because of the time difference between Boston and Beijing, the Opening Ceremonies actually took place twelve hours ago.  The program was taped for the U.S. audience, and in truth all of this is long over. 

I have been sitting in this waiting room for two hours now, and my head is pounding with pain.  My shoulders are rigid.  I have to ask someone what’s going on.  I stand up and feel that my knees are sore from sitting cross-legged on the waiting room chair.  I take a deep breath, nervous to face what I might find out, and walk past the nurse seated at the reception desk.  I press the metal button so many others have pressed before me tonight, and watch the word EMERGENCY split in two and the doors slide open.  A large nurse’s station is located behind the doors, then a long, wide corridor lit by blinding fluorescent lights.  I walk past a line of rooms with half-open doors. A man is standing in the hallway, talking into his cell phone. His shoulders are hunched, his head bent forward.  He looks exhausted.  “I’m in the hospital,” he says into the phone. “It’s my mother.  She fell again.” 

Is our story not so unusual then?  Are others living through the same type of hell?  For months we have felt so alone.

I look for my husband. I see him standing outside one of the rooms.  He is speaking to a middle-aged woman in a white lab coat.  They are looking at papers on a clipboard.  I approach and notice the strained expression on Jean-Paul’s face.  He looks up without smiling, nods quickly at me and holds up a finger, indicating that I should wait a minute until he can explain what’s going on. 
Does this mean she’s being declared legally incompetent to handle her own affairs?” Jean-Paul asks.  Then he adds, “Will she think I have done this to her?”

I step backwards to give Jean-Paul and the doctor some space so they can talk. The motion is strangely unsteady.  No Tai Chi Masters move with me; no audience watches, enraptured.  I am not in a stadium or bird’s nest, high up and safe from the fray.  I am in a hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the circle is collapsing.

- Faye Rapoport DesPres’ essays have appeared in Ascent, Hamilton Stone Review, InterfaithFamily.com, Writer Advice and International Gymnast Magazine.   Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, the Writer’s Chronicle, Animal Life, Trail and Timberline and other publications.  Faye holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pine Manor College.

Twenty Minutes

“Where do you suppose Granny is now?” Ben asks. And because this is my logical husband, I know he is wondering where the casket is that we left above ground at the committal service, and not something more metaphysical.

Ben, his sister Elizabeth and I stop by the cemetery before leaving for the airport to check up on his grandmother, Marjorie. Manchester, Michigan —“Home of the Famous Chicken Broil”—is only big enough for one cemetery, with a sign halfway up the hill informing visitors they are leaving or entering the Catholic or Protestant section.

We can see that her casket is gone and a man is using a crowbar to maneuver the Bentschneider family headstone back into place. We walk over, still in our funeral clothes—too black, too dressy, too East Coast fancy compared to the rest of the family—and the man explains that the headstone won’t be in its final position for another week or so.

“I’m Mike,” the man says. “I take care of the cemetery.”

Mike is a large, heavyset man with curly brown hair. He is sunburned from the work outdoors and has none of the professional solemnity of the funeral home staff.

I glance over at a dark granite marker in the next row bearing the image of what appears to be a Scottish terrier.

“Is that a dog on that headstone?” I ask, half-smiling at the incongruousness of it. “It looks like a photograph.”

“Oh,” he replies, “That’s an etching of a photograph in the granite. That woman took her own life, and apparently the dog was with her when she died. I guess that dog meant everything to her.”

I stop smiling.

Mike remembers Marjorie, Ben and Elizabeth’s grandmother, and talks about how she used to come to the cemetery after her husband died and tell him how bothered she was that every time she came the wreath on the grave was tipped over.

“So I stuck a couple of pieces of wire in it and just kind of jammed it into the ground, and she must’ve thanked me about twenty times after that.”

Ben and Elizabeth smile. This sounds like the Granny they remember, back when she still remembered them.

We look around at the nearby plots.

“The flowers are planted in the ground,” I observe with surprise.

“Oh, yeah,” says Mike. “You can plant anything you want as long as it’s not a tree or a bush, and I’ll mow around it.”

I think about the small-town cemetery in Connecticut where my maternal grandparents and great-grandparents are buried. It sits atop a rise next to a road that used to be a rural route connecting farms and is now a two-lane state highway. The cemetery is composed of small family plots, with an upright marker in gray or rose granite with the family name. Decoration, if any, consists of engraved flowers or tastefully scrolling ribbons. In my family’s plot there are footstones for each individual grave—light gray slabs that list only the names and dates:

Charles F. Pobuda, 1872–1936
Agnes Luxa, his wife, 1879–1906
Elizabeth Moravec, his wife, 1872–1961
Charles F. Pobuda, 1901–1970
Charles F. “Chucky” Pobuda, 1933–1936
Mary M. Pobuda, 1906–1989

The footstones are flush with the ground so they can be mowed over by tractors, and there are only a couple of times a year when flowers of any kind are allowed—a week around Memorial Day and again around Veterans’ Day—and then only in containers that can be thrown away.

I stop by whenever I’m driving down Interstate 84. I usually have the place to myself. There’s an austere serenity about this cemetery, a dignified stillness beyond the breeze and the cars rushing past, and I sit on a little granite bench for a few minutes and let it wash over me.

I used to talk to my grandparents during those visits. Hi, Grammy. Hi Pa. It’s me. How are you? I felt compelled somehow to be polite, to keep up their spirits, to distract them from the terrible thing—death—that was happening to them. But I came to realize that the person to whom their deaths were still happening was me. Loss reverberates through the living, but for the dead it’s a onetime deal.

Now that my grandparents have been gone for 20 and 40 years—half a lifetime—their deaths are finally in my past as well as theirs, and I can leave them undisturbed by inane chitchat. I sit in silence and notice the quality of the light. Sometimes it feels like I can breathe in the quiet.

These days when I think of my grandparents, it’s not when I’m at the cemetery. I’ll see a daddy longlegs climbing up one of my tomato plants and remember how Pa used to pick them up out by our garage, holding them out by one leg.

“Which way’s north?” he’d inquire of the flailing creature as my sister and I watched in fascinated horror as he touched a bug.

When I think of my grandmother it’s most often in my kitchen, cooking paprikash or pork and sauerkraut, which she learned to make as a new bride, following her mother-in-law around the kitchen in Connecticut, measuring spoons and index cards in hand. My mother has those index cards now, and I have the copies that she wrote down for me.

I have index cards in Marjorie’s handwriting as well—a sloppy joe recipe that I raved over the first time Ben took me to her house is now a winter staple in ours. Someday I will make copies for our kids.

The same handwriting, a little shakier, spells out “Benjamin” on the little cardboard jewelry box that Ben’s mother sent after she moved Marjorie into assisted living. It contained a stone arrowhead. Ben rolled it over in his hands and told me how he and his grandfather found it together in the garden when he was little. Marjorie must have held on to it for almost 30 years.

I see that the photo etching in Michigan is a popular technique. We pass graves decorated with tractors, trucks, and one—apparently that of a hunter—that has three separate images: a deer, a fish, and a boat. It strikes me as terribly sad that somebody thinks their life, or their loved one’s life, could be summed up with a picture of a tractor.

I tell myself that it’s meaningful to the person who chose it, that I am being a snob.

Who thought that all there was to you was a tractor? I wonder.

We pass graves decorated with photographs, toys, relentlessly cheerful flowers in plastic baskets, and one that is maxed out: teddy bear, flowers, dream catcher, and multiple open letters attached to stakes in the ground.

I don’t look for the name or dates on the stone. I don’t want to feel sympathy for the person who created this tacky monument to her own grief, which looks like a dollar store exploded in the middle of the cemetery.

And yet.

Those letters are only a more concrete expression of the need I felt to make small talk with my grandparents. This is a death that is still happening.

Someone spent his entire life at the backbreaking labor of running a farm. Someone lost hope and died in a suicide, alone except for her Scottie. Marjorie used to worry about the wreath on her husband’s grave, but then she got Alzheimer’s and died. The stones tell the facts, but the real monuments are recipe cards and arrowheads. Only the people who loved you can tell the story.

- K. T. Landon is a software engineer at a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lives outside of Boston with her husband, Ben. She is a Pushcart nominee and her essays have appeared in The Dos Passos Review, The Fourth River, The Journal, The Rambler, and Red Cedar Review.

Six Strands of Separation

I sit in the hair salon, facing myself in the mirror, screaming with laughter. I am with my hairdresser, Lexie, and we’re laughing about something frightening that could have happened to me but didn’t. I laugh at both inappropriate and appropriate times. I laugh when I’m describing things that scared me, hurt me and made me sad. I laugh at eerie things that have no real explanation. I find the funny bone in tragedy.

So many scenes in movies, plays and books take place at the hairdressers that I believe that, in some way, it is a place on a par with the bedroom and the dinner table. I hear more stories here than nearly any place else. I also tell many stories here.

I have a specific relationship with Lexie. She and I recently attended a live performance of Dancing With the Stars but we don’t socialize outside of that. I enjoy this limited relationship with her. She is a petite blonde, twenty-three with an angelic face, single, with a four-year-old daughter. She has a sunny nature and is a great laugher. Also, she’s a size 2. I’ll say nothing more about that other than I forgive her. She has an extreme form of a popular hairstyle. It is a bob, long and blonde on the sides, and colored a dark chocolate in the back, shingled short. Over the years, I’ve noticed most stylists I’ve seen seem to take their hairstyles one or two degrees farther than those of the hirsute citizens on the street.

It’s a wonder any of us go to the stylist. And so often. I think it’s the nurturing and cosseting we return for, not so much the styling. I’ve been known to stay with an inept or abusive hairdresser for eons. It may be guilt or perhaps a substitute for my mother of blessed memory. Lexie is neither bad nor abusive. She thinks I’m funny, which is a baseline requirement.

Lexie tells me about the new man she dated who has been either following her or stalking her. Rick works for the company that supplies product (that ubiquitous style term) to the salon.

She has recently ended a long-term relationship with Rex the Cop, which is the only way anyone ever refers to him. According to Lexie, Rex the Cop is a good man but spends more time with her parents than with her so that was that.

“So, I had to meet Rex the Cop at my house to return some stuff to him, and I noticed as I was driving, there was a car following me,” she says. The scissors balanced on her hand, wide open and winking.

“You’re kidding!” I say.

“Yeah, and I pull over on the street and start to get out of the car with my stuff, and there’s Stalker Rick in his car, pulled over about a half a block down.”

“Shut up!”

“Later,” she continues, “when Rex the Cop drives away from my house, Rick follows him and Rex the Cop pulls him over with the flashing lights and says ‘Are you following me?’”

How ironic, I think.

“And?”

“So Rex the Cop tells him to cut the crap or he could be in trouble.”

“No way!”

“Yeah, and I told Rick I couldn’t see him one night and I walk out to my car after the salon closes, and there he is sitting in his car.”

“Creepy,” I comment. “So what’d you do?”

“I said to him, ‘You’re frickin’ nuts! I don’t want to see you anymore, you head case,’” she says snipping away at my hair with gusto. I let out a brief hoot.

“You tell him!”

Amazingly, in the midst of this dramatic account, my hair looks great. I watch my hair creation emerging like a sculpture out of a block of stone.

“Well,” I say, “there are so many wackos out there. I’ve been pretty lucky throughout my long dating life, but I’ve had a few scary experiences myself.”

Lexie remains quiet, waiting for me to spill. “It’s an intuition thing,” I say. “If you don’t listen to what your gut tells you, you could get yourself into serious trouble.”

I met Brad on Match.com. There are not a lot of avenues of choice other than on-line dating these days, though I have to admit I don’t cope well with it. Too much pressure up front. There are of course potential drawbacks to meeting someone on-line. You have no idea who you’re meeting. You’ve nothing to base trust on. It’s a blind date without the friend referral. You have to be more careful when you meet someone this way. Your instincts have to be acutely sensitized. Otherwise, you might find yourself alone with a dangerous person, a pathological liar or a con man. Still you have to take some risk if you want to meet someone.

Brad was a fireman at Conrad International Tradeport with the National Guard and had held that job for many years. He was physically beautiful. About 5’11” and built rugged, like Tonka Trucks. Soft brown eyes. Curly thick salt and pepper hair. No male pattern balding in his future. Perfect, smooth skin with sun kissed dark brown hair all over his arms. His skin was firm and elastic. He was the kind of handsome guy who gets chosen for those firemen calendars. First we emailed. Then we spoke on the phone. He sounded charming and anxious to meet me. So we set up a date to meet at the cafe in my town.

He looked exactly like his photo, which is often not the case with on-line dating. There was something vacant in his eyes but maybe I imagined that. He exuded animal sexuality and he smelled wonderful, like warmed earth and sunshine. Smell is a big thing to me. If the person doesn’t smell right, he’s quickly crossed off my list. Brad passed the smell test without breaking a sweat. Now, it was a matter of communication. We talked about all the usual mundane things that people who don’t know each other talk about. Work, education, family, friends. Everything was okay. He didn’t seem terribly bright but no red flags. Eventually, we left the café and since we didn’t want to end the evening, we moved to sit in my car. In the way of those things, we kissed. It was great.

Then, he said, “Let’s go back to your place. I want to make love to you.”

I’d just met this man an hour and a half before. I looked at him and there was nothing behind his eyes or his words. No passion, just physical need.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s not my way. It takes me time. I don’t trust that easily. With good reason.”

“Why not?” Brad said. “It’ll be great. I can tell. I’ll make you a good boyfriend.”

Red flag waving briskly.

“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go.”

We didn’t.

“So,” I tell Lexie, “I can’t give you a good reason for this, other than animal attraction, but I went out with him two more times. Is that crazy or what? My intuition was screaming at me, ‘Don’t get involved with this guy.’” She is laughing her high trill laugh. “I mean, what did I think was going to happen on the second and third dates? He was going to magically metamorphose into a mensch? He never gave up trying to coerce me into bed. I never give it up to anyone who wants it that badly to the exclusion of anything else.”

“Totally,” Lexie agrees. “How stupid can men be? They never get that.”

“Well, some do,” I amend. Some know how to manipulate a woman into bed, I think, by talking about anything else but sex. And there are some who want everything, body and soul. Those are the men I’ve loved and some have loved me back.

Lexie looks thoughtful for a moment as she rolls my hair around a large round brush, focusing the blow dryer. I could do this every day but the thrill would fade.

“You know, it’s funny,” she says. “I have a client who is married to a Conrad fireman. And he has salt and pepper hair too. I met him once.” She swings my chair to get the other side of my head. “I’m sure it’s not the same guy but you won’t believe what happened to this woman.”

She tells me that this woman, Lynn, met this Conrad fireman, fell in love, and married him after seven months.

“Duh,” I comment. “Never a good idea as far as I’m concerned.”

“They were married in the Caribbean,” Lexie adds. “On an island.”

Is that a rationale I wonder?

Lexie tells me that Lynn is a nurse and works at the local hospital here in town. They’d been married a couple of months, and everything had been going fine.

Lynn has a fifteen-year old daughter who usually lives with her biological father but was staying at their apartment one night while she was at work. A phone call comes in to her work. It’s Lynn’s daughter. She says she’s been raped by Lynn’s husband.

“You’re going to think I’m making this up but do you know what kind of nurse Lynn is?” I don’t have time to think or respond. “She’s a rape-crisis nurse, for God’s sake. Can you believe it?” Lexie blurts. “She was at work when the call came in. That’s why she got the call. Her daughter called the Center right after it happened. The police brought the daughter in for testing and the results showed she’d been raped.”

My mouth is a big O. “What happened to the fireman?” I ask, finally.

“He took off and holed up in some nearby motel under a false name for a couple of days. Then the police found him. They drove him to the psych hospital in town because he attempted to kill himself twice.”

I think about all the lives involved that are, in some ways, destroyed or at least epically changed. I am sad for all three of them because the fireman is clearly ill. Somebody should have spotted it at work or somewhere. But no, Lexie is telling me that the fireman’s boss refuses to terminate his employment because he’s worked there for seventeen years and he’s such a great guy, a great worker.

A great rapist, I think.

“Well,” I say, “What’s the fireman’s name?”

“I don‘t remember,” Lexie says. “Brett or something. And Lynn has a different last name. But just go on-line to Foster’s to search for fireman and rape. It just happened recently. It was all over the papers.”

We look at each other in silence and our eyes meet.

“It can’t be the guy I dated,” I tell her firmly. “I don’t see him doing that.” But something inside me is curling like a question mark in my stomach.

“Right,” says Lexie.

“It can’t be,” I repeat.

“No,” she agrees. Her scissors dip and fly around my head for several moments.

“But wait, you have to hear this last part. The wife goes to visit him in the county jail. He’d been out on his own recognizance but the idiot removed the leg bracelet they put on him and took off again. So they found him again and took him to jail. Then Lynn the wife goes to visit the guy and you know what? He says to her, ‘You’re not my wife. I’m not married.’”

“Very convenient,” I say.

“Yeah,” Lexie says, “She thinks he’s trying to act psycho to get out of it.”

I think that if this happened to me, I wouldn’t have gone to visit him in jail. I definitely wouldn’t be discussing it with my stylist, especially with an upcoming court case. Suddenly, I’m glad my haircut is finished because I just can’t bear any more of this story.

“I guess that woman should have paid attention to her gut,” I say as I leave.

“Maybe her gut wasn’t working,” Lexie says to my back.

When I get home I immediately Google the story. An enormous headshot of the alleged rapist is featured on the front page. It is Brad. I sit staring at the screen. I suppose I’m in shock. The photo is so large and close-up, I can’t even pretend to myself that it might not be the same person. There is no doubt. I call Lexie and leave a message on her cell telling her that the main character of my story and her story are one in the same. When I put it all together, I feel sick, like I just ate bad meat that was sitting out in the summer heat. I know I’ve had a narrow escape. This story could have been my personal tragedy. It comes to me in a moment of stark clarity that I dated an accused rapist.

He’s the guy next door. He’s just down the street. He’s on the dating websites. He’s a fireman, an accountant, a policeman. Perhaps he was a sex addict for a long time but something pushed his anxiety to the breaking point and he raped a little girl. And I could have chosen to get involved with this man but I didn’t. I’m not sure why. I feel relieved. I feel vindicated for trusting my instincts. For not doubting myself.

Recently, I go back to the salon for a trim and Lexie and I return to the subject briefly. Lexie says, “I have his wife as a client. I have you who dated him. And it turns out, Brad’s best friend is also my client.”

“There’s something really strange about all these coincidences,” I say. I’m not sure I believe in coincidence. I feel very uncomfortable about my involvement in this drama despite that it’s peripheral.

“So,” Lexie continues, “the best friend comes in this week and tells me he’s known Brad all his life and even though he may have done it, he’s going to stand by him.” We both shake our heads in wonder at this revelation.

“So his wife visits him in prison, his best friend will stand by him, and he raped a fifteen year old girl,” I say. Lucky rapist, I think.

I watch my stylist sweep my hair together with those that have already fallen into a big pile onto the floor. I wonder whose hair is in that pile with mine. The wife? The friend? What happens to all that DNA? Deep inside, when I allow myself to think about it, I know that, in a parallel universe, I didn’t listen to that still small inner voice, and I am sitting somewhere crying and broken.

- Jewel Beth Davis is a writer and theater artist who lives in Rollinsford, NH with her cat Lizzie. She has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College and won awards for her acting and playwriting. Her work has been published in Compass Rose, SN Review, Moondance, Cezanne’s Carrot, Bent Pin, READ THIS, Sylvan Echo, Lilith, and American Diversity Report.

The New Normal

Someone has tried to brighten up the room with paper cutouts of watermelons and beach balls. But decorations cannot compete with medical monitors or pods of plexiglass isolettes and tiny metal cribs. I spy my baby, born not two hours ago, the newest resident of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Nursery Five.

A nurse beckons me over and I squint to see beyond the wires and tubes to my son. A Gerber baby he’s not. Long and scrawny, he weighs two pounds, nine ounces. My shoes weigh more. His fingernails are smaller than Chiclets, his face gaunt and wizened, and he is the red-purple color of a sugar beet. At twenty-seven weeks gestation, the baby is breathing from a respirator, his lungs too young to function. I open an isolette porthole and stroke his leg with my finger, hoping I don’t break him.

The nursery houses six infants. Four of them are five or six pounds, baby giants, but one is even tinier than my son. I’m proud, however inappropriately, not to have the smallest infant in the nursery. On day two, the baby basks under neon blue lights. He wears a mask to protect his eyes, an alien elfin superhero. The following day, the baby grasps my husband’s fingers, one in each of his little hands. He has a strong grip.

A week passes and routine gains a hold over chaos. We rise at seven and leave for the hospital. My husband works there and will visit throughout the day, but the NICU is my new nine-to-five. I whisper good morning to the baby, and listen to the nurse reciting the night’s events. I watch him sleep as his monitor stands a silent guard.

I am sent to the waiting room when the doctors round to discuss the babies in the nursery. The chairs are ugly red vinyl, but oversized and comfortable. In the afternoons I sometimes nap in them. I often see parents sleeping in the chairs, giving in to exhaustion and boredom. Families don’t intermingle in the waiting room; the fear of comparing stories and coming up short is greater than any potential comfort.

The baby is opening his eyes now. They are disproportionately large in his tiny head. The attending physician grants permission for me to begin “kangaroo care,” where the baby and I will snuggle bare-chested. The nurse sets up a privacy screen; she presents the baby to me and I lay him against my chest. The nurse positions his head so that his breathing apparatus stays connected and places a blanket over us. He is so tiny. I am afraid of dropping him, of crushing him like a bug. My arm goes numb before fifteen minutes have passed, sending off waves of shocks and tingles. The baby nestles in and falls fast asleep.

I rely on the baby’s monitor as an oracle. Standing above his isolette, it shows his heart rate, respiratory rate and blood oxygenation levels. If they drop below a certain number, an alarm sounds. The first time it happens, I look at the monitor; the baby’s heart rate has dropped from 140 to 70. His nurse, who is with another baby, glances up, returns to her work. The alarm continues to go off. She walks over, opens the isolette door, and taps his foot. That’s it. His heart rate jumps back to 100, then 150. The nurse records how much stimulation it takes to bring him back. Right now he needs only light stimulation.

The respirator has been replaced by something called CPAP – continuous positive airway pressure. CPAP exerts a certain amount of force as the baby breathes, “nagging” him to keep breathing. The baby turns his head to wiggle out of the nasal prongs. It must be like having a wind tunnel up your nose. I like that he is solving problems already.

The baby is not tolerating the feeds that he is getting through the feeding tube. His belly is distended, a post-Thanksgiving dinner bloat, and the doctor orders tests to rule out infection. There is a constant see-saw of good and bad days, of turbulence and calm.

Now the baby is not tolerating the CPAP. As the second week ends, he has more episodes where he stops breathing, and it is getting progressively harder for the nurses to snap him out of it. The doctors decide to put him back on the ventilator.

The baby is one month old on my birthday. He now weighs three pounds two ounces. He does well on the ventilator and after a week is put back on CPAP. But now he is having trouble maintaining his body temperature. The doctors order more tests – an EEG; bloodwork; a rectal biopsy. He poops on the pediatric surgeon during the biopsy. The labs come back normal, but his body temperature remains unstable and his belly stays distended.

One afternoon I enter to find the baby screaming inconsolably. His belly is hard, unyielding, and stays that way after he has finally dropped off into an exhausted sleep. The doctor is paged. She orders a chest x-ray, which shows air bubbles in his intestine and liver, an infection that has led to a bowel perforation.

In the waiting room, the physician on call explains in a thick Asian accent that part of the baby’s intestine is dead and gangrenous, a condition called necrotizing enterocolitis. It sounds awful. It is awful. The baby will need immediate surgery to repair his bowel, and even then, the infection could kill him. We can barely understand the doctor’s accent, but what I hear is her saying that babies can die from this. My baby could be dead by tomorrow. My husband sits beside me, tears streaking unnoticed down his face. I have never seen him cry in public.

In the nursery, they have re-intubated the baby, now pale as the floor’s linoleum. His blood pressure is beyond low. No one seems to know if he’ll survive the move from the nursery to the operating room. But he cannot survive otherwise. The surgeon comes over and puts his arm around my shoulder and tells us that we can kiss the baby before he goes to surgery. So we do, tears falling on his face.

The waiting begins. We talk trivia, processing nothing. Truly, I don’t know how we manage this feat for hours until the surgeon finally comes in and tells us the surgery was a success. Our baby is alive, although he still has to survive the infection. We move into a sleeping room next to the NICU. During the day, I sit vigil and sing to the baby, folk songs and lullabies. He is puffy, like he has swallowed a bag of marshmallows. On the fourth day after surgery, he tries to open his eyes, but can only raise his eyebrows, as if asking “What the hell happened to me?” I tell him that if he beats the infection, I’ll buy him a car.

One week following surgery I can hold him. The baby seems pleased. He stares at me for fifteen minutes and drifts off. Progress comes much faster now, and the baby graduates to the step-down unit to continue his recovery. While this is good news, I am loath to give up the security the NICU has provided. Clouds decorate the ceiling in his new room and I have my own couch to sleep on. No more red chairs. I change his diaper, feed and bathe him, all the normal mom duties.

When he is discharged six weeks later, it strikes me that all the time I was wishing for normal, this baby had welcomed each day as just that. A mom’s voice, a dad’s finger, a warm chest were his only requirements. And this is how a baby who can’t even hold up his head teaches me to make my own normal – a parenting life lesson that I, the most remedial of students, must re-learn every day.

- Toddie Downs lives outside Seattle, Washington. Her work has received recognition from Ohio Writers and Pacific Northwest Writers Associations and her essays have been published in The Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine. Her son, the subject of this essay, is now a thriving 7-year-old.

Thoughts in the Woods

On my first morning in an isolated cottage in the Appalachian Mountains, I sit on the deck looking into the forest. I look into the higher branches of oaks, tulip trees, sycamores and maples, and through a tiny gap to a distant mountain ridge. I see the rich dark greens of moist deciduous woodland and bright spots of sunlight sprinkled on the green foliage and on the bed of fallen leaves that cover the ground, where brown and cream and dark red fungi and mossy logs and stones tell of damp weather.

The warm air reminds me of Februaries in Brisbane and discomfort of school uniforms – those thick tunics with shirts and wool neckties striped with the school colors, the long socks and later the black cotton stockings and suspender belts, heavy black lace up shoes, the gloves that must be worn in public, the big panama hat. There were heat-wave days when we were allowed to wear our gym tunics in class – square necked green cotton tunic, matching green bloomers, short socks, tennis shoes. I seem to remember that this began after a rash of faintings in morning assembly during a heat wave – hymn, prayers, Old Testament, New Testament, hymn, prayers, announcements. Our teachers remained stockinged, corseted, and high heeled.

And I remember working in Nigeria years later, with a team of entomologists in the forest – counting grasshoppers in the great humid heat, as we tried to figure out their lifestyle, mortality, the causes of their pest status and the best way to manage the problem. Nothing had prepared me for the wall of warm moisture I encountered whenever I walked outside, the air so thick even breathing seemed difficult.

Here in the early morning, as the dew in the tree tops drips noisily onto leaves below, I hear four different bird songs, but cannot see who makes them. Looking onto the leaf litter below my deck, I see a small, deft, brown bird foraging silently. Nearby is a strangely bright patch of orange, the size of a golf ball, and I go down there to look. It is the only flower I have been able to see in the dense woods – a tiger lily, orange petals curled back to meet on top of its drooping head, and underneath, spots on waxy yellow, the long white stamens with brown anthers at their tips. It is a bright jewel in a world of green and brown.

Young saplings, a foot tall with half a dozen big leaves, wait for the time when a large tree falls, allowing them the space and sunlight to make their urgent growth – not wasting an opportunity. By mid morning, groups of cicadas in different parts of the forest sing – within each group the individuals sing in unison. First there is a slow soft noise, rising fast and shrilly to a crescendo, then falling away again to almost quiet. Occasionally there is the sound of a busy woodpecker. Each creature is busy with its reproduction and survival. And I hear drips, moisture accumulated and still finding the ground after a brief light rain shower. Behind me, there is the soft whirring of a fan – otherwise the air feels dense and too heavy to make a breeze.

By midday the cicadas stop and I hear instead the squawking of some distant hidden bird. A dark brown butterfly spends five minutes ambling close by and I notice small dots of light going by – tiny flies whose wings are lit for a few seconds by sunlight. A few large flies land on the railing. With the light above now I see sections of a few bright threads – spider webs across space between tree trunks. A squirrel descends in silence from the top of a tree, running down its trunk to the leaf litter.

The quietness of this nature is imposing. I am a part of it on the deck of my rustic cottage. Along with all the trees of this rich forest, I mature and grow old and die. If I burn, the ashes will become part of the dust that helps create a brilliant sunset. If I decay, the molecules that formed the living body will become part of other living things, and the messages encoded in my DNA will disappear forever. Some of these trees will have passed on their DNA to offspring, but not all of them, and not me either. My time here will end without a biological meaning other than the re-use of constituent parts.

In the heat of early afternoon the silence in the forest is palpable. It could be that there is some persistent very high-pitched insect, though I suspect it is tinnitus. But there is moisture and in the air there is carbon dioxide, and those green leaves obtaining sunlight are busy building complexity. Beneath the apparent lack of activity and in the great silence a huge invisible biochemical industry is in progress, and from those millions of little flat green leaf machines a vast source of potential energy is being created. Most of the leaves are intact. A few have insect damage from earlier in the season. All of them are rich green with only minor differences in hue.

The light in the forest decreases and increases and I know that clouds are building. If there is a breeze somewhere out there it doesn’t penetrate here. Mid afternoon and the sweat begins to drip down my neck in spite of the fan and I get sleepy. My mind goes back to times almost completely forgotten. Queen Elizabeth, young and newly crowned, visited Australia in the summertime. All the Brisbane schools were to take part in a display at the big exhibition grounds – the biggest arena available. The thousands of children would make a huge E.II.R. of bodies, upon which she would gaze in the February heat. I was to be part of one of the dots. I remember playing truant on the practice day in order to go swimming. I remember taking part in the display on the equally hot big day. Dozens of children fainted in the heat. I wonder what the poor Queen made of it all.

I remember Mother ironing with the sweat dripping from her face down onto the clean clothes – I think it was Mondays – seven shirts for my father and five detached starched collars for the weekdays, and twelve or more shirts for my older brother who wanted a clean one for the evening’s courting. My sister and I did our own ironing.

Window screens became popular and my mother scoffed – well, they’ll get no breeze now. Our houses, built on stilts, were supposed to gather what air movement there was, and screens reduced that. So we had air, and a multitude of moths and mosquitoes at the lights fascinated my unschooled brain. We all sat out on the wide veranda on the hottest evenings to get what breeze there was, talking in the dark, with just the red glow of mosquito coils and my parents’ cigarettes. No one had air conditioning then, and I don’t remember fans either. We came into beds under mosquito nets hanging from a circular hoop above the pillow. I remember waking heavy in the head those hot humid days. The first department store to get air conditioning made a killing.

The great humidity eventually brought rain and how wonderful it was to run out and get wet through, to arrive at school so wet we were allowed to remove shoes. Washing remained on the Hills rotary hoist for a day and was then brought in to the washing line under the house, where it sometimes remained for several days to get dry. Mildew grew on the walls of my bedroom, toadstools covered the lawn, moss covered the slate roof, Mother rejoiced that the 40,000 gallon tank was full, Father cursed the amount of mowing and scything, the car skidded on the clay surface of the driveway up the ridge to our house, frogs croaked and the poincianas bloomed, flying foxes enjoyed the palm fruits and grasshoppers ate the acalypha hedge.

But this hot moist green forest is new to me. Though I see leaves drop now, in three months time they will rain down in their millions, and leave the skeletons of trunks and branches. The cottage will be bathed in light, and the brown walls of natural, unpainted wood will be warmed with sunshine through the many windows as the days become colder.

On the north side of my cottage, outside a screened porch, is a flat area covered in moss. Its not easy to tell directions most of the time, but I have a mental map of the area and know that my doorway faces north. I rest here in the splendor of a warm dark forest, exploiting as best I can, all my senses, my memories, my small understandings and my sense of being alive in the world, and know who I am.

- Elizabeth Bernays grew up in Australia, then studied agricultural pests in developing countries. After being a professor of entomology at Berkeley and Regents’ professor at the University of Arizona, she obtained an MFA. She publishes in various literary journals and won several awards including the 2007 X.J. Kennedy prize.