From Ashes to Butterflies: a Dancing Good Bye

I wish I had some photos to add, but for now, I don't. I lived in the moment and let someone else worry about pictures.  Last week I was in northernmost New Hampshire for three days to scatter the last of my dear sister's ashes.  I know, I know. That hardly sounds like a happy thing, but it has been a long, long time in coming.

During the last weeks of my sister's life, while she was in hospice, she thought long and hard about what she wanted. One day she said, "Jetty, I don't want some burial spot. I want my ashes scattered in Lake Winnipesaukee, near the Teddy Bear Inn in Vermont, Pemaquid Point in Maine, off the rock's at the beach near Gail's, and in the source lakes in New Hampshire. And Paris would be good."

I looked at her a moment and said, "Jean Ellen, I love you but not that much. Let's just say that I'll get to some of those spots, okay?"

She laughed and said, "You are so fussy. FINE. Deny a dying woman her last wish." Of course, then she saw my face and my eyes and said, "No, honey! That's a joke! It really is a joke. I forget--for you, my dying is hard. For me, you know it's what I want. You know I have felt DONE with my business in this life for a long time. I'm so sorry. The only point is that I really don't want to be any part of a cemetery. I want to be part of the flow. Water, mostly, just the way I feel I flowed through this life from another and am flowing INTO another."

It was, of course, too late. I was crying, but we had a close hour together then. Well, my health went south before I could do too much, but I decided that when I was strong enough, her best friend (my other big sister of my heart) and I would trek up to the Connecticut River source lakes up near Canada.

Finally, this, the week before my sixtieth birthday, which is today, I was well enough to go. It was a wonderful trip and I took many inspiration pictures, fully replenishing the creativity well. Nancy found the very beach on the third Connecticut Lake where JE took one of my favorite photos--pebbles through water, just ten minutes south of Canada. (I have no passport, but I waved to you Canadian friends.)

This is just a quick picture of someone else's--Robert Knapp. Remember, this is not for commercial use!

It was about ninety degrees, even there. I picked my way through a shore trail, about twenty feet up-current and up wind of the little beach. When you dump ashes, they do not disperse; they remain in a beautiful water-born cloud for quite some time as they drift. I think that doing this six years later made me better able to connect with all the love I feel for her--most of the grief is gone, as is the somber mourning. I miss her living spirit, but I feel her spirit lives through me as I paint. I am surrounded by her--pen and inks, gifts, family treasures, treasured belongings that were hers.

So I looked at the transluscent silver cloud of what were physical remains of a spirit long gone and said, "There. Okay. Fine. It took me six years, but are you happy now? Fly!"

I called to Nancy that I was done, as I watched the cloud drifting toward the beach, and I heard her suddenly go, "Jeannette! LOOK!"

A swirling chaos of pale yellow butterflies flew up, fluttering in a spiral above the ground. They did not leave; they hovered in that one area, dancing in a space no more than five feet square. They lit on a damp patch of earth, I guess doing the butterfly version of drinking water, but then lifted, dancing in and out among one another for the ten minutes we stood there. Nancy's camera was clicking nonstop, but I simply watched, smiling.

Do not speak of science; I am aware of the logical explanations and of coincidence and all.

I don't care.

She sent the energy to hatch the butterflies to dance for us.

Don't bother to tell us differently; we were there.

When we left, the cloud was by the beach and the butterflies were still dancing.

***
If you care to know more about my sister and me, this is an early entry "Flying into Dawn: Memories of My Sister."

My Dad: Another Parent, Another Promise

A while back, one of my commenters pointed out that there are worse things than living on the edge of poverty. That reminded me of the story I wrote several entries ago about my dad and me, and how he would show me exactly how the money was handled and where it went. And all sorts of memories have been tumbling into my mind--new and old, alike. It has been two weeks of confusion, joy, and pain. But my dad clamors to be heard, so I write more. This is unedited stream of consciousness today because I want to quiet at least ONE of the cacophonous voices in my head!

Ostensibly, so many talks began around money...

When Dad finally got ahead, back in 1969, it was because he collected a pension  in early retirement from the State and then started a new career in Education Administration as the Registrar of a local university. I think his example is another reason I have never been able to subscribe much to the idea that it's too late to start fresh after fifty. Even when he retired as Registrar at 67, he became an administrative consultant to the President of the university. He felt change was usually a good thing, not bad.

My Parents and Their Idea of Wealth
He and my mom faced potential poverty all the time. Sometimes they dipped into the wrong side of that line, but when they were financially secure, what did they do? Turn around and start helping other people when they could. Dad said, "Money is only as good as what you do with it. We have been helped along the way, so it's our turn to help others as we were."

They befriended a waitress at a local restaurant, helping her and her son as they could. Those two were with us for five Christmases, and Dad paid for her education at a local community college, then got her into the university on a scholarship two years later.  We had strays at my parents' open house on Christmas Eve nights and we never quite knew what sort of person would appear next. I think they helped about a dozen people before they died.

I remember he asked my opinion about that. He wondered whether I thought he should give the money to the charities that helped people and explained to me that he and mom were a little selfish in wanting to do it this way. "We get to see the effect. But do you think we waste our money?"

I was shocked that he asked my opinion. He said, "Why wouldn't I? You have been through more than the others have and are more mature than any 32 year old I've known. You work in non-profits." That was when I felt like a grown up. I had not thought my parents had noticed much of anything about what my life was really like, or how I had coped with having three operations while I raised two stepchildren and tried to develop an opening for a career. However, I still did not care for the question.

I felt that it was entirely up to them and, in fact,  I told him that if this was being selfish, then the world would be better off with a whole lot of selfish people like them. I did ask, "Daddy, I only worry about your getting into trouble spending the money. I know how tough things were when we were growing up."

He looked troubled. "We won't spend away your inheritance." I remember tearing up that he could think that's what I meant.

"DADDY. It's your money! I don't care if you leave us not one dime, don't you know that?"
He had the strangest look on his face, and rare tears were there, making his eyes shine dark, like Jacky's. "How is it that you and your sister have such different perspectives than your brothers? They talk about how they had nothing. You and your sister talk about how your mother gave up her comforts for all of you."

I think the boys never bothered to look; I don't know why. They saw the flaws, as did we all. They just didn't want to see the rest, I guess. Jack wanted to "out-Daddy Daddy" and deliberately went into education. He was mad when he was dying because he would never finish his book and he wanted to beat Dad at that. I suspect being boys in that family was harder in some ways. When my friend dated Jim (pre-memories, mind you) she bought t-shirts for all three: purple, with fancy white printing that said "the Father" "The Son" "The Holy Ghost." Funny. Each one knew which was which and they were PROUD of them; they were proud of their own egos.

Still, it bothered me that the boys never could see the sacrifices both parents made, just for us.

Spinning Gold Into Love
We talked about many things that day. He was was driving me to Boston for one of my "blood-lettings," as we called them. I used to get massive hematomas on my back after surgeries and would go to Boston every three days for a couple of weeks, so that the doctor could aspirate the surgical site and draw out all the old blood. It kept me from getting infections. My husband didn't like to take time off from work for my illness. It wasted too much time, he said. But Dad would sit there and hold my hand, and would grow very pale at the sight of the enormous needle and tube into which blood was literally sucked from the swelling.

We both knew those trips saved my life. It cemented a unique bond between us, as well.

My parents had no desire to be wealthy. Dad wanted Mom to get some things for herself, yes, when he changed jobs. When she'd finished her binge, though, they wanted mostly to "give back." Friends had helped them sometimes and all the friends had said was, "When times get better, don't pay us back. Just turn around and do it for someone else."

I realize that this was the prototype for how my friends and I work as well. There is about five thousand dollars total that seems to float around my circle of 10-15 women--sometimes in a thousand here and there, and sometimes the whole wad.  My family and friends who celebrated Christmas Eve together would pick the person with the roughest year for the "Spoiling target"for the year. We would give them an outrageously large Christmas then and spoil them rotten. I learned from my parents that THIS was the REAL fun of the season, and of life.

Spinning Pain Into Love As Well
Why am I writing this tonight? It has been a difficult couple of weeks for me. I do not write that much about my back. I have had bizarre and terrifying experiences in the 1-2 month hospital stays. Lately, I have dreamed about the worst ones. And we are now in the season when I lost both parents. The final weeks of their lives. Mom died on February 16, and Dad died on the 26th. January was full of poignance. And two worst hospital stays were in the winter. I may write about those; possibly not.

But as I think of my parents and remember things to put in my book, I remember Daddy as well. We had an unusual relationship, I think. I was lucky enough to hear both of them talk about their own fears, their disappointments in themselves, not each other, and to hear about parts of their lives I am not sure most kids of my generation got to share.

My father was a womanizer; those of you who have followed my blog a couple of years know that already. He was famous for his business trips... We knew. Well. I knew. The boys remained blind until it was out in the open; denial was always their preference. Most mornings my dad sang one of two songs in the shower:  Many Brave Hearts Are Asleep In the Deep or Ah Sweet Mystery of Life at Last I've Found You.  On February 1st, when I was giving him some ice chips because eating was so awful for him, he took my hand.

"You know about the women, Jetty. Your mother could have left me. She should have, really. But don't think I did not love your mother. I DID. I DO.  But you are too much like me. Don't learn everything the hard way."

I said, "Daddy. I have made big mistakes, but..."

"You are not happy with Mark. I see it all the time. He is not right for you. I know it. I just know it. Jetty,  what are you going to do? Oh..." He was so agitated then, all I could do was stroke his forehead and the still thick and silky, silver hair.

He was quiet, but his cheeks were wet and his eyes were glossy, and almost black. "Why did it have to take me DYING Gawddamnit? Why couldn't I have listened to the Gawdamned WORDS, instead of my own voice? 'For tis love and love alone the world is seeking.' Jetty. Promise me you will hear those words. 'Tis the answer, 'tis the end and all of living.'  I learned it all too late! Don't you, Jetty. Don't you."

Ah! Sweet Mystery Of Life
Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life
At last,I've found you.
Ah! At last I know the secret of it all.
For the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning,
The burning hopes,
The joy and idle tears that fall.

For 'tis love and love alone,
The world is seeking.
And 'tis love and love alone,
That can repay.
'Tis the answer, 'tis the end and all of living,
For it is love alone that rules for aye.

(LAST STANZA REPEATED AND CLOSES WITH);
For it is love alone

 I hear his basso profundo still; or, as I preferred to call it, his basso buffoono. I see his face, the tears. I feel his hands on my face, and see him looking for an answer. I am not sure he knew who I was in that searching.

All I said was, "I know, Daddy. I know."

He smiled and nodded, let go of my face and he slept.

And the Question and the Answer Were the Same
He and my mother, both. In the dying, turning to me to give me something all the while begging for a promise. The telling. The listening. To me. I was the writer. Of course it was to me.

Regardless of what came from moving lips, the sound from their souls was simple: love.

What more could any parents leave?

On Writing My Memoir

I am finding that some truly beautiful experiences are coming back to me, the more I write.  I find that my mother's sweetness knows no bounds, now that I remember the rest. That is such a gift, but I realize it is a gift I will need in order to address the worst of her. It was not liquor. It was psychotic breaks. And I am at a loss as to how to write of them, yet I will have to.

Writing ugly is not easy when you lived a life of oh-so-lovely denial. When I was in college I painted a picture of beauty about my home life, except for the fact that my mother drank. I did not speak of any dark times in childhood, however. My story with her always began in high school, out of thin air. All was beauty and magic, if you listened to me talk about my childhood. The only horrors were at school.

We do that. I also spoke of my relationship with my older brother as special and tragic. He was the whipping boy, the innocent too often blamed for everything. I was his defender. And I was, as it happens. Again, this is so often the case. I tutored him in French for all his high school years. He was fifteen and I was ten! It was after the rape, after he tried to sell me so he could by some "buck" shoes, like Pat Boone's. I had no memory of that. After all, by the time I was fifteen myself, I had turned instant burial into an artform. If the memory was not to my liking I simply denied its existence, like some reject factory part on an old-time conveyor belt.  I was afraid for him, and bought into the family line when the New York police were looking for him on drug charges. He was framed, my parents said. They got him to hide out in New Hampshire.

Every holiday season for three or four years, the police would stop by. It got so I would be the one to answer the door and invite them in for coffee or cookies. A standing "joke." Finally, when my brother as married and wanted to come out of hiding, my parents took him with their lawyer to New York and the charges were dropped. He was terrific at posing as a good, reformed family man.

Only he was guilty. And years later, I found out that Jim's discharge from the army was dishonorable. All those bouts of illness when we had not heard from him? The brink. He was court-martialed for bribing an officer.

My family, like so many others, simply acted on the premise that if you say everything is perfect often enough, then everyone will believe it to be so. This was never clearer than the years I tried to tell the truth about my mother, during high school. She primed the school with the "fact" that I was a liar, prone to fantasy. While that was not entirely false, it was not the truth when I tried to get help to deal with Mom. By then her bouts were every morning, before I went to school, and by the time I got home, she was often so drunk that she was barely conscious. Then she would, for no apparent reason, have several months of sobriety, just long enough for me to hope, but short enough for me to be wary at the same time.

I could not begin to look at the whole truth as I knew it, until it impacted my own children. Until I had to, to keep from repeating the tale in my own life's story, too.

Ugliness and great pain is an underpinning for our love story that has to run through the whole. I have spent a great deal of time writing of the many gifts she gave me, and that's the truth. And you know she drank, but sometimes we have to show not tell, as the cliché goes. I know that, too. The funny thing about moving beyond the pain to the beauty is that sometimes I just do not WANT to remember what happened! While this is not a bad thing at ALL in how I lead my life, it's not as good for the writing of the tale.

Mom wouldn't want me to leave it out. I know that for sure. In my core. In my soul. How do you tell the story of a small child, too young to bathe on her own? How do I relate the moving blur of the NOT Mommy face as she tipped my head beneath the surface to  rinse the shampoo out? I see her eyes go dead and cold just as the water closed over my own entirely. I see the moving glare of the light and feel myself struggle beneath her hands. I can feel the pain on my heel as I kicked and connected with porcelain, and feel the struggle not to breathe, feel the pain as the light grew dim.

Suddenly I am sitting and I hear the sucking as she pulls me out too quickly and  she misjudges and my head just catches the faucet. I see the pink creep through the water as I cough and cough forever, and I hear my mother. "Oh, my GOD, oh NO, oh, NO! Oh, GOD. My Jetty, oh, NO! I'm so sorry!"

She is crying and pulls me to her, but I pull back just a little, to see her eyes, but she is there. Her sweet sky eyes full of tears and she holds me and we cry.

And later she is in her chair, unable to speak, the bottle of amber on her table. Jean Ellen puts me to bed. Mother will not rise until too late for church on Sunday. Daddy is away on a "quick business trip." I remember Jean Ellen tucks me in and she has her worried puppy face. Her brow would pucker instead of wrinkle. She reads a long story and already the horror has dimmed, and all I know is my mother's eyes when she held me close to her.

***
That is the story, too. And it is every bit as much our story as the elves and the drinking and the summers and Christmases of joy. It is my story with her, and my ultimate joy that we had our truths with one another at the end.

And so I write it all for the first time. As I remember it. My truth, which I know was hers. Ironically, alcohol numbed her in a way that did not allow the psychotic breaks. She never raised a finger to us when she drank. She said most of her pain left her when she drank.

And what I feel at last is the pain I know as a mother myself, and how it must have felt when she snapped out of the break and saw what she had done. No one loved a daughter more than she loved me. She hated the monster she could not name, this illness no one could name back then. I know how hard she tried to fight it, to fight an illness over which she had no control at all. I know how much she hated herself.

As I move forward with the book, it is so hard to find the balance in the work. It hurts to write her dramatic and sometimes horrific failures. Yet without them, her magnificence and her strength are lessened. She succeeded more often than she failed, and I cannot under-value the strength she had, nor the toll her tortured life took on her most of all. So I try on the pain again, now strong enough so that it cannot stick any more. It cannot offer more pain, though it can scratch an old wound to discomfort.  I hold all her beauty on the other scale, and its weight is ten times the pain. The wound will not open; only the love.

How I miss her still.


***** DIFFERENT Note, for now: Please check out Waystation One, for 1/23/20122's poem

Christmas as A Child: YES, Norman Rockwell for Real

I am busy actually STARTING my Christmas Eve preparations and I am also painting. I'm hoping to get back into my blog world before Christmas--I have several pieces started--but I am not really sure I will.  But it is NOT for any bad reasons. I miss writing and I miss reading! Still, sometimes I have to oh, go ahead and LIVE my life so I fill the well, so to speak.

I first published this one in 2009, and it explains why I really am an all out, absolute, completely wacko Christmas nut. Not in the sense of buying new decorations or oodles of presents; I love the peace, the music, the silliness, the love that has always been mine for the giving and receiving. My family did it right. Sorry to bore those who read this, but I enjoyed reading it again because all of it flooded back and put me into the mood again.

I also know I referred to this in October--I think I published this again now for my own sake! A relative who was less than kind to me sometimes, but very kind at others,  has died... and it has brought up some, well, disturbing memories. They may find their way into another entry, but I think I wanted to focus on something joyous... on a time when I got to be nothing more or less than an excited, happy child.

It is not meant to replace my entries--I realized tonight, as I revisited this post, that it was "birthing" a new one. The hour is late now, as I add these last two paragraphs, but reviewing and editing this piece did the trick.  Joy is the woman who died, and I like visualizing her here, at Christmas, with my mom.

Lately I have been returning to this blog myself, just to bring that feeling back--how lucky I am to have such memories! So, have a wonderful holiday season! I'll READ some blogs, but somehow, even though I mean to write, I get side-tracked.

Here goes... no pictures, no more apologies... just my family at its very best!

Norman Rockwell Ain't Got Nuthin' On Our Christmases
 It's hard for me to choose a Christmas from childhood.  Two or three may be mixed together here, but I don't care. To me, it was idyllic. Jim did not torment us. Jacky and I were small children together, even up until he was about eleven.  Jean Ellen was a keeper of magic and secrets to rival our mother. And Dad and Mom? Well, they had to be experienced.

So the Roots of my Love for the Season Grew Deep and Immortal Here...

My  mother not only looked like Mrs. Claus, she acted like her. And it always began the day after Thanksgiving.

Jacky and I, and sometimes even Jimmy, Would race downstairs on Friday morning to see five presents perched on the top shelf of the extra tall white bookcase in the dining room. The Five Foot Shelf fit on one shelf, that bookcase was so wide...  And the books on the top shelf reached the top of Daddy's head, so it was six feet tall.  I grew up in a home with a bookcase in every room.  It was just not a room without books, even in the bathrooms. And we had a BATH AND A HALF!

At this point, the books were still on that shelf, too, so the presents were annoyingly out of reach.  We would climb on chairs, wondering how it was that Mommy had managed to pile the presents so that just enough of each tag was visible, so we could read the name, but we could not move a single package without the whole pile's tumbling to  the floor. Inevitably we'd blow it and the pile would fall.

Mom would come from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her first of seven Christmas aprons, and say, simply, "Good thing nothing was breakable. Go ahead and open them and ruin your surprise.  I don't much care..."

Then, as she was heading for the kitchen, she would toss back, "Not quite sure how Santa would feel, but that's your problem." We would feign our disappointment and put each one back, rattling them, squishing, doing our best to know what was inside, but Mom was too smart.  We never could figure it out.  It took until I was about twelve to be bothered that there never was something for Mommy there. Jean Ellen and I took to wrapping something for HER the morning after Thanksgiving, because it just felt all wrong. She was in college and it was a ritual we enjoyed together.  I think it was the first of many she and I developed around the holiday together.


Let me reinforce this; until I was about 20, my mother never drank between Thanksgiving and Christmas. NOTHING. She would empty the huge "Silver Satin" port jug and there were never stray rum and cokes around. In fact, she didn't buy Coca Cola® at all until just before the holiday.

From then on, every day held a surprise.  She didn't do a lot that Thanksgiving weekend, but wrap a new present or five each day, and the pile would grow more precarious until, by Sunday, Daddy took the books from that shelf and put them in a box tucked in the footwell of his desk.  "GAWD knows none of you will let me have any peace between now and that day.   MY life is over now. Nothing but shelling out money, having to run around to get GAWD knows what. Bah."

Tiny Tim in Scrooge Clothing
He never said humbug until the day.  He also was the least convincing Scrooge alive, since he read us the Christmas Carol and checked with Mother every single night, asking her whether maybe ONCE she might come up with something on her own list that didn't involve her doing more work around the house.  The truth was, my dad spent more on Christmas presents than anyone else, and would get scolded at by  my mother constantly, often punctuated by a wet dishtowel on his head, which sat there for at least fifteen minutes, at whatever angle it had landed.

My parents were in love.  That was the miracle of them.  For all his womanizing, for all  her drinking, for the myriad fights in between?  They loved one another with a passion that would have been embarrassing if it had not been so wonderful to see.  They liked to talk late into the evening, just about books, about politics, about philosophy. About their days.  My father said that Mom was the most highly educated person he'd ever known and she never went to college.  He would walk up behind her in the kitchen and simply put his arms around her sometimes, and they would stand there, singing softly, saying nothing.

(That's what I wanted in my life, and knew I could never settle for less than that, that alone would be better than less.  I do not regret that choice at all.)  I will not spoil this by moving into the present, though.  I will return safely to that time, as a child, through my early teens, when I saw that my parents were clearly lovers at every age.  I felt, though would never have said so, that I was lucky to witness those private moments, and that my parents did not find it wrong to let us see them.

Their love was palpable at Christmas.  And the house was full of the good kinds of secrets.  This Christmas brought us the birth of the "Christmas Spider," As Mom and Jean Ellen dubbed it. A hanging thingy made of glitter gold paper, on a large hook. When you draped it from a chandelier, pointy tentacle/leg things draped in many layers from the center and it seemed alive in a particularly grotesque way.

It moved around the house, from dining room, to kitchen, to a curtain rod, to the lamp next to Mom' chair--wherever Jean Ellen or Mom chose. the damned thing lasted for 25 years!  And there was the wrapping of the "spoon rest" if it was Mom's turn. She and Grandma LeSure, Dad's mom, had an ongoing exchange with that. Granny'd gotten it for her donation to the Navaho Indian Tribe (back then). It was pale pea green, with three spoon rest depressions. Made of plastic, it was a "French" artiste in the center with his paintbrush, surrounded by his palette spoon rests. Half his moustached was missing from the get-go. The ugliest thing I ever saw. Granny gave it to Mom, then Mom gave it back for Mother's Day, then Granny gave it back on Mom's birthday, and here it was being re-wrapped in the same box, same interior tissue, same tag with all the cross-outs, for her.

We had traditions coming out our ears in our family.  Most of them had to do with laughing.

But some had to do with the season.  In late September, for instance, when I was little,  Mom took me for a walk and we brought a pillow case.  We'd go into the wildflower field and fill it with drying grass.  Then Mommy would hang it in the attic and, along around December 20th, there was hay for the manger.  She and Jean Ellen would put the crèche (nativity--we are French) together on the little table by the front door.  We did not do the British custom of leaving the baby Jesus for Christmas morning, but that's okay.  Mommy wanted us to have one thing that would remind us of the day's origin. When I was big enough, she let me sound out the words of the story--we were born reading, so that was fine. We knew it by heart anyway. So Jack or I would tell the story while they put the crèche together.  Jean Ellen always made a star that covered the normal painting there. Sometimes silver, abstract on black paper. You never knew. Sometimes a big star in a cluster of smaller ones in a field of blue.

And the baking.  I would sit cross-legged on the counter and "help" with the doughs, hand mixing in the chocolate chips. Or I would sprinkle the sugar cookie stars. Mostly I licked the bowl because it made it easier for Mom to clean. I think that Jean Ellen and I learned to bake through osmosis. I don't measure much, to this day. Mommy baked by feel, she said.  We had six kinds of cookies, and the butter cookies without leavening were made two weeks in advance, and other doughs were frozen. She never froze cookies.

"They never taste quite the same," she said. I think she was right. And we NEVER used margarine. Margarine was a sin in our house.

We went shopping for presents for Mommy on their double bed, Jack and I.  Daddy would have a miraculous display of things my mother wanted all around the perimeter, with price tags on every item--price tags he had made himself, to suit our budget. He as fair, though, because he had certain items out of our range--they were his presents. And he trusted US NOT TO TELL, and we never did.  Through the year Mom thought of ways we could earn money for Christmas. We'd get paid and she had little jars with our names on them, NOT TO BE TOUCHED.  Some things were practical, and some pretty, but there was always enough so that Jack and I could truly choose up until we were around nine. There were often twenty items there--all bought by Daddy, all re-marked.  And then he helped us wrap them in tissue papers, and he had a stash of glitter and star stickers and ribbon so that we could make them "special." My Scroogey Dad.

****
I am the youngest. The miracle for me?  Christmas Eve. By then, there was a ham coming out of the oven by 1:00 and a turkey going IN, for a late buffet at night.  The trimming party was that night!  While Jack and Jim were rooting around for a missed present or whether or not Santa REALLY was out there, I sat cross-legged on the living room floor with my dad. I wish I had a picture. I was not more than five or six. I was tiny. He six one. And we tested the bulbs, consulting over how he might plan which should have reflectors. Counting sockets and bulbs. Sometimes the count was wrong and he'd say, "Road trip, Jetty, get your coat." We'd run to Wallach's grocer and get some bulbs of the color we needed adn somehow or other, Daddy's find something that someone just HAD to have, just to even things out you know.

But I would hand Daddy the bulbs or reflectors and he would string the tree, from the bottom up. He didn't even bothe with the spire until the end. We knew it would get tipped. We worked quietly and fast, for guests arrived by 4:00 and we had to also unpack the ornaments, so people could decorate when they came.  I loved unwrapping the blown glass ornaments. Mommy never hid breakable things from us. If we broke and item, she's say, "Did you mean to? Will you be more careful next time?" And that was that. We didn't mean to, and we WERE more careful and very little got broken.

That Christmas, when I think I was six, Grandma and Grandpa LeSure were there for BOTH days and were staying in a hotel!  And Aunt Joy was coming. She wasn't married then, and was ten years younger than Mommy and was GLAMOROUS.  The tree-trimming party mostly had friends of my parents when I was little.  I loved sitting in a corner and hearing the adult conversation. Grandma LeSure told me I could go INTO her purse and try her lipstick.  When I did though, Grandpa SLAPPED me and I yelled at him for it.

When Grandma explained, he had the oddest smirk on his face and said, "Well, Missy, I guess no one will push you around in this life. Excuse me." I found it a wholly unsatsifactory apology and avoided him all night.

Slowly the beauty of the tree emerged, amidst the singing and the laughing and the stories, the ham, the turkey, the spilled drinks--not Mom's, other people's ... she had me TASTE hers even--the boys nearly tipping the tree over from an over-rambunctious game of throw the dish towel around...

As the night lengthened, it all blurred for me.   It seemed to me that our tree glittered more than anyone's.  Then Mom and Joy had the obligatory fight over not having garland tinsel. We had the long, leaded icicles then.  And Mom and Jean Ellen would not let ANYONE help with that. Every piece had to drape free. Grandma LeSure got that, too, and so did I, but when I started to help, suddenly, Daddy said, "Santa comes soon, Jetty! You have to run to bed!"

Run I did, and so did Jack. Jim and Jean Ellen stayed up later, but I didn't mind.  I never saw the thing done. For me? For me, the last glimpse of Christmas Eve was a room full of people laughing, JE draping tinsel over Daddy's head, the boys NOT fighting, but playing cards, Mommy talking with Grandma, Grandpa standing back, holding his stomach, smoking his pipe, but looking happy. Joy working on the tree and clucking at the lack of garland, and two to six other adults laughing, singing, or talking. We always sang "Lullay thou Little Tiny Child" when I went to bed.

***
That early Christmas I leaped out of my bed though, pretty late and looked at the roof below our window. It was the roof to the den and there were HOOFPRINTS. "JEAN ELLEN!"

Now, my sister HATED to be wakened. We were not allowed to rouse her OR Jim until 7 for stockings, but I JUMPED ON HER. She opened one eye and grunted, but she got up and came to the window and said, "Oh, Jetty. Honey. Santa must be HERE right now. Quick. Back to bed." She went to bed, I flew into the hall, STRAIGHT into my dad.

"WhAT ARE YOU DOING?"

"Santashereisawtheprintsontehroofandiwanttosayhiand go---"

He had a huge turkey platter in his hand. It was NOT one of the presents we'd seen."DADDY?"

He simply squatted down and said, "Jetty. Santa is so frazzled this year, he's asked ME to wrap this for your mom. See? He already had me put the stockings at the top of the stair. Now, don't you think he might be a little upset to have to carry on polite conversation with a little snigglefritz who is supposed to be in bed NOW?"

"YOU are helping SANTA?"

He looked so solemn with the weight of this honor.  "Yes. And I need to do a good job, so off to bed."

No problem.

***
The morning between 7 and about 8:30 was a cacophony of stocking openings and playing games until Daddy allowed us to get him up. On this ONE day,  he insisted on showering first, just to torture us. Jim would dig out his slippers--again worn once a year--and his robe and we'd wait. UGH.

Then HE woulds schlump downstairs, grumbling and turn on the lights and this was MY FIRST look. Presents from one wall all the way to the front window, presents as high as my chest, and the most beautiful Christmas tree EVER. And we were allowed ONE PRESENT before breakfast. Only one. It was okay. We learned very early that our Christmases lasted longer than anyone's because we took turns and we took breaks. We had to PLAY with our toys. WE read our books.  We watched the grown ups. We all shared the jokes.

If it sounds like Heaven, it's because it was. Sheer Heaven. This Christmas was all about trains, though. JACK GOT his Lionel trains from Grandpa, and five billion miles of track and little houses and trees and, well EVERYTHING.  I had good stuff too, but it was the trains.

When Daddy's last present was opened, along around TWO--he HOARDED them under his chair and we had to watch him open his all at the end. Rotten man. And he won at the can you unwrap tissue without ripping it game. Excruciating. Mommy was festooned in bows and she and Grandma and Jean Ellen were busy with dinner plans. Jim wanted to listen to his record albums and call his friends.

Jack, Grandpa and I went into the basement and built a city.  We had hills and had to measure the angles--Grandpa was a vice president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. And engineer... WITH A REAL ENGINEER'S CAP! He put it on and he we built our railroad route, complete with a mountain, a skyscraper we could drive it THROUGH and a cave and tunnel. We only had four crashes before it was complete at Five.

And Grandpa looked like a little boy, when we threw the switch and the train began to run. He ran around the tables with us as every obstacle was successfully managed. I threw the switch correctly--we had TWO trains--and they avoided one another neat as can be.

When it was done, He threw his cap in the air and DANCED. It was the only time I remember seeing  him smile, let alone dance.  My grandpa, my brother, and me, we danced a jig and sang a railroad song on Christmas.

***
There were no pictures taken or home movies. Grandpa died the following summer.  But I see him in his cap, I hear him and I remember forgiving him the slap for the call, of "GREAT JOB THERE, LITTLE ONE" when I threw the switch for engine number two.

Grandpa was a railroad man. And for one Christmas morning, so was Jack and so was I. Three guys on the tracks, just doing our job.

On one magic Christmas when I was only six, and the world was new, and Santa landed on my roof.

***
The tree held presents and gave them up at night, after we were all in our nightclothes again. Mommy doled them out and all were labeled from the tree. They were always special--jewelry, a matchbox car, something special to the particular child. That year, mine was Santa in a Snow globe, only it was about three inches tall, with a tiny note affixed that said, "Thank you for not bothering me. It was a busy night. You are such a good girl. Love, Santa"

***
There is no one left from that time but me. Even Grandpa's hat is gone. But I hear him still. the magic of that Christmas, of many others, remains with me still. But that one  Christmas, Grandpa let us see his back yard, the boy, the man who loved trains, the man who loved us. And I see the tree shimmering as I glanced at it over my daddy's shoulder as he carried me to bed, humming so that his chest rumbled and tickled me.  I see the tinsel on his head, and Jean Ellen slapping Jimmy's hand as he looped the stuff in a clump. I feel my heart speeding up at the memory of almost seeing Santa.

I see it as clearly as any movie could bring it. It shines there for me to run whenever I need it; there, just by my heart, with Mommy close by, laughing.

So forgive me if I indulge myself in festooning and laughing and singing my way around my new home, making cookie dough to freeze, ordering some gifts, putting up my tree, repeating the story of every ornament. And planning my own Christmas Eve celebration with nine of my family, here. In my home. And there will be stockings from TWO Santas under my tree Christmas morning. And there will be toys. There will be singing deliberately off key.

And there will be more love than any one woman could possibly hope for. Here. In my home. You all are invited. Just let me know by the end of next week, so I know how big a turkey to order!

Headed to the Studio for a Bit ... Some Background Blogs in the Meantime

I actually am working on a book, and trying to figure out the thread of the focus. It won't be a litany of hurts, that's for sure; it won't be Pollyanna Grows Up In Hell but is GLAD,  either. I'm not good at perky. I think that essentially it is The Prince of Tides without the tiger. And it may be that I wind up having to fictionalize, for the sake of some innocent relatives, and, well because the sociopath is alive. Then, too, that might be kind of fun. While I would love to write a memoir, it might be that to talk about my personal journey, it should be fictionalized; to talk about my mom, however, might be something I could tackle. We'll see.

Regardless, painting dreams seem to be taking over for now, and it's time I paid attention. Often the two forms--writing and painting--feed off one another.

But I've been so lucky to get about thirty new followers in a short time, and some of my entries might make more sense if you look at earlier ones. They might illustrate more of who I am.

I dance on the edges of things, skating the curve between the yin and the yang, the dark and the light, where life and death touch. But the only way I survived all the pain was to cling to the beauty and try to let go of the horror, swinging toward that rainbow on these slender vines of whatever beauty I could see. Sometimes they broke. Sometimes they took me to somewhere safe for a time. Sometimes they took me directly into a pile of ... not good stuff.  I have lived between the extremes, but early on, it taught me to live BY extremes. Too much so often. 'Matt' once told me, "Your love, our love, this love between us was so big it scared me to death. You scared me to death. I had to run away."

SO... I did my best to kill myself off by inches in my twenties, until my broken back saved my life. It was a real, tangible problem to fight, to overcome, to conquer, instead of demons just out of my reach. And conquer it I did, for twenty years longer than they gave me to live or to walk, so far. T I'm here. I walk. I stand. But mostly, I live. And as I have said in previous comments, I use the elves and fairies, the wildflower days and the Lake, the beauty and laughter of Christmas, to cut the demons down.

Blog Entries for While I am Painting, not Writing--for those of you who are so inclined
For any of you newer followers who are interested, I've included some early entries--Losing Dad was the latest and about nine of you were around then, perhaps. I did not remember a thing about the abuse and violence until I lost my dad--Losing dad, finding therapy .  This entry talks about him in a little more depth than the Slayer of Monsters under My Bed.

I could not really start the process of having the distance to write about it all until after my  mom died. I was far too closely entwined with her, her struggles, her failures, her victory. HER life story. (Hence, I am kicking around tackling a memoir that focuses on her and on our relationship.) I could not separate myself properly. I include the following entry, which shows most clearly so far, the wide swings of feelings about her.
Losing Mom, finding my way

When I had lost both parents, then I opened up and began to write about it all, a bit at a time. But I let no one see. I let very few in that deeply even in talking. It took years to truly have it lose the power to  hurt me. But I had my breakthroughs, and life changed. I got new tools to use to actually enjoy pastels in life. Grays even. Balance without boredom was a brand new concept to me at 37, after she died.

I think one such breakthrough came when I stopped blaming Mom for everything, that was a huge step.
Underlying Premise--I cannot blame my mother, dammit.


This next is the beginning of it for me, and it is pretty horrifying, I think... Where the terror and the sociopath were born, but also where the love was born. This was the one story that made my therapist cry, but it is pivotal to the gift I was given to cope, through the Robin Hood Days, and through the days of jumping at the too small sounds in the night, when my other brother came.  Bear in mind I was perhaps a year and a half older than the me in the picture of my window box elves entry -- three and a half!  I don't know that I had more than two followers when I wrote this one. Grace by Any Other Name

I blocked the incident out entirely until I was about 36, just as I did the sessions with Jack, and the rape that made me start carrying a steak knife to my room at night. No one ever said a word about the knife, a small fact that makes me wonder still. I never tried to hide it. In fact, if Jim was in the living room, I made sure it was very visible... Still, my memories were only of elves, until my father died, and Pandora's box flew open, and the demons were let loose for good.

Out of that little bitty girl came a solution for most traumas, most pain. Love. Agape, not emotion so much as the gift. The gift of love.

It was what I used over and over before each of my nine back operations--I would say the names of the people I love, over and over and over -- it was far more powerful than thinking of people who loved me. After all, who would love a woman like me anyway? They all left so fast, and it was so very hard to believe back then that there was anything in me to love ... But there was nothing hard about my naming the ones that I loved, whether or not they loved me back. It helped me get through many situations which scared me.  Cover the fear with love

Funny thing is, most of those people DID love me back, and have loved me ever since.  It kept coming as a shock when these women united so often, catching me before I hit the ground, over and over again. The Women

 ***
I think losing my daughter in 1994, just two years after her father left, broke the final dam of some sort of resistance to share my core with others. I did not think anything could ever be worse than this. (That will undoubtedly be an entry one day--one of the most bizarre experiences, aside from the worst moment of my adult life. Hearing that she was dead.) I moved to Pennsylvania six months later, learned to paint, and simply breathed. Between 1987 and 1994 I lost both my parents, had my  ninth back surgery, went through psychotherapy for post traumatic stress, bought a house with my sister, had both kids leave for college, had my husband leave me for his student teacher who was Jessie's age, and finally lost my daughter.

When I wrote the poem to her in 2005 that is in the next entry, I had lost three best friends and my nephew and my brother as well. I was worn out from  losing people and starting over, but I also knew I was going to lose my sister, too (I wrote about her in January of this year). (From 2000-2006 I lost my minister -- and dear friend--to suicide, two close friends, my nephew who hanged himself, my brother and finally my sister. I was kinda tired. And I was losing my ability to walk. I was starting over for the sixth time in my adult life, I felt.)

This is just a bit of a tribute to my love for my Jessica. She is inextricably entwined in my path to wanting to write again, in wanting to fly if I cannot walk. My Jess

That's enough of the hard stuff. I understand if you don't want to read any of those. I am so grateful for the support you all give me in writing, in letting me know that you don't think it a crazy idea for me to write a book.  Of course, I'd have to write it anyway, because writing is what I do.  I could not stop it, one way or another, if I tried. Like breathing. Like praying, singing, painting.  Like loving. So if I write a book no one wants to publish or read,  I'll keep writing anyway.

If I do not just go down into my studio and get started on those paintings, I will lose my brain altogether, howver. I thought I could create a schedule where I would, oh, paint in the morning, write in the afternoon. Nope. I'll do both in spurts... but as long as I do one or the other every day, then it's fine.

Okay, for those of you newer followers who don't really want to just read the heavy stuff about me, I have other entries that show something else!

NOW About Fairies or Faeries, and other Kinds of Magic
What More you Really Should Oughta Know
For those of you who want the silly and the magic,  Birthing Fairies: the Honest Truth, not the Fake truth    is self-explanatory. Some of you may have not had this in your education and if you have small children or grandchildren, you might need to pay attention to this factual account. Jo over at Majority of Two can corroborate that this is how they are born. She found this out in Canada, so it isn't just me.

Beyond the magic of my mother, I was also given our summers. Huckleberina Finn is a sample of that. Then of course, there was Christmas....

Those three entries are some of the shiny parts of my life.Hence my comparison of my family environment as a rain forest: lush or rotting, with little in between.

As for me, one of the pictures I've dreamed is birthing fairies... a spot on the lake that shines so clear for me still. I finally think I know how to get what I want on paper--the overbright sparkles that get larger as they come to shore. We'll see. And I finally have the right fish for my coral painting... and--Well. I just have to paint is all.

I can't walk away for two months again. Undoubtedly new things to write will start nagging at me softly, then louder I will have to come back and finish them, if only to shut them up. Do you find that, too? That a work of art yells at you to get over there and DO it? That a  story weaves into your dreams and mucks them all up ? Or paintings arrive unannounced and fully blown?

Sometimes the muse is downright rude. Oh. And I've recently begun to write music for the Thursday night group of which I am a part. I never wrote music before in my life. THAT is calling to.

But the thing is? Now I am free. Free of the house that was too much for me, of having to consider anyone else in my days. I am free to fly. And that's WAY easier than walking. My friends dubbed me the Phoenix. I like that, as I said. It's mythical enough, and I am slowly working on a painting of that. Each feather is being cut individually. I work on it when I DO feel weak, when I feel that I cannot take any more pain or loss, or have one more hope placed in my hand to look at and cherish, only to have it taken away and thrown beyond my reach the moment I believe. I mean, really. Who doesn't want to be the center of her own myth? It can be useful when the darkness visits.

The demons rarely stay for long any more. And when the fires come, I FLY. Fly straight up and free.

I'll be back in a couple of weeks, but I will be following your blogs. It's how I start and end most days.

Then, too, I may be back writing sooner if new entries interfere with my dreams and then start yarping loudly at me as the paintings did!

In the meantime, as Carl would say, keep makin' art. I am so very lucky to have made blogging friends here... and I think it all started with Carl at Artistic Balance and Jo at Majority of Two.  And built from there.  If the blogs I follow are not familiar to you, I'd also suggest you root around among them, and give some a try! I know that reading such fine words and seeing such beautiful words  have made me think more, feel more deeply--and have lifted my spirits when I needed it.

The Existence of elves, Revisited (July, 2009)

My family life was pretty much about living in a rain forest: lush or rotting, with little in between. I've said that on many occasions. Lately, I've been writing about the hard stuff, and I know that both Robin Hood, from yesterday, and When I Awoke to the Notion of Being a Writer from a couple of weeks ago are two such entries. I have been given so much support for them, that it has renewed the impetus as I move forward with my book.

However, I wanted to revisit an early entry here. I had a whole lot of magic in my early life, and when I started writing the blog I began with some of them. I had almost no followers. Not that it's a crowd now, but quantity hasn't been my goal. I simply wanted to work on my writing--the craft, the art, and the notion that one can convey pain without graphically sticking to horrifying detail!  However, more people have decided to stay and perhaps you might be getting a skewed view of what my childhood was!

One commenter felt he could not live my life with all I have gone through.  I put this little piece in here once more, for those who have never read it, to remind you that I LOVE my mom. And that Jack and I had some magical times. That our world held every single color imaginable, and, yes, to lighten up.

NOTE: I have scattered a few Garth Williams illustrations because THIS is the image of elves I had as a child, from the book Elves and Fairies.  I just thought it might evoke memories for boomers, and give others a feel for the fifties, when my memories were the living events.  At one time I asked my mom whether I could grow up to be Garth Williams and she told me that I would have to work on growing up to be Jetty.  I sulked for easily a whole fifteen minutes.

Enough intro  ... Onward... From July, 2009--moved to today

... [There] were moments of pure joy and absolute beauty in my childhood. In fact, they took up more time and space, and as I explore this art form of memoir in my blog, I think I would rather start here. I would rather begin with the magic that was my mom, Jean Margaret. We'll leave the darkness for other times...
***

Me, around 2
in ecstasy over a feather

Flying Lessons: Proof of the Existence of Elves

Spirituality is a strange thing in the heart of a child. It has wings sometimes; it flies up from the leaves, the grass, through water, from everywhere at once. More than half a century later, I feel it and taste it, hear the echoes of that day. Grown ups call what children feel so deeply “magic,” then try to teach them it’s God. They don’t seem to ever get it; children need no teaching. We know it is all the same, whatever name we give It. The Keeper of all Magic is God.

On the other hand, when I was not yet four and my brother was already six, for us, the Keeper of the Magic was Mommy.

Especially on sunny mornings, when the light threw rainbows all over the kitchen, and she'd wipe her hands on her apron, not even finishing the breakfast dishes, turn to us and whisper, "picnic!" Out would come the hard-boiled eggs ever-ready in the fridge, for deviling. Jacky would make the chocolate milk. I would rinse the grapes. Before you knew it, Jack's enormous red wagon appeared, the thermos was full, picnic packed, and we were gone.

This particular day, Mommy had said to me, "Always remember, Jetty, there is always something more compelling in life than housework."

***

We always stopped on the dirt road beside the hole in the bridge. She’d let us look down at the water rushing miles below. It was on our picnic that particular day that we learned about elves.

“Lie on your backs and don’t make a sound,” said Mommy, doing this herself. “Just look at the clouds and listen.”

At first I didn’t hear much, but gradually I heard it. Soft rustlings, small feet, rushing sounds that had no familiarity.

“Now look at where you hear the sounds,” she said. “You can’t see anything, can you, except a few ants. They are much too small to make such sounds.”

We were stumped. We waited, looking at our mother with full confidence that some new axiom was about to be shared.

“Elves,” she said. “Well, and fairies, too, but primarily elves because fairies tend to fly. It’s the only explanation. They are invisible to us, but they make sounds. What else could it be? If it were birds or animals, we’d have seen them. We have them all around here.” She waved her arms, encompassing the whole woods, it seemed. “And we have them outside the kitchen window, too. Jean Ellen saw them yesterday. We decided you two should know about it, because we want you to help us make them some furniture.”

“In the window box, Mom?” asked Jacky.

“Precisely.”

We sat up and opened our sandwich cookies in solemn wonder. Elves. At our house. First a picnic, now this. Lunchtime drifted lazily into early afternoon, as we named cloud shapes, studied three ants trying to move one large crumb to their home. Mommy wouldn’t let us squash it.

“Only in the house. Outside, this is their spot and we’re guests.”

And so it came to pass that Daddy came home for dinner to find four of his family painting folded paper furniture, and stringing twig bows for a family of window box-elves with whom he wasn’t even formally acquainted. My older brother Jim was watching T.V. He was nine and too old for this “junk.” Jean Ellen was twelve and it didn’t phase her in the least. It was all right, though, because Jim wasn’t much into anything Jacky and I cared about.

Daddy said, “Elves. I see. I’ll go read the paper for a while.” He didn’t even grump about dinner. Just got a beer from the fridge and wandered, chuckling, into the living room. We put the furniture and three bows into the window box and tried not to look for signs of life more than ten times before bed.

I was in the kitchen by 6:00 the next morning, when Mom was putting the water on for hers and Daddy’s tea. I dragged a chair to the window, knocking into washing machine and the mop bucket.

“Hold your horses, Jetty, just hold your horses,” Daddy’s voice was his laughing voice as his hands lifted me onto the chair.

The furniture had been moved and the bows were gone.

“Jacky!” I shrieked. Fortunately, he was on his way down the stairs.

A small, bumpy blue bag was on the edge of the box by the house, in the left corner, the spot most accessible from the kitchen. I let Jacky pick it up and he let me unfold the small note inside, as he emptied out a small mound of marbles of every description. In the tiniest printing that ever was, Daddy read, 'Thank you for the furniture. It’s very comfortable. And the bows work great. Yours truly, the window box elves.'

Later that summer, when I was four, Mommy said we were moving to a new house in someplace called Manchester a whole twenty minutes away. I started crying because there would be no elves.

The very first thing she did, when she got me out of the car at the new house, was take me to our side yard. There was a tree with twisty branches and giant leaves, as big as plates.

“This is a catalpa tree, Jetty. I prefer to call it an elf’s tree.”

I looked hard at the tree, expecting to see a tiny pair of eyes look back.

“Elves use these leaves for clothing, for their bows and arrows, to make their homes, and they use the catalpa beans for food and the pods for boats. It’s the perfect tree for them. Just last week, I believe your father saw an elf or two right on our back porch. Next week, we’ll have to make some gifts as a sort of housewarming, okay?”

Years later, I found her talking to my soon-to-be stepdaughter at the picnic table beneath that tree. All I heard were the words “What else could those sounds be? Catalpa trees are elf trees, actually…” and I went back into the house. Jessie started calling my mother grandma that very day.

***

That was one type of punctuation to bracket regular life. Most days we told her we were bored and had nothing to do, to which she would absently pat our heads, kiss us, and say, “That’s too bad. I’m not.” And she’d leave us to find something to do, not knowing how to be mad at her exactly. She yelled at us when we were bad, shooed us when she was busy, was impatient more than was probably right at times. She was the rule-maker and the sun at the center of our lives, like most Moms. She also held a terrible darkness that could block out the brightest day.

Most of our days, though, as small children, were the stuff of everyone’s childhood in the 1950s and early 60s. The difference was the magic of a Mom who would drop everything to give us pure joy, to find the adventure in an ordinary moment. We had elves. We had rainbows. And we had lazy, deviled-egg picnics that supplanted housework on the priority list for living.

This morning I saw a dust rhino gallop across the living room floor. I thought I'd best vacuum. The sun hit the prism in my window and I went out into the garden instead. I am not sure, but I may have seen an elf leap off the six foot tall lily by my front door.

Small Addendum

How many people got a mom like that? Or ever really KNEW about elves and fairies? Or knew there was something more important, more compelling than housework. Like blogging, for instance?  I miss my mom. On the other hand, I DID teach Claire and Adam all about Santa Claus and how I knew about him through my dad. Yes, and of course, they did not have an elf TREE, but they had a birdhouse with a magic garden around it, and ultimately the elves found that... There is no garden or catalpa tree. I guess next spring, I'll have to make an elf planter because I am really  not sure I want to live somewhere they cannot be, you know?

The Next Reinvention

I was pouring coffee for one of my dearest friends the other morning. She stays over at my place sometimes to save herself a forty-five minute commute from her second shift job. Sometimes she stays over just because we're like a couple of teenage girls who want a sleepover so we can talk all night.


Regardless, I took the coffee to her and realized I had started to cry.  I had been thinking about the day ahead and it hit me; I don't have to do anything. My bills were paid; for the first time in years I was out of debt. There were no contractors to talk to, nothing to fix.  I had all the groceries I needed for another ten days.  The agony and terror of the week before was gone.  For ten days I had had trouble walking from my bedroom to the kitchen. I had shooting pains up my spine, down both the insides and outsides of my legs, as well as down my right arm; both feet were about 80% numb, so that I had to walk barefoot just to be able to feel them hit the floor--and with every hit to the floor there was pain.

I think those ten days were the farewell pitch of the previous two and a half years. The last hurrah of chaos, failing health, financial instability, emotional turmoil.

In that short walk from kitchen to the couch where Martha was sitting, all those things went racing around in my brain and, like a beautiful sunrise, two words rose from somewhere inside of me, from that life-feeding force some call God, 'gratitude' and 'hope.'

Often, I've mentioned my back.  I wrote very badly of the last dance with romance I had a couple of years ago. And I talk about the struggle to find my way to balance, to learn how to dance around the pain, in spite of the pain, in spite of the inability to even move my legs at times. I try not to touch too much on the terror.  When I want to write in my blog, I want to be exploring the "what's next" aspects, or the parts of my life that saved me; that kept the torture, the abuse from killing me figuratively or literally. It's those things I was given that saved me, not some sort of super human strength.

My strength is real human and fails me often enough.

We do not do it alone. If we rise like phoenixes, usually I truly believe it's that somewhere along the line we were offered examples of the rising. So I write of my mother's and father's graces more than where they hurt me. I rarely write at all of the brother who was so sick. I do not yet know how to handle that, or even whether to handle that. If I want to write the book, he has to be there, but until I know how to write of him with grace, a blog is not the venue.

And I want to write the book; I have already begun the book for real.

I tend to write when I have mostly processed, so that I am comfortable with exposing my heart--long after the fear and anger have left. At least, that's when I write my best. But these last two years have leaped in here anyway sometimes. How could they not?  And reading other people's blogs, looking at your artwork, marveling at your wisdom has helped me believe that I could still write, and reminded me that I should still write.  And paint. And sing.  That if I kept even sporadically returning to the page, either online or in my journals, one way or another the latest hell would leave.

Thursday morning, in the little act of pouring coffee for my friend, I realized I'd made it home again. A new home, true, but home nonetheless.

And for the fifth time in my adult life, I am reinventing my life.

The difference is that, for once, I am aware of the whole process as it is happening, not in retrospect. I am alive. I can still walk! I am in my new home and do not ever again have to deal with contractors, leaking roofs, bad septic systems, sewer hook ups, co owners who do not share the responsibility, tenants to evict, mold in the basement, and neighbors who sabbotage my livelihood. I am here, in a lovely apartment, with room for my studio. I have a studio again!

On that long coffee walk, I realized that all is well at last. I felt flooded with something overwhelming, as I realized that finally I really do not have to worry about a thing for now. Who gets that in their lives? Perhaps lots of people; I don't know. I simply know that it was a novelty in my adult life. For now, for at least a couple of years, I truly have all I need, to allow me the time to create a body of work and build my health back as far as I can, without really thinking about much else. I have no one I must take care of and no home for which I am responsible, and I have the money to care for my needs for probably MORE than two years.

Who gets that? I don't think a whole lot of people have that these days. So that flood of gratitude was real. It was mixed in with a relief or release that I have never known. I've never been in this position!

And I admit, this weekend I may just revel in it a little. I am safe. I am free.

And that's the thing I had not even dared to think, let alone write or say. I am free. Even now, as I write, the tears are beginning. I have never felt this way in all my adulthood. I remember approaching this one February morning. My dad was out of intensive care and my older brother (this is pre-memory of all he did to me) was going to survive the car accident he'd had the night of my dad's surgery. Dad had had a complication and Jim was in a coma and Mom was drunk. So my sister gave money to my other brother to drive to New Hampshire to give to Jim's family while he was in a coma, and everyone decided I should be the one to tell Dad that he was not expected to live! Yes, well. Imagine the scene with my mother slumped over, drunk in a chair in the corner. Daddy asking me if Mom was okay from all the stress, because, after all, she couldn't keep her eyes open.

"No, Dad, she's drunk. THAT is why she's asleep. She couldn't cope."

"Well, don't say it like that. She is just under too much pressure."

"Yes, right. Whatever. But, Dad, I gotta tell you something."

So that February morning, I was going to go to the hospital to tell Dad that Jim was okay AND that I had been accepted into Boston University's graduate school, to get my degree in adult education! I could not believe how great life suddenly was, and was marveling how everything could change in a matter of hours, when my foot hit black ice and I fell down six concrete stairs on my back. That was 1980, and my life changed in thirty seconds, let alone a few hours.  My first of nine operations was six months later.

Thirty-one years later, my spine is far worse, but I am far healthier in a dozen ways. I have lived several lives since that morning.

And now, at 59 years old, I am starting yet another. I haven't any idea where this new one will lead, or whether the goals and dreams I have now for it will come to fruition or change along the way. I know only that Thursday morning something inside awakened the phoenix yet again. The last two years have been two of the most difficult I have ever known, but they have also been two of the richest as well.

I know I am loved; when I do not believe in myself, there are all these women who do it for me, giving me the chance to heal, to rest, to revive.  I know that I am safe; I know I have all I need. I am lucky beyond belief in such a time of uncertainty for so many, to know that I will be okay for at least a few years now.

The rest is up to me, isn't it. No one can reinvent my life for me, and I don't want someone to. I did not spill the coffee, even. I sat on the other couch, looked at Martha and said, "I'm free. I really am free."

She just smiled and said, "Welcome home."

More Lush than Rotting: Huckleberina Finn et al.

 Maybe I should have broken this into two entries... it's a novella. Oh, well! I hope you enjoy...

Summers in Utopia... as Ever, the Lake
Our memories never seem to move in nice, predictable paths. Our minds wander, like willful children determined to explore the forbidden territory beyond the next block. We will cross the street, open the drawer, even go into the woods alone. You’d think it would change once we become “grown ups,” but it doesn’t. We knock down the locked doors, sometimes seemingly against our own will.

I see the endless, island beach days -- white bright and singing throughout my childhood. And yet I see the inside of my father’s closet, smell his cologne. I feel the floor and ceiling nearly meeting at the back, where it narrows, floor reaching up, ceiling bending low. I am small enough to fit in the one safe spot, curled into a ball, silent, waiting.

I hear my brother's cries. I hear him call, “Jetty, run and hide!”

No one can find me here because I’m the smallest; but, like a bull, Jim has been distracted by the nearest moving object, Jack. I stare into the safe and fragrant dark, even now.

But then I blink, and I see the white pine boughs kissing The Lake. The water laughing with sparkles in wind-driven sunlight. I first learned the word “diaphanous” there. Until Mommy told me that word, I had none to describe what I saw.  So white-bright, it could blot out the darkness of "regular" life at home.  There were no dark corners in my summers; my soul danced bare, shining, and safe.

Who gets to spend summers in Utopia? I did. And it shines as brightly through fifty-eight summers, today.

Even Jimmy lost the darkness, had others to distract him.  Or perhaps, even he rediscovered innocence there, from time to time. I know that Jim never went to the Lake; only Jimmy.

***
When I was newly five, one July, I was really busy when Mom wanted to go home for our lunch break. It probably was only about 11:30 or so, but Mommy really didn't like the noonday sun. She'd take us home and, unless I stayed with Judy the way I normally did, I wouldn't get back to the beach until after 2:00. And this particular day, Jude was visiting relatives at some beach by the sea  somewhere.

I was building a sandcastle at the time and Jim and two of his girlfriends were helping me.  They were really helping,  not teasing--Jimmy never played with me and I liked it. Jack had been with other kids and wanted to go home, but I did not.

"Mom, I'll bring her home by 1:00, okay? Let her finish the castle."

Mom left her watch with him and we finished our castle. It was BEAUTIFUL, with two moats and a driftwood drawbridge. Jimmy and the others built a breakwater so the 1:00 Mount Washington cruise ship run would not ruin it with its waves. We left at 12:35 because he even accounted for my five-year-old legs vs his ten-year-old ones. I was missing a flip-flop.  Jimmy weighed late vs a lost shoe, and decided late was worse.

I was upset, but he said, "Oh, forget about that. Ma won't mind. You can't remember everything at five anyway."

We got to the top of the beach entrance and Jimmy stopped cold. They'd paved the road while we were playing. The new tar was steaming in the heat, and he looked at my tiny foot. At home, he would have relished watching me have to put my bare foot on the hot pavement, smiled at the pain, and then would have stopped just short of letting my feet blister.

Lake Jimmy? He simply said, "Well. I guess I better carry you, huh. I can't let that little foot burn."

I said, "I can walk. I'm big." But he laughed and grabbed me up onto his shoulders as if I were a twig. About halfway home, though, there was a grassy island for the stop sign at the bottom of the last hill, and he put me down. He was nervous because it was 1:00, and we were still ten minutes from home. I couldn't tell time, but I knew that the little hand was on the one and knew just enough.

My brother's face was bright red. "I'll hop on one foot for a while, Jimmy."

And I did. And I'd hop to a grassy yard, then walk a bit, and  hop. But after four yards, he stopped me, smiled, and simply picked me up and had me hook my legs around his waist, then jogged with me on his back.

Mom was waiting for us. Apparently, they had paved AFTER she got home. She'd driven up and over the island, so she had not seen the pavers go past. She took a look at my foot, at my brother, and she said, "Jetty, WHERE IS YOUR FLIP FLOP?"

She was kind of angry at me. But Jimmy put me down and rested his hand on my hair. "Ma, we're hungry. Come on, it's just a flip flop. She's little."

Mommy kissed him, shook her head at me, and we went in to lunch.

But that's how he was in the summer. Lake Jimmy. I loved summers and I loved him that day.

Utopia. I spent summers in Utopia.

***

 

Oh, the endless adventures, the magic of islands that turned to dragons and swept me to lands unknown. I watched fairies come to life. The giant Daddy Whales emerged beneath us, vaulting Judy and me into the sky, like baby dolphins. No, none of the rotting of our lives touched us at the Lake. I had Judy, and we all had communal parents, and tumbled about the Island like bear and wolf cubs.

There were family cookouts where all the station-wagoned families pooled food, love and nonsense. Evening games of Michigan Rummy in which my mom cleaned up. She would bid, staring with china doll, wide-open eyes around the table. Mrs. Claus with a dealer's visor and a mind like a computer. She’d stutter, feign innocence.  And clean up.

Jacky and I never could understand how everyone could be that dumb about her. She was smarter than anyone there, except maybe her best friend Phi. (Fee) Phi spoke seven languages and was a world-famous anthropologist. She stood fully six feet, an Amazon. Classic features and a Jane Russell body. Hair in a French twist. Every man on the beach just stared, slack mouthed when Phi went for a swim. She and my mother played intellectual leap frog with the Sunday Times crossword, seeing who would complete it in pen first.

The birthplace for myths, if one chose to conceive. Rich. The freedom. That’s the thing. I was absolutely free there. Judy and I would meet by 9:00 and be together until supper time. Sometimes we’d see each other after supper, too. Taking turns running the half mile between  our summer homes.

I never had to hide in the dark.

But the mind goes to the darkness anyway. I would dream images of dead mice in traps, feel a shove at the top of the stairs while safely tucked in bed, feel the blood on my legs, but will them away with the images of sun on water. The Lake taught me the art of forgetting. We learn to put it away, sometimes for years, these particular punctuation marks of pain, of terror too ugly to fix our gaze, too harsh for little hearts meant for fairyland and mythical battles where good always wins. My world had Medusa in the corners, and I learned the art of blindness. I learned the beauty of the sidelong glance, the ability to look away just before the monster appeared. Look away to the mountain that always steadied my gaze.

I ran to my spot by the bridge every morning before breakfast, starting when I was just seven, after first grade. I could walk down from the road, and sit on a rock, just hidden from view, and I would look off toward the Sandwich Mountains. They never changed; they  never mocked my fears, nor laughed at my dreams of greatness. My mountain never left me alone. I would watch until the sun was high enough to make the fairies come, then I knew I had to go home.

Usually that was about 7:30. And by my third or fourth day there, the monsters did not bother even trying to come back. And summer began for real.  I found the time and the room and the freedom to lock my closets and stuff the drawers full of whatever  I could not bear. It was very hard work, but I was tenacious. I filled my days with adventures with my pirate/Merry Band/vagabond friends. 

Maleness is not a prerequisite for a Mark Twain sort of summer.

It was the Season of Exile. The Reign of Terror of the Gang of Four: Judy, Marge, Geri and I were kicked out of, well, everywhere, pretty much. Pickle, Lily, Dinah, and... yes... I was Sewer. Those of you who know my last name, know it's a play on that. Judy and I felt we were kind of done in on that part, but, since we WERE the ring leaders, perhaps it was only fair.

Deep Sea Diving: Poisoning Our Parents

Pickle had lately discovered stuffed clams and had the idea that we could stuff mussels. We had also been mocking the t.v. show "Treasure Hunt" in which Lloyd Bridges deep sea dived every week and wrestled giant octopii, squids, terrorists, thieves, and sharks... and seemed to almost always narrowly escape a life-threatening case of something called "the bends." The best we could figure when we were littler was that they called it that because everyone was always bent over in agony and then they died. And it involved coming up for air too fast; you couldn't beat your air bubbles.

Lily required some assurance from our parents that diving off the raft for fresh water clams would not put us in mortal danger. Pickle and I were best at the diving anyway, having been tried by our fathers in the art of holding our breath and letting it out slowly.

We  probably collected fifty.   In the process, we found a couple of sunken ships and probably a billion dollars worth of doubloons. All in a day's work. I had just turned twelve, and Judy was due to turn. I was not keen on being a teenager ever, and was terrified of seventh grade, a new school and the great unknown. Fortunately, we four felt pretty much the same, except for Geri (Dinah). She was born boy-crazy, but she liked our games, too. That summer, especially.

Once we had the mussels, though, we realized that they needed cleaning, grinding and preparation. Pickle's Aunt Phi was a gourmet cook, so Pickle lifted one of her cookbooks for us to use, and absconded with the necessary spices. This was good, since we were headed for our kitchen. Grandma's cottage was the smallest place, but had the biggest kitchen. Her spices included salt, pepper, and... salt and pepper. Dad never met a seasoning he was comfortable with and Grandpa'd been no different.

We headed through the garage, slamming into the house with our six buckets of mussels and Grandma met us at the side door, barracading us from setting FOOT in the house until we'd cleaned the nasty things in the lake. That took us three hours. She was NOT easily satisfied; Dinah and Lily left before the job was done, with orders for us to call when the cooking began. Pickle and Sewer? My grandmother was not about to let us off.

Then we had to boil and open and gut and season and cook… we finished our works of art at 8 that night.  Phi and Pickle's  and Dinah's mothers were brave enough to try one and were violently ill for hours. On top of that, my grandmother’s kitchen was dripping in mussel juice. We spent the next morning scrubbing and were informed that her kitchen was off-limits, period. For life.


Hey, There, Little Red Riding Hood...
Another friend, Julie, was a year older. SHE got to take the enormous teak INBOARD boat out in the evening.  We'd tear through dinner, Pickle, Dinah, and I, and head for their place. Lily wasn't allowed, usually.  There is nothing like the sound of those old inboard motor boats. A comforting, low, gurgling sound. They rode low, smooth, and fast. Julie would take us flying out toward the Broads, the widest part of the lake. It was several miles, unobstructed by any of the Lakes couple of hundred islands. And usually, she'd cut the engine and we'd drift.


That night, we decided we would sing, or something approximating that. We lost track of the drifting, until we heard a little thunk, and the boat kissed THE WITCHES. The Witch Rocks, in July, barely broke the surface in the Broads. A nest of rocks there in the widest, deepest part of the Lake, they covered a surface of a a few hundred square yards, and were very clearly marked. But there we were, and Julie panicked.


Pickle and I grabbed the oars, and Dinah held a big old floodlight of a flashlight so we could push our way out of the mess. No harm done, but Julie still did not want to go home yet, so we anchored about halfway between her place and one of the islands straight across.


We sang, "OH. Sweet Pea. Wontcha dance with me. Wontcha, wontcha wontcha dance with Me-e-e-e." We were screaming byth etime we reached "Wontcha be my girl."  Unfortunately, we then  decided to follow with "She Loves You" and, finally, "Little Red Riding Hood."  When we howled, to our horror, we saw lights go on on Governor's Island AND the other Island and, through the last of the daylight, heard versions of

"SHUT THE HELL UP!"
"Knock it OFF!"

"STOP!"
"I'm GONNA THROW UP!"

Then a voice that sounded like a familiar bass... "HOME! NOW!"


It was my dad.  He was at Jude's house, which was not all that close to Julie's, we thought. Funny. When trouble hit, our names returned. We were cooked, parboiled, fried, and most definitely banned from Julie's boat. So was she. We were not allowed on a power boat ride through whole two weekends!


Betty Crocker, Redux...

So we moved on to blueberry muffins.  We snuck up to old Mr. D’s hill at about 6:00 a.m. about four days later, and began picking blueberries.  I mean, his property must have gone up a quarter mile to the house, and it was nothing but blueberries.  We picked really fast, and I don't think we laughed more than about four or five times at the retelling of my father's puns.  Mr. D. came barreling out at about 8 yelling at us and we took off.   He called us each by our name and told us that he would loose the dogs on us if we ever even walked BY his house again. Right.

I said to Pickle, "Yeah, like there's a law against walking? Like he could ever eat even a tenth of those berries or--"
I shut up because I heard barking then and we RAN all the way to the top of the beach road, where we quickly ducked into the bushes, just in case, and checked our stash.

Even after spilling about a quarter of them, when we combined our take, we realized we had enough berries to feed all our families! And I mean, after all, even we couldn't poison anyone with muffins.

Now Lily was one of eleven kids (no lie), I was one of four, and Pickle's family had Dinah's family AND Phi.  We’re talking serious numbers of muffins, but since all of our homes were entertainment centers, there were serious numbers of muffin tins as well. Lily’s house had two ovens, so that was our natural destination. We each robbed our respective cottages of all the muffin tins and set to work. Scratch muffins, so we had to cadge flour and eggs from each home, too.  We figured we'd be done before anyone noticed anything was done. How we thought that a couple dozen eggs, eight cups of milk and five pounds of flour, give or take would not be missed eludes me now. We were normally considered intelligent...

Furthermore, we didn’t ask. We took.  We were invincible.

We marched down the road with our haul, chanting, "Pickle. Lily. DinaaaahhhhSEWER!"

Lily's Mom had gone out with the three littlest kids to the library and store. She'd be gone forever. The older ones were working. And really, who cared about the two boys who were left? They went off on their bikes with candy bar bribes in their pockets. We would surprise everyone and all our sins would be forgiven.
 

Muffins. We wanted them to be generous sized, so we filled the cups accordingly. We couldn’t find liners, so we greased the cups. Have you ever greased twelve dozen muffin cups?  The last fifty or so don’t get as much.  When we carved out the centers of the muffins, about eighty were really very nearly presentable.  It took us two and a half hours to clean the tins, though. And there was a matter of batter drippings between stove and counter. Lily's dad was not pleased... And it turns out we used up the milk and, Jude's mom had planned on using the eggs for an angel food cake and...

After all of us were over our three-day grounding for taking stuff, we decided we’d had enough of domesticity.  

We're Bloody Buccaneers.. UGH. 
And Each a Murderous Crook... UGH.  (Adventure on the High Seas)
 It was time to explore the frontiers beyond the island, sail off to the distant shore. Or row.

Row to Timber Island, to be precise. How far could it be? And there were four of us. We’d just go on a calm morning. Leave a note that we’d be home after lunch. Hadn’t we all been taught to tip a boat and tread water for half an hour?  Pickle and I brought the food this time.  Veri-Thin® Pretzel sticks, white seedless grapes, eight cans of soda, half a package of Oreos® and some Viking® Doughnuts. (Those were the days of the Viking® Bakery delivery truck and the milkman, going to the laundromat, and grocery day and such. TV at the cottages was superfluous.)  Life was good.

A perfectly flat lake at 6:45, a large aluminum rowboat and we were gone.

It’s about a mile to Mark or Timber Island.  It didn’t feel too bad then, but the lake was flat and we took turns, rowing in pairs. (though Pickle and I seemed always to be part of the pair)  But Dinah was company and it was Lily's boat. Seemed fair, and Pickle and I had our rhythm in all things anyway. We sang the Pirate song from the Musical Peter Pan. It helped us keep time with the strokes. Especially the "yo ho's."

When we got to the cove, the romance began to die. There was nowhere to land and the island seemed a mass of dense undergrowth and granite. Huckleberry and blueberry bushes, sumac. Rocks. We rowed halfway around the island and found a small, bug infested beach.

“What are we, sissies?” Pickle growled.

Inside, I said, 'Uh, yeah. I hate bugs.'

But I got out. Pickle and Lily forged ahead and stepped into a ground wasps nest. They each got stung only about twice, but that was enough for some pretty mean pain, so we ran for the boat. The wasps were slow, thank God. We were not.  Pickle and Lily then looped their legs over the boat to soak their bitten ankles and calves as we rowed away. I spotted another cove and this one seemed better. There was a breeze, so there weren’t the bugs, and there were huge flat rocks to stand on. The boat kathunked against one, but it was metal. No cause for alarm. We pulled the boat onto one of the rocks by the shore and waded in. We made mudpacks for the stings and we had our lunch, splashed around, sang loud obnoxious songs…

It was curiously dark before we’d finished the pretzels or the cookies.

“Damn! Thunderstorm!” Jude looked at me. Suddenly, we were just ourselves again.

We did not care to remember her father’s words or my grandfather’s. The words you live by in the summer at The Lake among the mountains. When the lake is flat until eight, there will be trouble in the afternoon. There were whitecaps and the water was molten lead.

We threw the food in the bottom of the boat, in a tangle with our sneakers and shoved off. About 100 strokes out from the island we felt the water at our feet. There was a leak.

“You bail, I’ll row!” Judy yelled.

“No, Jude, move over and we’ll both row while they bail,” I said. We rowed and rowed, getting nowhere of significance.

Then Geri screamed.  “OH MY GOD! WORMS!”

All over the bottom of the boat, were puffy, horrible white worms wriggling. About three inches long. Everywhere. It was a total infestation. All we could think was somehow or other, they'd got on while we were beached. It was disgusting, but there was nothing for it.

“Shut up and keep bailing!”

The waves got bigger, the sky got darker and we went absolutely nowhere after less than half a mile. Then the thunder came.

We were four idiots in a leaky metal rowboat in the middle of a lake with a thunderstorm bearing down and a boat full of worms.

Then we saw it. A police cruiser.  To our absolute mortification and total relief, we were rescued.

Summarily ordered on board, the two officers could do nothing but shake their heads in disgust. When Judy said her name, they knew where she lived and we were quickly deposited on Judy’s dock, leaky boat in tow.

Ted was there, waiting for his daughter, for us all, his 6’4” enormous frame clearly visible from a quarter of a mile away. I snuck a look at the police and they were smiling, rather sinisterly, I thought.

One said, "We've come to deposit your girls here. We couldn't find an arrestable offense called terminal stupidity, so here you go, Ted. Good luck with them." (Ted knew everyone. I mean everyone. And anyone he didn't know, Mommy knew. We were toast.)

We tried to explain, which was pathetic, really. All that came out was, “Adventure … we were explorers … we know how to swim … boat leaked and stung by wasps and didn’t see the storm worms everywhere.”

“Worms?” Ted asked. It was the only comment he felt warranted attention. The rest was meaningless static. “What do you mean worms everywhere?”

Eager to distract him from the inevitable lecture and further grounding, we led him to the boat. He looked at the boat, then back to us, then back to the boat.  He bent over and picked something up, then turned around.

“Worms,” he said, as he held up a now empty box of pretzel sticks.

***

We pretty much went back to playing tennis and swimming to the raft after that for summer excitement. After another week's grounding. I mean, we could play on the beach for an hour in the morning, then we had to go to our own homes, and got sprung maybe another hour in the afternoon. I got really good at Canasta and read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. This was when I decided to grow  up to be a southern writer, and my mom informed me that this was not likely to happen, considering I was a Yankee.

Great. It had only been a year and a half since she'd told me I could never be a linebacker for the New York Giants.


I moped around for at least a day, until I discovered Lad, a Dog and, my favorite, Wolf. And Grandma's books from childhood. Judy said she started reading all the books on the shelf beside her mother's chair. When we each wound up telling our parents that we didn't know why people hated grounding, I think they gave up on us entirely.


***
What I hold onto is how bright the summer was.  That summer before teenagehood, I had already put all the horrors of rape and torture in a locked vault, covered with Utopian New Hampshire days.  It was the last summer of holding onto childhood, but the first summer I latched onto a brand new dream of becoming a Writer. Judy and I felt destiny called. No. DESTINY called. There were no lower case moments that summer.

I think we each created our own adventures there, creating our own versions of Heaven and haven, even Jimmy.  He found his own freedom, too, perhaps, when he was there. I never knew what his prison was.  I only knew my own.

And at the Lake, I broke free and flew.