One Dog's Life

Fiesty, funny, fearless Scout

OBIT
Jean Louise Finch “Scout” Rountree
May ?? 2016-Sept. 8, 2024 

Jean Louise Finch “Scout” Rountree, the Rountree’s feisty canine companion of eight years, died on Sept. 8 at the NCSU Veterinary Hospital from complications of an unexplained spinal cord injury. She was eight years and something.  

Rescued on a bright May day by way of Saving Grace Animal Rescue, Scout “rescued” her owners from grieving over their beloved Little Ronald Reagan, who had recently died of kidney cancer. By her third night in her new home, she was sleeping on the bed between her humans, the only dog in their 43-year marriage to wiggle her way under the covers. Within weeks, she had curled herself up on every bed, chair and sofa in the house, her favorite spot being on somebody’s lap already sitting there.

Scout, fond of kissing everyone within reach of her tongue, wooed the doctors, nurses and students at the vet school with her frequent tongue action and her stoic demeanor amid what all said must have been great pain. And this formidable furlady knew pain, from her first months, we think, as she was rescued from the back roads of eastern North Carolina, having been on the run from somewhere in the months leading up to her establishment in Vestavia Woods. Feisty by nature (likely from her hardscrabble roots) she was kicked out of one doggie day care for too many infractions. Two years ago, a bigger dog grabbed hold of her neck and shook her like a rag dog, likely because she was talking junk.

A nurturer at heart, whenever we’d give her a rawhide-free dog bone, she’d run into the yard and quickly bury it, only to return to the back door with her nostrils full of dirt and the bone secured in her teeth. We’ve found bones folded up in the remains of her favorite stuffed animals—which she always chewed to shreds— in planted pots on the deck and even tucked into a sleeping bag rolled up and stored in an attic cubby. She loved French fries, the remains of any sandwich and chasing shadows dancing across the pavement. She adored (most) of her friends “on the track” — Cane and Stella and Izzy and Harley and Rocky and her beloved Sook, who greeted her in heaven. And quiet mornings napping in every sunlit space she could find. Summer tomatoes might have been her favorite food, and somehow she knew when Sooze made the first slice on the chopping board, appearing by Sooze’s side without making a sound. (And Sooze would give her the heel, a piece she never shared with anyone until Scout came along.) So of course, we served tomatoes as part of her last meal on this earth.  

Named for Sooze’s favorite literary character, she lived up to her namesake in her spunky nature, and in the fact that whenever she walked, she was first and foremost a scout, her ears shifting like a satellite dish in search of a signal, and her nose searching out if her arch rival Lucy was anywhere near her on the track.  

But most of all, Scout loved her people, showering them with her kisses, nudging closely to them at any chance, and taking their warm spot under the covers if they got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

In addition to Rick & Sooze, she’s survived by Grace & Harold, Sookie’s human family, who loved her despite her many shortcomings; her away-from-home family, Ann & John, who adored her from the first moments she boarded with them eight years ago. And the folks at Armadale Farm Kennel Daycare, who quickly taught her that screaming in public places is not allowed. She was predeceased two months ago by her beloved cousin Mudd and three weeks ago by her human grandmother B. We asked her to seek B out upon her arrival in heaven, and we know she is sitting on B’s lap, licking ... forever licking.

We thank the doctors at the NC State Emergency Veterinary Hospital, who came to admire Scout’s stoicism and kisses in her short time with them.  

Scout was our fourth dog and our most challenging. But we wouldn’t not have a dog because one day we will lose them. And she taught us overwhelmingly how to love, no matter what.

Summer Sentence: what we didn't do — and what we did

Summer Sentence

What we didn’t do — capture a family photograph.
But we
ate sand out of puddles
found a fish,
cuddled the baby
ate shrimp,
found the sandbar,
jumped the waves
watched the baby
ate snapper and flounder
mahi and more shrimp
played on the playground
kissed our cousins
shared a cold
traced some starfish
stamped some letters
watched Buzz
and Coco
and the Beast,
read stories
about a polar bear’s underwear
worried that Max’s supper
wouldn’t be hot
counted fish in
’the bailey book’
rode a boogie board
ate some tacos
learned where poops
come from
sang ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’
sat in Pop’s lap
ate Pop’s popsicles
didn’t eat Sooze’s
cooking
wondered why
Max chased the dog
with a spatula
missed some pages
talked a bluestreak
turned the music down
felt the ocean’s breeze
dug our toes in
held hands tight
wiped our noses
(a LOT)
missed home (a little)
touched the
baby’s foot
found some
shark’s teeth
saw the
turtle hospital
sat with Mommy
sat with Daddy
built a
bunkbed fort
said “cheese!”
and ate some
bacon
rode the scooter
and the swing
hugged Aunt Pamula
asked Sooze to
Google
lots of things
ate some cantaloupe
colored pictures
ate Friday pizza
painted shells
cried a little (but not too much)
sucked a thumb
washed our feet
watched the baby sleep
tickled
the grandparents
until
it was time to
wash our feet
for the last time.

What's a Story Worth?

Every Monday morning, before I’ve even donned my walking shoes, I check my email and find a question for me to answer. It’s a gift my son gave me for Christmas, and he week he asked a question through a website called Storyworth that I'm to answer about my childhood and other things.. When I’ve answered all the questions, my children get a keepsake book.

Now I’m guessing, that since I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 and had recently completed more than a year-and-a-half of chemo/radiation/targeted therapy, that he thought I might die with stories in my head that were still left to be told. It was touching beyond measure, as my kids, historically, have rolled their eyes at my stories. I wondered at the time if he really wanted to know these answers, but I took the gift into my heart as it was intended and starting writing.

The answers, I was told, could be short — a paragraph, really — and when I read that, I thought, well, if it’s a story there must be more to it than a single paragraph. (And I thought, too, that the creators of this website didn’t know me at all! But on that first Monday after Christmas, I got my first question and began to ponder. “What is one of your favorite children’s stories.” A lot. Just one story? How could I narrow a childhood of reading into just one story? But as I perused my mind and my library, I kept coming back to the Illustrated Treasure of Children’s Literature.

Here is what I wrote ( it’s not ONE story, but several):

When I was a child and before I was in school, our library at home was quite limited, as was the town library, which was in a room above the Fire Department (if you can imagine that.) I can still remember walking up the creaky stairs to the library room, watching the dust filter through the windows. Out the window to my left was Pop B’s office, and in front, the Post Office. But you didn’t want to be up there when the fire alarm blared! I remember those details but not particular books I checked out. In the school library, I remember a book called “Little White Dove,” which was the imagined story of what had happened to Virginia Dare. Her life fascinated me as a young girl — does still — and I liked the book a lot. 

But I suppose some favorites came much earlier, from a book I have on my bookshelf today called “Better Homes & Gardens Story Book.”

I’m sure B must have gotten this as part of her subscription to Better Homes & Gardens magazine. Somehow it ended up as mine, which was rare for this third child! I remember this was my first exposure to Beatrix Potter’s “Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and grumpy old Mr. McGregor. It was filled with poetry, something I loved as a child, and one of my favorites was called The Goops. “The Goops they lick their fingers and the Goops they lick their knives; They spill their broth no the tablecloth. Oh, they lead disgusting lives! The Goops they talk while eating, and loud and fast they chew; And that is why I’m glad that I am not a Goop — are you?

That would make me giggle, because we were all Goops as children of course! I used to read that one to you.

The stories of Uncle Remus drew me, too, but though they are based on old slave tales, they where written by a white man writing in dialect. ( At Carolina I wrote a paper on “Jack Tales,” and interviewed my boyfriend’s maid, who learned the stories about Uncle Remus from her grandmother, who had likely been a slave. I recorded her and I think that recording ended up in the Southern Collection at the Wilson Library at UNC.) The stories carry universal messages, the language is not appropriate for today’s child.

I loved the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. He wrote one called The Swing, which I loved to do in my grandparents back yard, and The Land of Counterpane, which was about a boy who was stuck in bed because he was sick and learned to create a whole story with the toys he played with on his bedcovers. And my favorite is probably My Shadow, which is can recite by heart. “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me. And what can be the use of him ( I would say ‘her’) is more than I can see….”

 But the question asks for just one story. (You know I don’t follow the rules!)

The one that keeps coming back to me is from another anthology that I read all the time as a child called The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature. Again, we didn’t have a lot of books in the library, but at home we had this book. You may remember it, because I read from it when you were younger, before we started reading books together like Old Yeller and Harry Potter. 

It’s a fairy tale from Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote all the great fairy tales, many of which are dark. The Emperor’s New Clothes (so much like today’s Trump), Little Mermaid, Princess & the Pea, The Ugly Duckling. He also wrote The Little Match Girl. It has never been made into a Disney movie for reasons that will become apparent. 

It’s the story of a child of poverty who has to sell matches on the street to make any sort of living at all. And on New Year’s Eve, when no one has bought any of her matches, she is cold and hungry and searching for warmth. 

As I child, I could not imagine this life, no more than I could imagine being a princess, but this one drew me more for some reason. I did know children who I never thought of as poor, but who wore the same clothes to school every day and never had new shoes. They would grow out of their clothes but never had clothes that fit. I never asked my parents why this was so.
In the Little Match Girl story, cold and hungry, she walks through the streets and watches the windows of the houses she passes. There, she sees people celebrating the New Year with goose, bright fires in fireplaces, family all around. But as she walks, she grows even colder and sits in a corner shielded from the wind and starts striking matches for warmth.

And with every match she strikes a new image of warmth embraces her. She imagines sitting in front of a warm stove until the match fades out. She strikes another: a table set with pretty china and her own roast goose; another brings a Christmas tree, filled with candles (no electricity when it was written); and then her grandmother, who was the only person who had ever been kind to her. And in trying to keep that image alive, she strikes all the matches she has in her possession until she had no more. 

The story says her grandmother had never looked more beautiful as she lifted the child up and took her through the stars at the end.

I think it was lost on me that she died in the end! But it’s the story of the warmth memories bring that drew me to her, I think.

So it seems an appropriate story to start this thing off. 

I guess, through The Little Match Girl, I learned early in my life that stories can be beautiful and sad and uplifting, all at the same time. And that is so true with life, right? You both have been through joy and beauty and great sadness all at once, as have I, many many times. As your mother, I wish I could shield you from the sadness, but my job is not to shield you but to offer comfort, when the challenge comes. I hope I have done that, at least to this point. And not caused you too much pain as you try to sort it all out.

This is an amazing gift. In the writing, I’ve learned a good bit about myself just now. I look forward to the next question. (I didn’t peek, though they said I could.) 

Every week since, then (well, ok, I skipped a couple of weeks) I’ve written stories about my grandparents, what my mother was like as a young woman, how I go to school, the friends I’ve had since before kindergarten. Stories about travels I’ve taken, organizations I’ve belonged to — it turns out the Tar Heel Girls State, class of 1974, was a very progressive group — my first job and given awkward advice about relationships. I’ve written about inventions that have most changed my daily life (the smart phone was first, chemotherapy advances, second.), and shared the fact that my preferred way to travel is by country road. And the question of where I went on vacation as a child? My response to my children was: I wrote a book about that! But as it turns out, the book was about how other families spent their vacations, so there is a whole ‘nother story about our own.

I have always felt I knew the worth of a story, and I’ve told many. But it turns out, the worth of stories prompted by my children are turning into the most worthy of all to me. In these months since Christmas, I’ve mined my own history like no time before, sorting through scrapbooks and scripts of plays I was in, Playbills I’ve kept (I had no idea I’d actually seen Michael Crawford live in a production in London in 1975, though I remember the runway in The Rocky Horror Picture Show too vividly.) I’ve read letters and political platforms that supported rape crisis centers and mental health programs in every county, and statewide recycling. —from that Girl’s State trip —when nobody in eastern N.C. had heard a thing about recycling.

As I said in that first entry: Stories can be beautiful and sad and uplifting, sometimes all at once. Stories can be simple and complex at once, too. And funny and heartbreaking. All of that, all at the same time. And that’s remarkable, when you think about it.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a podcast hosted by author Kelly Corrigan, much of it about the power of story: why we tell them and why we need them. In her conversations with authors from around the country, the same theme keeps coming through: Stories show us the truth of our lives in ways living through them doesn’t necessarily reveal. And it’s in the retelling of our own stories that discover things about ourselves that we didn’t really know in the moment.

So get out that and tell your story, folks. Your family will thank you. And it’s so worth it.

Charmed

Sixty three. That’s how old I am today.

A year ago, I wasn’t sure the shape I’d be in when I got here. I look at a picture of myself holding my newborn granddaughter, Audie, and though I’m not as bald as I would become, I’m getting there. And there is weariness in my eyes. That 62-year-old’s eyes, well, you can barely see them — eyelashes gone, the light of them, even in the presence of dear Audie, shows hardly a twinkle.

Maybe it’s because I’d spent much of that day crying. My sister and sister-in-law had sent me a gift, and when I opened it, I found what feels now like a hundred charms threaded on a silver chain, charms sent to them from friends and family from all points in my life. Well, if you’ve read much that I’ve written, you know that I’m all about charms. I have two full charm bracelets and now the necklace, and when I first pulled it out of the box I was fairly certain my sister was thinking I was dying. And she wanted me to know how much people around me cared about me.

Certainly there were days in those first few months of treatment that I thought I might. And some of the tears easily fell from remembering those dark days. But I laughed, too, through that puddle, knowing maybe even then that this thing would not kill me. At least not yet.

The necklace weighs several heavy ounces. It’s filled with pieces of my life, like charms of buttered toast and an Outlander book, a hot pink dress and a yellow submarine, typewriters and clouds, a crown and a tea cup, a pencil (and its sharpener, dogs and the Empire State Building, sand dollars and a hamburger, an artichoke and a bird, Bible, crown and peony — (just to name a few) and every single one of them comes with a story all its own.

I wore that necklace every single time I had chemo until it was over, except it wasn’t. On those days last summer and fall, I felt as if I was taking with me a full scale of armor to fight this thing — with the help of all those who had charmed me. And in the hours when I sat in the chair, I fingered each gift, remembering the people and the stories.

Two pieces of buttered toast. Malone and I sat at her kitchen table as pre-teens and teens, eating buttered toast after school and talking about boys. (Today Malone is home after almost a week in the hospital fighting COVID-19. She’ll be fine, but her challenge, this time, has been more than a couple of pieces of toast can cure.) Yellow submarine. My brother — Beatlemainiac that he is — sat close to the stage at last year’s Paul McCartney concert in Raleigh on his own birthday.) Clouds. My niece, whose 2-year-old question: Do Clouds Sleep? still has me pondering. Peony: my mother. It’s the only thing she ever gave me that I seem to be able to grow.

The crown looks like the one that sat on Queen Elizabeth’s head during her coronation, the charm’s original owner the mother of my dear ABSU, who bought it when the two of us saw the crown jewels as seniors in high school. The dog from my college suite mate turned neighbor, Grace, as a reminder of all the dogs we’ve walked together and loved in almost 30 years of neighboring. The cardinal: my sister’s reminder that our father is never far away.

I could, as they say, go on.

There would be no writing about it last year. Most days when I looked at the necklace I cried just thinking about all the people represented in it. I cried for the reason behind the necklace and for the fact of it. I cried because the sheer weight of it felt a lot like the weight I was carrying.

I’m embarrassed now to say that when I learned I’d have to continue treatments for another year, I put the necklace away. I can’t say why, really, but anger at the state of things likely had something to do with it.

Today I’m feeling better. I have hair again, though it looks as though it belongs to someone else — the salt and pepper and curls in no way resembling the (mostly) straight blonde sprigs I had last year. And no, my hairdresser wasn’t hiding my gray all this time! (My sister can’t get over the color when we FaceTime. Nobody in our family ever had this color, she says.)

This morning I pulled the necklace out again, fingering the silver jewels for the story each one tells. And I put it on. And took a selfie. Because that’s what you do when you are 63 years old and can’t visit with your mother on your birthday but want to show her how much you’ve changed. (She’s 92 and COVID confined at home, at least away from me right now.)

Anyway, looking at this new woman I saw something I hadn’t seen in so many months — something I thought cancer had taken from me forever.

Light. Sparkle. Twinkle. Blue. And yet, there it is. I hardly recognized myself.

(Well, today, I actually went into a store to pick up my lunch and noticed the mother of one of my son’s high school friends. Masked (she was as well) I spoke to her, but I don’t think she recognized me either!)

Tonight I (tried) to hold Audie, her squirrelly self no longer satisfied to sit in my arms. And it was grand. We are both so big now.

Tomorrow, very early, I’ll be back in the chemo chair for what will begin, once and for ALL, the countdown til I’m finally done — mid-November. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. And done.

I’ll be wearing the necklace again, armed, and charmed, to begin what promises to be my next good year.

Keeper of the Keys

I turn into the parking lot and park my car at the curb. 

‘What’s a phone number?” Tim asks. “And a last name?

Tim has been greeting me almost daily for the past few months, taking my keys and parking my car, while I join all the other souls in the waiting room. He wears a black scally cap and a perpetual smile. 

I remember the day I met him, way back in May, on my first day as a new cancer patient, unaware that the cancer center offered free valet parking for those of us in their care. 

“I’m new,” I remember saying as I stepped out of the car, feeling quite brave as I recall. “I can walk from the parking lot, really.” He took my keys anyway, smiling, happy in this job that keeps him at the front door in 100 degree heat, in tropical storm rains and crisp fall days. A nurse later told me that once I was well into treatment, walking to my car would become a chore. 

Well, after 18 weeks of treatment, here we are. 

Tim is among a team of people I didn’t know existed before early June but who have become particular players in the middle of my kidnapping. There’s Jean, the receptionist who checks me in at the door and knows my name now. Andra, who must know my birthday by heart — and who places heart and smile stickers on my arm band. Rose Marie, whose name I memorized by thinking of the Dick Van Dyke Show — she’s helped me juggle my schedule so I can have a small semblance of regular life. Marlene, one of the nurses who accesses my port each week (with a truly tender touch), and Colton and Kendra and Ana and Jana, nurses assigned to me who cheered me on when I came back to chemo after a two-week absence. Jamie, my nurse practitioner, high fives me when my counts are good and doesn’t judge while I cry and curse. You’ve read about Hope, before. 

I’ve been getting shots three days a week lately in addition to chemo — an unexpected regimen that keeps my bone marrow strong. Which also means I spend more time at the cancer center than I do anywhere else, other than home. Though I have not gotten to know any patients, these people who are in charge of my daily well being have become a little bit like family. They are pumping me with drugs and good will so I’ll outgrow my need for them, we all hope, in a matter of weeks. 

After that, I’ll have a whole new team caring for me in the next phase of this ‘ridding your body of cancer’ camp activity. Kind of like going from high ropes to low. Or from target practice to sailing (though I hear it won’t be smooth. Tim will still be there to greet me, but my nurses will have moved on to other patients. I’ll miss them.

When we discovered the cancer, I wondered what to tell my children, though I don’t remember what rehearsed it in my mind. I did tell them through my tears that we would fit this around our already busy summer and not the other way around. But the reality of cancer and its treatment is that in the mind of those treating you, there is no more important life event than your recovery. Not grandbabies being born or 91-year-old mothers who need hip surgery, not sisters who fall and break both feet at once, not husbands who find themselves scattered along the edges, waiting for signals. No grandsons you wish you could hold tight but can only visit by FaceTime. No Friday night suppers with friends. No church. Work, when you can do it, has to be from home. The big C breaks in front of the line on all you thought you had planned.

You must simply pull up to the curb and hand over your keys. 

I’m not sure what I expected that first day when I gave my keys to Tim. Like most things, I’ve learned that there is theory and then experience. I would lose my hair, they said. And I did, though in theory I had no idea what it would feel like staring at my bald head every morning. And I didn’t expect when I tried to use mascara on my eye lashes recently and there would be a day when I couldn’t find them. (My eyebrows are gone, too.)

I was so naive as to think I could fit cancer around my life and not the other way around. Missing out on the things that matter to me so much, I know, is a minor inconvenience — momentary realities that when viewed in the long game will seem like a blip. Hair grows back. Eyelashes, too, Google tells me. But the other thing I’m learning about cancer is that it is sometimes hard to see the end of that long game. Just when you look at your calendar and see “last day of chemo!” written (in pencil) and start thinking about who you’ll miss in the windowless room with the warm blankets and the comfortable chairs, the real keepers of the keys (the doctors) throw in another 9—9! — weeks, between chemo and surgery, surgery and radiation, and THE END. Weeks more until they will finally hand the keys back to you and you drive away. You hope forever.

Don’t misunderstand me. I want to be present for the long game, I do. To witness my grandson ride a bicycle and and cut himself shaving, to be present when the new grand baby walks and dances and drives away in her first car. It’s the space in between all that and right now that has gotten to me.

“I don’t remember what I was planning to over summer,” I told Andra, the receptionist, when I checked in for my shot a couple of weeks ago. We laughed, but it was only so I could keep from crying. I really don’t remember what I had planned, though “cancer” didn’t appear once on my calendar, even in pencil. 

What had I planned? Was it trips to New York to walk to school and read books and visit the park with my grandson Henry? Or hours of time with two-month old granddaughter Audie and not brisk snatches when I can hold her? I know those would have been on my calendar a lot had there been any room at all. 

I don’t mean to seem ungrateful. I know there is no more important work for me now than what I am doing — fighting cancer. Getting well. But I wish they would leave a little room on the cure calendar for LIFE. 

A memory: the wee hours of an early spring New York City morning less than two years ago, when I held tiny Henry in my arms and thought: There is no more important work for me to do in this world. I have missed similar moments with Audie, and I grieve that. And so much more. 

I keep telling my doctors that sometimes complete healing doesn’t come in a pill or a vial attached to tubes. Life and family and love heal, too. I have those things, surely, but at a distance that doesn’t feel like part of the cure.

My father, a doctor, believed that medicine wasn’t always the answer to what ails you. And though in this instance I know he’d tell me that this is what I have to do right now, he would also say that the distance between my reality and my hope will narrow soon enough. I just have to hang on a bit longer.

One day in the next few months, Tim will hand me back my keys, and I’ll drive off. Seeing him won’t be on the calendar anymore. I hope he won’t take it personally when I don’t look back. 

The Devil You Know: Chemo Camp, Part 3

The camp counselors in charge of my life right now kept telling me I’d be in for it when the Red Devil made its introduction. I’d read about the drugs they would pump into my body every two weeks, like clockwork, for two months. (The Red Devil is one of two). And even that first time when the nurse brought out the giant vials I thought, well now, they aren’t so red after all. Not blood red anyway, but a brighter pink than I expected. 

I don’t know what I was thinking. A lighter pink might mean a softer blow? Yes, I lost my hair, but I kept my pace that first couple of infusions, resting when my body said to, pushing forward when it felt like I could. I sat for those two hours crunching on cherry popsicles (which I hate) and talking to my sister and my friend AB about everything except all that redness flowing into my veins. 

I would not be outdone by this. I had bandanas! I had special chemo scarves! I’ve had what has felt like a sky filled with cumulus clouds full of witnesses praying for me! And one of my first “counselors” was Joy! 

But it didn’t take long to learn there is not much joy in the actual treatment for breast cancer. There is an overwhelming sense that a stranger has moved into your house, uninvited, and you have no way to evict. You must trust other strangers you’ve only just met to rid your home of this intruder. It may be a complex mission but it’s not complicated, you remind yourself. They do this every day, like the people you hire to do all sorts of things you aren’t personally trained to do yourself. Like roofers and electricians and carpenters and such. And though you  might be “one in eight” in the statistics, you are one among dozens they will see in a day’s time who might be getting some version of the cocktail they are giving, to shed you of this unwanted thing.

And though you might be one among almost 270,000 women who will be diagnosed just this year with invasive breast cancer — 15 percent of whom will have the triple negative kind like you — that’s not really a very large number in the scheme of things. But then, you are that one, in eight, that it’s happening to. 

So that’s what I scrape the skies about in the middle of the night — at 2 and 3 and 4 am, when I can’t sleep. I lie in the dark, praying — even when I don’t feel like it — for myself and my doctors nurses and all the people I know in this world who are hurting — way too many —  and the millions I don’t know but who are as well. Like the young nurse in scrubs in the waiting room at the cancer center last week — younger than my daughter — but already wearing a wig — herself one in eight among her own peer group.

Back in June, they signed me up for four doses of this Red Devil — Adriamycin — which a nurse told me just this week gets that name because it takes you to hell and back before it makes you well. Joy first called it that as she was plying me with popsicles. (Adriamycin can cause mouth sores, so they try to keep your mouth as cold as possible in the 10 minutes or so that it’s actually being pushed into your veins.) It’s so toxic, apparently, that there is a lifetime maximum on the number of doses patients can have. 

After the second dose, all that redness started seeping out, my skin erupting in ways I’d not seen since acne days, a painful and unsightly rash that looks like measles, creeping across my back and chest and arms. A constant dry cough took over at night, so neither I nor my husband could sleep. By day, fatigue set in that wasn’t curable by an afternoon nap.  (I’m on my third dose of Prednisone for the rash, and the number of pills I take morning and night for various things when I barely took more than vitamins three months ago is embarrassing.)

All this time, I’ve been trying to work, at a slower pace, surely, but work. When it’s all over, I want to add the moniker “cancer survivor” to my list, along with grandmother, writer, yeast roll maker, left-hander and dog nose kisser — way at the end, not the first thing to define me, but one small thing among many that make me into me.

Keeping it to just a small thing has proven harder to do this summer than I thought. Two months in, I’m weary. I long to have a Friday night out with friends or spend a weekend at the beach or visit my mother. But in recent days, I’m pinned to the corner chair in my sunroom trying to concentrate on a book because I have little energy for anything else. 

Which is why on Monday of this week, I was back at the cancer center, trying to get someone to hear my weariness, to help me out of it, if that was possible. To find some way to stop the cough and the sore throat and the fatigue so I could actually sleep for several hours in a row.

The young nurse sat across from me, handing me Kleenexes, as I listed my laments. If I could sleep, we agreed, the world would look a little brighter. 

“You’ve gotten through the worst part,” she said. The worst? But I have another 12-week stay at chemo camp before my mother can retrieve me. “A lot of people don’t have as much trouble with this next round,” she assured me.

Even though I am indeed a crybaby, I lied, telling her through my tears that I am not really like that. Except it wasn’t a full-one lie, just a tiny one, as I have kept my counsel, proudly so, throughout much of this ordeal. 

“It’s ok,” she said. “You have a safe place here.”

In that room with her I did feel safe. I changed the subject from myself to my son and his wife, whose first baby was due that day. I wanted to be well enough, I told her, to meet the newest member of our family without a thought of this damn disease that’s stolen my summer. I want to be there for my grandson, Henry, and for my daughter, who will have her own daughter in January. 

“Right now you have to take care of yourself,” she said to me. “But keep your eyes on the goal.” 

“They are my goal,” I said back.

Leave it up to me to make a cancer nurse cry. 

She has a six-month-old daughter — Grace — my daughter-in-law’s name. During our conversation, she thought about own mother and baby, and for a small moment imagined what it might feel like if her mother had cancer like me. 

As we both dried our tears, I searched for her name, but her ID was upside down.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Hope” she said. “It’s Hope.”

Of course. Of course.

And so, there was God was again, stepping into my eighth week of chemo, with Joy and Hope, and I learned about Grace. (I promise, I’m not making this up.)  Too serendipitous to be coincidental, at least in my thinking. 

I’m sleeping well now, and my cough is almost gone and I’m feeling so more like myself than I have in weeks. Next week I’ll start my new camp session — two new drugs that will do other crazy things to my body — but I do so feeling renewed, somewhat, and ready for the onslaught. 

And for today. It’s before dawn on August 10, and today is BIG. Sometime today, I hope to finally meet our newest family member, who has taken its own sweet time getting here. We don’t know yet if we’ll be greeting a baby boy or girl — yesterday I bought both blue and pink bows for my son’s mailbox — but it doesn’t matter. Born in the middle of what has felt like a stolen summer, this new baby offers it back. And no devil, red or not, can steal it away again.

Dear Chick

August 1, 2019

Dear Chick:

I remember the day, almost 30 years ago, when I wheeled my grocery cart around Food Lion in search on one last thing to fill my growing boy’s Easter basket. My offering of jelly beans and Peeps seemed rather paltry. I needed something large that would stand out.

And there you were, your black eyes staring at me, yellow arms outstretched, your orange beak almost shouting at me: Take me! Take me!

The boy didn’t yet have a favorite friend, but he had a yellow blanket he loved, and so I thought you’d match each other well. Off we headed to the register, Jelly Beans and your soft yellow torso in tow.

Morning came, and the kids saddled up to the kitchen table to  check out their loot. Your boy, who always left his candy in his basket for months until the magic beans melted together, plucked you up like he might a new puppy, and in this mother’s eye, rarely let you go. As he grew, though he didn’t take you to school (he tried), you sat with him on car trips, always, snuggled up with him each night for a story, hid in the caverns of that yellow blanket — it’s folds and you lit by a flashlight  — long after you both were supposed to be asleep.

Once, you must have hurt yourself somehow, because you and the boy came downstairs to show me your arms, now guarded by green Ninja Turtle Bandaids, carefully placed. I wish I could remember the conversation, but it’s very possible (and likely) that he had identical ones on his knees. 

In time, the boy wore the blanket to shreds, but you could still be seen holding fort beneath the windows left in the yellow threads by his nurturing hands. You were a team, the little yellow Chicky and the boy.

Until one day, while the boy was on a father/son trip with his dad, I found you abandoned on the bed. I couldn’t imagine he would have left you on purpose, but he was now in first or second grade, and maybe boys of that age didn’t want to be seen snuggling up to what others might see as a stuffed toy, in the middle of a cabin filled with boys and dads. That weekend I do remember, because the boy came down with a high fever and had to come home, and when we placed him on the bed, he searched until he found you, carefully tucking you under his arm, a place you had long-since molded to fit. And there you stayed for a really long time.

On another day, we visited the boy’s grandmother, who had a dog fond of chewing things. The boy had left you on his bed while he ate his breakfast, and upon return, found pieces of your face scattered about the room, your beak torn away. I thought he might be inconsolable, but he picked you up and loved you all the same. (A dog lover all his life, he did not, however, ever like that dog again.)

And so the boy grew up and moved away to college. The blanket was long gone, except for a tiny corner of silk and yarn and a single band of silk, salvaged by me because I couldn’t bear to throw it out. But you, you sat on his bed for the long-haul, beak-less but waiting for him whenever he came home. I know his love for you never wavered, though it may have waned in those years. Yet you were patient, somehow knowing that one day you might be needed again.

I thought about that, too, as I moved around his room, cleaning out, changing it from boy’s room to college kid’s and beyond. I sat you on his bookshelf, then on his chest, trying to find the perfect spot for you to stand sentry. I brought you out on his wedding day, wrapping what was left of the ribbon from his blanket around your neck to remind him that he might be grown, he would always be our boy.

This year, spring came, our man was about to become a Dad. I knew he needed something special to show him just how great a dad he would be, so I plucked you up, studying your whole body for the holes that might need stitching, the stuffing that might need replacing, and when I found more wounds than a box full of Ninja Turtle Band-aids could heal, I searched Esty for a shop that might care for you as I would. I found a woman who through her description promised care for you in her healing as much as our whole family did.

So Chicky, I bundled you up with a prayer and a picture of what you looked like at your most loved (but with your beak), and she set to work. You arrived safe at home a few weeks later, carefully wrapped in tissue paper, your new beak smiling as if you were chirping, Thank you! Thank you!

I found a box and put the picture of you and the boy and your Band-aids inside, wrapping you up with a special note. And on Father’s Day, I put you back in the boy’s arms, ready for your new work to begin.

Now you sit in the crib where in just a few short days, a new baby will be joining you. We don’t know if it’s a boy or girl yet, but I’m certain that as he or she grows, they will reach for you and will feel all the love poured into you by that boy rushing out to greet you, dear Chick. You. And you will pour all the love you’ve been holding in your heart right back out, and a new story will begin.

You have an important job, watching out for this new child growing up in our family. It is my hope that one day, the boy will find you under covers lit by a flashlight long after you and your new owner are supposed to be asleep, and he’ll crawl inside with the two of you, to see what the story is all about. 

With much love, Sooze

I feel bad about my hair

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” 

― Nora Ephron

My hair and I finally came to an understanding when I was in high school and I got it cut in a short shag. Until my senior year,  I’d had years of bad hair days, starting when I was 1 and had not a single hair on my head. 

Maybe I was cute when I was four (not a lot of pictures exist, so there is no telling), but when I was five, the daughter of my mother’s hairdresser — in beauty school at the time— practiced her perming skills on me. My otherwise short, tow-headed sleek ‘do’ was now a nest of curls more suitable for a bluebird than me.

When I did choose my own style — despite every reason to the contrary — I chose a long Patty Duke flipped-up style that drew my chin down to my chest and widened the gap in my teeth. This was the same year I got acne and breasts and everything about me seemed to grow so awkwardly that I wanted to keep myself hidden in my room until the ugly duckling gave way to the promised beautiful swan.

Only that part didn’t happen either. Oh I grew out of the Patty Duke and cut my hair shorter and managed to be if not a beautiful swan, then an ok looking duck.

But my hair.

My sister had long locks in high school (she was dubbed the pretty one and I the baby) and I longed for those. But some hair just isn’t gonna go there, and when mine tried, the ends split and dried out and frayed until when I finally got the nerve to ask that same daughter of the hairdresser — who by now was doing my hair regularly — to give me that short shag. My mother said then, and often, “You always look better with your hair on the short side.”

She’s raised me on bobby-pin curls done up Saturday nights for Sunday church, so I knew nothing of curlers. My sister must have had some instruction — maybe from Molly, her friend’s sister who was in beauty school —  because she rolled her hair with giant curlers, frosted it just so, and it came out looking beautiful, her hair draping across her shoulders like a soft blanket.

But I always felt bad about my hair.

That shag, though, took me through the 70s until Dorothy Hamill came along and showed us how to think about hair as geometry. Her hair molded to her every move, forming exact angles no matter how many “Hamill camels” she performed. This, somehow, was a language I thought my hair might understand. I wanted my hair to move like that. I still remember the day I sat bravely in a new Raleigh stylist’s chair at Crabtree and asked for it. From that day forward, my hair and I began a new relationship with each other, me and my Hamill cut— though I would later abandon it from time to time, depending on Princess Diana’s chosen style.

Then came the 80s, and talk about geometric hair! I got another perm and my new curls formed the perfect triangle. (Every time I see “Sleepless in Seattle” I’m reminded of this.) But now I had not only my head to care for but my daughter’s, so the hair, eventually, had to go. (Hers was so much prettier and thicker than mine.) So I cut mine short, where it stayed, and for the next 30 years, I felt good and bad about my hair, depending on my stylist. 

I found myself  been feeling bad again, after staying with the same stylist for too many years, and in the past year I left him. It was truly like a divorce, leaving the man who’d given me massages on my head and neck for at least 10 years, who’d styled my hair for my children’s weddings — letting go of that, and of our friendship, was hard. 

But from the first time in her chair, I knew Carla would make me feel better, if not great, about my hair again.

And she did, painting it the color my sister said I was born with. And using her own geometric skills to shape my locks so no matter how many weeks passed, the shape stayed the same and in place. I didn’t feel bad about my hair for the first time in a very long time.

And then, well, chemo happened. 

When I entered the Rex Cancer Center doors for my first appointment, a beautiful, tan and bald woman passed by me, her colorful skirts swaying as she walked. Her head, shiny as a bowling ball, glowed as she walked. No way could I sport that look. My head, though fully covered with hair at the time, was covered not in shine beneath my hair, but eczema. Not a good look on its surface, I could well imagine.

We met with our chemo educator a week later, and she looked at my hair and said: “You’ve got a really cute cut.” As in: too bad! And then went on the explain that if I kept my hair, I’d be the first in history. The drugs I’m taking target all the healthy, growing cells in my body as well as the bad, so the healthy, growing hair follicles are the first — at least the most noticeable — to go.

When Carla heard my diagnosis, we both cried. Then she trimmed my hair and said she’d be taking care of me for the next nine months, whether I had hair or not. 

A few days after my second treatment, my husband, who had never even met any of the stylists who’ve cared for my hair in almost 38 years of marriage, drove with me to Carla’s, sitting on her bench as she gave me a buzz cut. (She’d cut it in a perky pixie only a week before, to prepare me. At the same time, she styled my wig so well my husband couldn’t tell I was wearing it for 20 minutes.)

Carla took her time, sliding her shears through my head until I said stop. I’d not seen my head so bald in my life, and to say it was hard doesn’t cover it.

A friend who had breast cancer years ago had given me bandanas to hide my head, and I tied one in a cute bow and went to supper with friends. The next day, we packed up for a week at the beach, and all seemed right.

Until the next day, when in the shower, my hair came out in sheets. 

Long gone was the short shag and the Hamill and the wedge and all the other “dos” I’d sported in all these years of having “the best hair in the family,” so my mother said. But there it was.

My sister came over, wanting, she said, to see my wig. I warned her about what my balding head would look like as I changed from the bandana to the wig, and she held me and cried with me, hard. It was the first of many kindnesses she’d give me during that time.

I have never had long, luxurious locks, but they were my locks, no matter how often I’d felt bad about them. Ever the crybaby, I deserved a moment or two to grieve them. And my sister made space for that.

I hated for my children to see me this way. I prayed that my 15-month-old grandson Henry would know me by my eyes and not my hair. The next morning, I was up early, as I am every day during this kidnapping, and he greeted me with bright eyes and a smile. And all was right.

I’m getting used to it. My husband says he can see my eyes, brighter than they were before. I honestly don’t know why. Because I am tired, and sometime sad, though showering is quick and getting dressed for the day is far easier than it was a month ago. 

As for the Nora Ephron quote at the top of this story: I’m not the victim in my story, nor am I the heroine. (those are my docs, and God) I am, in fact, myself, and I just happened to have been taken aside from my life for a little while while my kidnappers — my care team — whom I am growing to love as hostages do, make me well. The victim, we all hope and pray, is actually the cancer, and that with each sometimes grueling treatment, it is fading, fading so that in a year’s time, it will be the dimmest memory for us all. Most especially for the tips of my hair.

+++

If you are facing a cancer diagnosis that promises hair loss, think about these tips:

• Take pictures of your hair as you love it.

• Shop for a wig while you still have hair, so those fitting you can see how you wear it.

• Wigs can be expensive and are not necessarily covered by insurance. Some cancer centers (like Rex) offer cancer patients a free wig, hat or hair covering. Take advantage of that.

• Have your own stylist trim it to suit you(make sure they are trained in cutting wigs, as of course the wig hair will not grow back)

• Your scalp will signal you when it’s time. It will become sensitive, even a bit painful, as your hair is about to go.

• Allow yourself to grieve. You’ve had your hair a long time.

• Don’t shield your family from the reality of what you’ll look like for the next almost year.

• Consider your beauty. It’s way more than hair deep.

Stroke, revisitied

Three years ago, while we were on our annual family beach trip, my husband suffered a stroke. He’s fine now, but as a public service on the anniversary week of that pivotal day, I’m reposting.

Here’s the original story, which ran in the News & Observer, in August, 2016.

The young family across the street from us gathered on the tiny front porch, then walked hand-in-hand — all eight of them — across the street to our driveway. My husband, who stood on the deck, walked down the steps to greet them. They were strangers to us, but two days before, the six children and their mother had gathered on the porch, witnesses to our family crisis. 

“When you had your heart attack,” the father said, shaking my husband’s hand, “I was at the store. My wife called saying y’all were looking for aspirin, but I couldn’t get here in time, so I told her to take the kids inside and start praying.”

Which they did that morning and every night at supper after that. They didn’t even know my husband’s name. 

Truth is that on that Tuesday morning in the middle of our vacation, my husband had a stroke. And a seizure. He is alive and well today to tell the story, though he doesn’t remember it. Doesn’t remember how we found him unresponsive on the deck of our family beach house — lips blue, face ghostly, body rigid — doesn’t remember my screaming, our daughter flagging help in the street, our son-in-law running toward where my sister stood three houses away, yelling for her to call 911.

The children witnessed my extended family running toward us, saw my husband wake up, thank God, flailing his arms at everyone around him, looking to take a punch. Which is so not him. What they didn’t see, thank God, too, were the blacks of his eyes — unseeing as we all gathered around him, tried to calm him, waited on EMTs. 

We would spend two days in New Hanover Regional Hospital as doctors tried to figure out what happened. Records show that he presented in the ER with an “altered mental state.” An MRI confirmed the stroke.

That he has no residual effects from any of it is nothing short of a miracle.

In times of crisis, look for the helpers, Mr. Rogers always said, and after the ambulance arrived, I moved away from my husband’s side, knowing I was not one of them. Around me my nephews poured cool water over his body. A doctor who happened to be driving by tried to calm him. A male nurse on vacation rubbed his shoulders. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. “Care for him,” I prayed, for there was no better thing I could do.

“Your husband exhibited the classic signs of a heat stroke,” says Dr. Robert Park, a partner with Wake Emergency Physicians, PA., a private practice which supplies emergency room staff to all seven Wake Med emergency rooms, in addition to several other hospitals in the area. “When I hear he is agitated, all limbs working well, a change in mental status, that tells me it’s a heat stroke.

Heat stroke. A rare occurrence that can be fatal, but something entirely preventable. The curious thing is that he also had a cerebrovascular accident (CVA), the medical term for stroke. (So heat stroke was actually off the table.)

I sometimes call my husband The Skipper. He’s on his seventh sailboat now, Fortune’s Fool V and most weekends in the past year have found him on the deck of the boat piddling with his love. 

On July 8, the heat index reached 104 in New Bern, where our boat is docked. And the Skipper forgot to hydrate well. (Forgot to tell me he was even going to the boat before heading to the beach.) The next day he developed a headache, and on the morning of July 12, he drove to the grocery store and purchased an over-the-counter sinus headache medication called Sine-Off. Within 30 minutes, the house shook like it would during a sonic boom and unbeknownst to us, he was down on the deck, closer to signing off from this life than I can even think about.

He had all the signs of dehydration, says Dr. Park: headache, thirst, elevated body temperature. The headache, though, was his only complaint. As far as we know, he showed no signs of stroke: slurred speech, numbness on one side of the body, drooping face. 

There is a grave difference between heat stroke and heat exhaustion, says Dr. Park, and heat stroke is much worse. Every summer, as temperatures hover near 100 degrees, he sees many cases of heat exhaustion but fewer heat strokes.

“Athletes, construction workers, people who spend ours at a time in direct sunlight and don’t drink enough water start cramping up,” he says. “They get dizzy, have a headache, cold sweats, may even pass out. That’s heat exhaustion.”

Heat stroke, he says, involves changes in mental status, and other organs — like kidneys — can be affected. If untreated, it can cause death. It’s rare, Park says, for someone to have a heat stroke and a CVA at the same time.

There are so many miracles in what happened — minutes later, and we’d have been gone from the house and he would have been on his morning walk. Seconds later, he would have fallen down the stairs. And so many lessons. We’ve learned about the app on our phones where we can store our medical history. We’re reminded that we have subscribed to a service that keeps our medical power of attorney and HIPPA permissions at hand for doctors to access easily should either of us be incapacitated. (In the midst of the trauma I had forgotten about the card I keep in my wallet.) 

Our children have learned that we are not going to be here forever. A scary but important lesson to learn. 

We are still seeking answers, and while we wait for appointments, The Skipper has found a new appreciation for water. And honestly, I have a new appreciation for the Skipper. I’m grateful for the helpers and for children who spend a hot summer morning praying for a man they didn’t know. 

+++

In the months after the stroke, my husband went through a series of tests at home that determined he did indeed have a blood clot that broke away and made its way to his brain. Regardless of the cause, which was a minute hole in his heart, strokes and heat strokes are life-threatening conditions, and emergency care should be sought immediately. 

Campfires Burning, Part I

Anyone who knows me well at all has heard my camp story. It’s legend in my family, and as we head into our annual beach week, it’s bound to come up. How my parents sent me to a two-week stint at an Episcopal Church camp on the Pamlico River where my sister had gone and loved it. And how I didn’t stay. We sit around the kitchen table and laugh about how the counselors all tried to entertain me with sailing lessons and camp fires and songs and whatnot, but I was having nothing of it. All I wanted was to go home and sit at the feet of my mother.

Since it’s my story to tell, I’ll tell what I remember. And it’s a lot. I was excited about going, spending what felt like weeks packing my steamer trunk with all I needed for that whole two weeks — short sets and new Keds and books and my Bible. Towels and clean white underwear and white socks. Crisp white notepaper and stamps for writing home. Some cash money for something called Canteen. Sheets and a blanket that smelled just like my mother’s linen closet.

When the day came, I was ready, and my mother drove me, with a friend, I think, the two or so hours to the river. The counselors took me to my assigned cabin, and I dragged my trunk up the steps and into a room filled with bunks. First issue: I had the top bunk. Second issue: No private bathroom stalls, but a room filled with showers with flimsy curtains and girls everywhere. It was almost as if I was late getting there. Then we all donned our bathing suits and headed to the river for the swim test. I think I passed, because they let me in the murky water the next day.

I tried not to cry that first night, up in the air as I was with the crickets hiding in the rafters, but it was hard. I was quiet, at least I hoped. The next day, we got to the work of riverside camp life — swimming and learning to sail a Sunfish, meeting each other, taking a group picture by the chapel. I have it somewhere. I felt like I met everybody in camp that day, boys and girls, even enough to pick out which boys I thought were cute! At the time, they say, I had the memory of an elephant, and I recall some of them still. (Yes later, one of my three-day crushes joined my church. I remembered him, but he did NOT remember me. Big surprise!)

It seemed pretty fun, but I was wary, having never spent time away from home except at my grandparents house. Back then, I’d stand in front of my mother’s wedding portrait and wail. But I was about to go into the fourth grade, and I was a big girl.

But at supper after my first full day of camp, they served me milk.

I have hated milk since I was a baby, and my mother used to add chocolate or sugar and vanilla just to get me to drink a whole glass at supper. But I gagged at the thought of drinking a carton of plain milk.

Chocolate please? None here, they said.

What about water?

Nope. Milk it is or nothing.

So I began to cry. And what these kind people had no idea about was that when I started, there was just no way to stop it, as the Broadway song goes. So I cried and cried. And cried some more.

The next day, the camp assigned me my own counselor, a cute young college kid who took me sailing and tried to talk me out of my misery. (Many years later, I would sit in front of his sister at church. All Eastern NC roads lead to other Eastern NC roads, but I digress.)

But even on a bright day with the wind in my face, there was nothing he could do. By afternoon, they let me call my mother, just to speak, but I pleaded for her, screaming, to come and get me.

On the third day she finally relented, and I waited on the steps of my cabin, my trunk packed, until the station wagon pulled up, my sister riding shotgun.

And this is where the legend really begins.

We walked around camp, and I showed her everything I’d done in the past three days. I held on to her, afraid she would sneak away from me, until I heard the words: Ok, go in the cabin and get your trunk.

Joy! Relief! I was going home! Forged by this news and super human strength, I dragged the trunk out onto the sandy soil, only to see my mother’s station wagon driving out of the camp gates in the flurry of dust. I ran behind her, sobbing, stop! STOP!!!! And just before she reached the arched entryway, her brake lights flickered.

I can’t imagine what went through her mind as she set her foot on the brakes, or the conversation in the car, or when she saw me run into the cabin. Or in my sister’s, as she witnessed the three-point turnaround to flee — though I would learn later that she begged to take my place. (Here with me a few days ago, she still can’t believe our mother made the decision to leave me.)

I don’t want to cast my mother as cruel here. She is not, and she was not then. I think she was trying to break me of my dependence on her, trying to make me stronger, as she had tried so many times in my short, almost 10-year-old life.

She drove me home that day saying I’d be grounded for the full two weeks I would have spent at camp, and I was ecstatic! I never returned to camp until I took my own second grader to a camp all the way across the state, and I cried the entire way home.

I’ve thought about my camp story a lot in the past few weeks, as I have begun a new kind of camp, one where there is no going home, no matter how much I wish my mother could rescue me. This time, she leaves me standing in the middle of that swirling cloud of dust and sand and her taillights never flicker.

And I’m the one who turns around and heads into the cabin and opens the trunk to see what she has hidden there for me.

Just after Mother’s Day I was diagnosed with breast cancer. In the weeks since, I’ve heard it called a journey, but it feels more like a kidnapping, so I’ll stick with that as I move through it. A journey to me is something you choose, like a pilgrimage or a river cruise and a trip to the Grand Canyon, something vast and inspiring, and one you hope will change you. Not that this kidnapping won’t change me — it already has — and though it’s come with lots of colorful brochures, it still feels a bit like I’m stuck on the top bunk in a place I really, really don’t want to be.

But in these weeks, I’ve found that my cabin is full of amazing women who didn’t want to be there, either. But they navigated the murky waters from that top bunk where newbies like me land, to the door where they have welcomed me, heavy-laden trunk and all.

So Chemo Camp has begun, and for the next few months I’m stuck here as the Red Devil, as they all it, seeps into my core and does its work, trying to kill what’s in me without actually killing me. So far, my days have been spent meeting some beautiful faces — almost all of them women — in my church, in my neighborhood, on my care team, in the hospital — and this time, my camp days seem almost bearable. I’ll tell you about them in later posts, as I this kidnapping drama continues.

I realize I’m mixing my metaphors here. Camp and kidnapping are not at all the same thing — for most people. But I’m finding out lately that I am not most people, at least in the kind of cancer I have (two kinds — Triple Negative and invasive ductal, in the same breast. UPDATE: 3!) Typical me, that.

But I promise not to be unique in the way I navigate it. When I first began sharing with friends, I wrote that there was no way through it except through it. A few weeks later, a friend sent me a book of daily meditations, and there it was in Psalm 21: “‘Lift up your eyes it the hills’ and go forward. There is no other way.”

I won’t be writing only about my cancer on this new blog. That’s not fun! But I will be sharing the gifts that come an almost daily basis. One friend, diagnosed last year and not yet 40 — just as she was about to give birth to her fourth child — wrote to me that she wished people would treat each other all the time like they do when they hear the word cancer. (She is cancer free after a year, with a beautiful healthy year-old baby boy!)

She is right. It’s been like having a birthday, almost every day for the past two months. Cards come, presents, flowers from gardens, food and visits. I couldn’t have told you the last time a friend stopped by for a real visit, until this happened to me. It’s been wonderful to feel so loved, and it’s humbling. To know that so many are thinking of me and praying for my healing is beyond measure. And I’m learning how to respond when I hear — and I will — that someone else around me has been kidnapped as well.

So I thank my mother, both for taking me home that day, but instilling in me that some things you just have to get through. You have the tools, and you will help others as you use them. She has done a lot of that in her life, and knowing that her youngest child has to go through this might be the hardest for her yet.

But I am not alone. I have my family, my faith and my cabin mates. And I have my trunk. And I know my mother packed it well.

+++

ps: Years after Camp I was on a book tour for Nags Headers, signing books in Elizabeth City, NC, when a woman asked me to sign a book for a child whose last name was Spence. “I knew a Penny Spence from here years ago at camp,” I said. From way down the line I heard a voice: “I’m Penny Spence.” She didn’t remember me, but I did her. I have a picture of her by the door of our cabin.

Susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author Susan Byrum Rountree. It is copyright protected and may not be used without permission of the author.

keep the sparkle

note: i know, i know... i'm terrible at keeping this thing up. but i finally found a story yesterday when i wasn't event looking. so there.

i called my mother yesterday. it was her wedding anniversary, the third one since my father died, and i'd forgotten to send her a card or a flower. we get busy in our lives, i know, and as i thought about the note or the flower, i realized that the one thing she wanted i couldn't give her. my voice would have to do.

how are you? i asked.

'tired,' she said.

from what?

'i washed the windows today,' she said.

windows?

my mother is 88 years old. she lives in a beautiful home filled with windows that let the sun in, in the morning, where the moon casts a soft glow over the living room rug at night. and she does not like a dingy window — never has. 

'

i thought i'd start with the front bedroom window and just go along, one or two at a time, she told me. 'but you know me.'

don't i. i have a lifetime of knowing  the woman who would remake my bed if it didn't suit her, whose linen closet i used to stand and admire for its geometric organization, the same woman who scoured the whole house spring and fall so when we came home from school you could

feel

the sparkle. 

18 windows, she said. and she just kept going along until she had cleaned practically every window in the house, almost by accident. (her sunroom is literally filled with windows. to be fair, one window is safely out of reach.)

18. 

on a recent visit to her house i scanned her fridge for the latest comic, since there has been one there since my childhood. tacked close to one featuring a character not being able to hear was an article suggesting that a clean house for the elderly has a direct correlation to their mental and physical stability. as if she needed proof that all her years of home keeping was finally worth the work. 

she used to say she never needed to exercise because she vacuumed every day and that was plenty. and it was.

my mother's house is ever ready for company: flowers on the kitchen table, beds made up with soft sheets, pillows piled high and towels hung, waiting. even my son says it's the most comfortable house he's ever slept in. i don't know about you, but i will hope my imagined grandchildren will feel the same about mine.

do you know what day it is? i asked her before hanging up.

'yes,' she said. 'keeping the windows kept my mind busy.'

busy with memory, surely, of the years she and my father sparkled— and there were almost 61 of those.

my mother no doubt slept hard last night, as we like to say where i come from,  climbing between her own soft sheets, knowing her hands had touched every pane in that house and left it gleaming.

a lot has happened since my father has been gone. grandchildren married. great-grandchildren born and too many hoped for lost. we could have used his wisdom in the time since, which at times seem like years and others like just days. i'm sure it feels like that in every loss.

but my mother, as always, provides perspective. there still is a bit of sparkle left, even in my father's absence. for one full day she polished her windows to a spit shine, no doubt remembering as she washed each pane, the life she spent with my father, remembering their sparkle in the sheen.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

the kind and unexpected thing

it's the day after Valentine's Day. my husband and i have been bonding for the past five days but not as valentines. on thursday he had shoulder surgery... not the awful kind that takes weeks to recover from, but traumatic enough that he has been unable to drive or lift or pick up things or put his own clothes on at first.

in all these years of marriage, he's only been really ill two or three times, so he is not used to me taking care of him. i'm not used to it, either, but it's just part of what we do for each other, part of the bargain we made almost 35 years ago, though he at times in the past few days has seemed surprised when i have willingly cut up his meat if needed or helped him slip on his socks.

i remember years ago when he contracted pneumonia and could hardly get out of bed, i brought up some canned chicken and rice soup one day for lunch, and he was overwhelmed at what felt to him like enormous generosity. and that was years before i began making soup from scratch! had i been that unkind to him that it was a new experience when i was not?

the day after the surgery he told a friend i was a saint. drugs talking, surely, and a couple of days later i'd lost my sainthood, as was expected.

i've been thinking about this a lot today, about how people care for those they love in all sorts of circumstances. three years ago it was my mother's turn, when after almost 63 years of marriage, my father contracted pneumonia himself and spent the better part of three months in the hospital. Eighty-four at the time, my mother drove to see him 45 miles (one way) almost every day, and as each day passed, she grew to be more beautiful. i know he saw it, too. 

(my husband can't say that about me, because i didn't even shower today til close to suppertime — well, to be fair, neither did he.)

my mother never balked at caring for my dad, giving up her days (but not her hair appointment) to make sure he was getting good care.(maybe it was because of all the times he cared for her through broken hips and other bones, though i doubt that played a role.) he barely talked, yet he knew she was there and doing more than he ever expected of her, to the point that she ended up in the hospital herself. it never crossed her mind that she might ought to stay at home.

i suppose on ordinary days, i have stopped going out of my way to do kind and unexpected things for my husband, though somehow i expect him to do unexpected things for me. i know there have been too many days when i stand at the stove cooking supper that i think: maybe this will be the day that he does so and so for me, when in fact, his just walking in the door and kissing me hello should really be miracle enough. kind and unexpected enough. but i have not been appreciative, i know.

maybe that's why he has been so surprised at my attempt at care, that finally, in his hour of need, i have done that kind and unexpected thing. i am embarrassed, if this is the truth. i thought i had been more attentive to him all these years.

why is that, when you're married so long that you forget that the small, personal gesture is truly important? in the beginning of a marriage, it's all we can do not to do kind and unexpected things, to work at what we hope will be a lifelong love. But it's the lifelong part of it that when you're young, you don't quite understand. at least i didn't. it includes days when you don't like each other, and when you have to do small but important things for someone when you'd rather not.

love creates such tangled hearts.

in these few days when my husband has been a bit immobile, we did get out for a short trip to a dessert store so we could test a few cake samples for the rehearsal dinner 

(i)

 we 

are planning for our son. my husband is the dessert fan in our family, so i made him go. 

on the way home, knowing we might be stuck with ice or snow, we stopped off at the grocery store so i could grab some orange juice. 

i go to the grocery store pretty much every day, which is neither efficient nor particularly enjoyable, but it's i what do. i made him stay in the car because he  is rarely patient enough to follow me through the aisle searching for things i don't need.

on the way out, i recognized an elderly couple i've seen before. the wife shuffles, often unaware it appears of her surroundings, yet her husband takes her down each aisle as if she will be the one to choose Folgers over 8'oclock, decaf or regular.

on this day, they had not made it inside as I came out with my orange juice (and oranges and green onions). his back was facing the store, and he was pulling her along.

in an instant, another shopper and i saw her ill-fitting jeans fall to the ground, bearing her tiny wrinkled bottom to the world. we stopped, trying to help her husband pull her pants up, but it was a struggle. the young woman shrugged, assuming i had the situation at hand, though the truth was far from that.

as a diversion, i'm sure, i found myself thinking of my grandmother — though this couple was about the same age as my mother — and made an attempt to save her dignity.

she wore no belt, and her frail body would not, without one, keep the pants up. so her husband and i held her jeans as we moved her gingerly into the store, seating her on one of the motorized carts they keep for handicapped shoppers. naively, i thought she might stay.

'i didn't know she wasn't wearing a belt,' her husband said. 'she has Alzheimers,' looking at me as if i didn't know. 

though i offered to shop for him while he waited, all he wanted was a rope to tie the loops of her jeans together so he could pull her along while he did the shopping. a clerk found one, and together we threaded the rope through the loops, she batting at my hands as i tied the loop into a knot so he could get on with his shopping.

'she's doing pretty good,' he said, introducing himself as Ralph. 

'and how are 

you

 doing?' i asked, almost in tears.

'the best i can,' he said. 

'family nearby?'  

'yes, but always gone.'

always gone. like me? i hadn't seen my own mother in about six weeks.

i imagined this man at 58, my age, and how their love story had evolved into this — her sitting in the handicapped cart with mittens on the wrong fingers, her jeans stained with her own excrement, unwilling to accept help from anyone but her Ralph.

but he insisted i not stay. so i didn't.

at home, my husband and i made a pact that we would never allow ourselves to be this way with each other. maybe they could not afford help he said, which made me want to search for every Ralph in my extended neighborhood until i found them, so i could give them enough money to change things for them. but how? 

later, when i couldn't sleep, i imagined what other kind and unexpected thing Ralph might be doing for his wife in the middle of that sad night. and i could feel how alone he must be, no matter how he loves her.

it's likely that this small woman did a lot of kind and unexpected things for Ralph as he made his career. she raised their children, and when they were the age of my husband and me, maybe he had some kind of surgery, and she took care of him, made him soup and helped him put on his clothes, and he is doing the same thing, in kind, and in love, still, and even though, he really, really, needs someone to help him.

+++

my husband is much better, though an ice storm has kept us homebound for five days, and so today we escaped to our corners and set to work. 

later i made supper. he cleaned up. now he sweeps the kitchen floor, which for years has been his favorite thing to do when the evening ends.

expected. yes. but a kind thing that does not go unnoticed on this night.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Like kudzu, come to think of it

sometimes the words i throw out into the world scatter and create new stories, all by themselves. sort of like children, i suspect. you raise a story up from that first uncertain word until it blooms into 700 or even thousands of words and then you nudge it out, into its own journey.

such is a story i published two weeks ago now

, about the farm i share with my siblings — though none of us could wield a plow if we had to. shortly after the story ran, the emails began, mostly from people who hail from Sunbury, the little village near where the farm sits. a cousin i had never met contacted me, as did strangers with my own last name, sharing their own memories of the place i had written about. as my quiet little story picked up steam, i lured in a couple of new blog followers, and six on twitter. #wow! 

still more strangers shared it on Facebook, on their own pages and even on a page dedicated to memories of Gates County. as the days passed, i responded to the emails, marveling at how connected people felt because of my few words about, well, connecting.

of course the email chain faded, as happens, and i set my sights on work and other things, wondering what in the world i'd write next.

a couple of days ago, a new email landed in my inbox, a delightful tome from a woman on the west coast whose Tar Heel sister had sent her my column. her own grandparents lived near our family farm, and she recalled her father's home:

"...a real crossroads with their house, an uncle's and across the street the country store and owner's house where my warts were wished off one Sunday afternoon."

her own family farm stands not far from ours but it is out of the family now. i wrote back, saying that we were practically neighbors, to which she responded: probably 14th cousins, several times removed. 

this is such a part of what i love about writing: readers who take the time to tell you how much your little story means to them. these comments are no small thing to me. 

we continued to email each other, unknowingly setting into motion a "whole 'nother story," as they say where i come from. 

as i learned more about her, we discovered link upon link to each other: our grandfathers were contemporaries. she grew up on one end of Halifax County and i on the other. she gave her sister my book a few years ago. she loves Nags Head as much as i do, and the beach cottage her family rented when she was a child? owned by her "Cousin Joe Byrum," who was my grandfather's brother and married to her grandfather's first cousin. can you follow? i might need to diagram it.

(wouldn't that make her a cousin to me by marriage? maybe 14th, several times removed?)

no people. you can't make this stuff up. 

photo copyright Watson Brown. Used with permission.

this morning, i found myself lured back to my Sunbury connections on Facebook, when i stumbled upon a photograph of our farm, taken last year by

Watson Brown

, the exceptional photographer of weathered old buildings and the beautiful landscape of eastern North Carolina. Another accidental connection.

I don't know Watson personally, but we have many mutual friends, and i've followed his work for the past couple of years, drawn to his images of home. there is a great beauty in the art he finds among the ruins. 

His calling is to document the fading history that connects all of us who call 'God's Country' home. he travels the back roads and dirt paths in search of life as it was once lived out.

browsing through his work, i image the voice of an aproned mother calling her kids across the field to home, the scrape of a father's boots on the back porch on his way in from a long day of fielding, the sounds and smells of something fried drifting out of the kitchen window toward the noses of those children, who turn and run, hurdling the rows of cotton, so as not miss a morsel of a summer supper.

my new friend on the West Coast and i hope to meet next time she comes this way. i have no doubt we'll find even more connections that link our families. in fact, i have a second cousin i'd like her to meet. his grandmother was her grandfather's cousin, Irma, so they are actually related. maybe we will share our family trees and see the many ways they do connect. 

if i've learned one thing in all my years of writing, it's that a story can take root and grow right where you sow it, standing tall and strong against the sunlight like a weathered old oak. but sometimes a story lifts itself up and spreads like kudzu all over the landscape, one thread leading to another until it's hard to tell if there is any beginning or end.

this is a story like that, i think, and i hope it will keep on growing. 

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

summer sentence 2015

i sit, staring into the eyes of

my five-week-old great niece Lucy, 

the two of us bound together

by blood

but not yet by story;

the only missive

we share is 

our 

week together

saying 'good morning'

and touching noses,

me bouncing her soft body

when she cries,

me trying to soothe, 

her trying to discover 

her new world;

and on this morning, 

our last together, 

she turns the corner 

of her mouth, just so 

into a soft, 

baby smile

and i know 

she is thinking

about the times

her mother fed her, or

my mother rocked her

or when her sister 

(2, plus some)

held her and 

kissed her face, 

of the times her uncles

took her into their arms 

and 

showed her 

their world 

at that moment,

bound by 

beach and sound and sky;

or of when her grandfather 

danced with her

in afternoon 

delight for both;

and as i look into her

family-blue eyes and

marvel at our same chins,

i wish she could remember

what i have seen of this week —

my sister holding and bouncing

her new granddaughter,

my brother walking into the

surf with his grandson, 

now 8, who

asked my nephew

about girls and French kisses,

and 

Monopolized our evenings;

our beach party dance-off

with no misunderstanding

from our

part-time partytime

brother-in-law;

how her mother ate fresh peaches

and slept when she could

(and cried a little),

not able to stick her toes 

in the sand often enough

like her namesake, 

my grandmother

always liked to do;

how we ate shrimp 

and how we watched

the sun set

over the blue waters

of the inter-coastal 

waterway,

my husband wishing

he was out there, skimming

the smooth surface,

under sail,

or my son

casting chicken necks 

tied to string

in search of

crabs for his

Maryland love;

or how my daughter

lifting the paddleball

into the air 

or tossing it

into the ocean 

with her husband,

who sweated

into soccer heaven

with the 8-year-old, 

all of them 

no longer afraid 

of the sharks 

they had read about 

in the news;

how i sat with my

nephews for the 

first time in a year, 

learning about jobs

and life

as they see it,

shared an early-morning coffee

with the newest girlfriend, 

her eyes crisp as

the ocean water 

we were about to leave;

and how after supper,

on our last night,

my mother sat

at the 

kitchen table

with her grands,

holding stories

in her lap as

softly as she did her

great-grandbabies,

hoping to 

pass 

her own history on.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

it's all about the Pea

at twilight, on the last friday in december 1983, my husband and i got the first good look at our new baby girl. we had waited for what felt like a month of fridays... after her delivery, they'd whisked her off for prodding and poking, putting me in a semi-private room with a woman who reportedly (her words) had her womb tied up. where we waited, wondering if something was wrong.

at last the wheeled our tiny new person into the room with us in her bassinet, circling us with a curtain, while the womb lady on the other side dialed the number over and over of some invisible man who would never materialize.

in those first moments, we cried, touching her fingers, running our hands on her legs and arms and head, taking a good look at this baby of ours. a baby! all toes and fingers and perfect eyes, a baby who searched our own eyes for what her future might mean.

who knew, because we could hardly see beyond that moment. 

i'm not sure what we knew in that twilight time except we were glad to be through the worst part. or what we thought was the worst part and the best part— her coming into the world. 

i remember the short days in the hospital as a bit of a Camelot. i can still feel the warmth of the water on my body after my first shower, as i pulled on the flannel gown i'd worn on my honeymoon two years before (and before you say flannel?! it was October in the mountains, and satin on the outside.)

i still can feel that first tug as i tried to feed her. can remember just looking at my husband and exploding with love for what we had done together.

i felt beautiful, for the first time probably ever in my life, as i, with God's help (and a bit from my husband) had created this great beauty of a child. how could that be?

on a crisp, deep winter day, we took her home, the dog kissing her on the face upon greeting. and with a lot of help from our mothers, we set about parenting. in the coming weeks, we would diaper her and argue over her, sleep (or try to) with her on our chests, try to keep her from crying during supper, move with her to a new city where she finally stopped.

uptown girl was a favorite on the radio in those years, and it would prove to be a theme song for this little girl of ours. when she was tiny, i'd dress her up in her best and head into downtown Atlanta to visit her dad for lunch, and her eyes caught the skyscrapers, and i wondered what she was thinking. (now that she has ended up UPTOWN i know.)

i've spent most of the years since trying to grow into being her mother, and while i have not been terribly bad at it, there are times i wish i could forget. 

times when i screamed at her at things there were clearly my fault, times i cried privately (and sometimes not so privately) over her own heartbreak — friends who left her out of things, when she didn't make the grade, a boyfriend or two who weren't worthy of her attentions. times when i felt she failed me, but were really failures of my own in parenting.

tonight she wanders around her chosen city, getting a massage — as her husband lays sick with a virus they both contracted over Christmas — not to be stopped from her small celebration. 

and i long to be with her. her birthday was a game-changer for me — one of those days in life when the earth shakes on its axis and you're never the same, the day i stopped being (totally) selfish because someone needed me for the first time in my life. and i will continually mark it. 

we FaceTimed from the office, with surprise visits from her father and my friends, all of us wishing her a happy day as she sets out for ginger ale and crackers... ordinary pursuits on a day that will never be ordinary for me.

happy birthday Pea. 

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

it's a wrap

the lady walked up to the giftwrap station at Pittman's, the small department store where i was spending the better part of Christmas vacation wrapping presents, and handed me her bag. i peeked inside, finding a dozen or so pairs of tighty-whities and another dozen pairs of white athletic socks.(the trims were different colors as i recall.)

i know i blushed. was she the mother of a boy from my class? lord i hoped not. underwear was not a discussable item in my house in the 1970s — well not now either, come to think of it. (politics, yes, as long as you voted for Nixon), but not 

underwear, and certainly not tight-whities!

in my family, underwear was a utility item, bought on a summer saturday when the last pair had holes in it. Christmas was for surprises and wants, not for needs.

but back to the job at hand.

as the lady stood by me, i pulled out a two large boxes from the pile and some tissue, planning to place the whities in one and the socks in another. i probably huffed a few times, too, though i don't recall that. i mean, couldn't she have bought them cargo pants or a jean jacket, or brogans, something cool? (all of these things were available at Pittman's.)

wrap 'em separately,  she said. 

really? all of them? i glanced at my watch, calculating the time it would take me to wrap two dozen small boxes before closing, which in my memory was only minutes away. my church youth group was putting on "The Homecoming" that night, and i'd have to head home, grab a bite and dress for my role (my stage debut!) as Mary Ellen Walton. there was not time in my life for 24 boxes of briefs and socks, wrapped and bowed. 

but.

i had a job to do, and Edna Earle, (yes, really, that was her name) — Pittman's ever-present clerk, hovered to make sure i was efficient.

once i got over my embarrassment, i set to work, trying not to imagine who'd be opening these particular packages on Christmas morning.

+++

it was a rite of passage for the girls in my town to pay their dues behind the wrapping station at Pittman's. my sister, Pamula, had loved the work, and even now when she gives me a package i can see the results of her hours logged there as a teen. sides tight, ends as perfect as my mother's hospital corners. bow pert and beautiful.

not so much me. that exercise in learning how to estimate how much paper i needed (no wasting, please), or how to rip it away from the giant roll leaving a perfect edge, to fold the corners exact and flat and keep the tape straight, well, this was lost on me.

thank goodness i found another career.

+++

in a week, it will all be over, but there is wrapping yet to do. these days i don't have anyplace else to go except to sleep once the wrapping is done, yet i avoid it. 

though i try to fold exact corners and tie a fancy ribbon, my packages look like they were wrapped by that anxious teenager, weary of the job of wrapping dozens of tighty-whities for some unknown stranger. (thank heavens for small favors.)

but with the FAM coming in on Sunday, i could avoid no more, so i set up my wrapping station on the kitchen island, turned the bose to my Pandora Christmas and set to work. 

though at first the memory of Pittman's and all those socks yet to wrap hovered for a little bit, something else came through my thoughts that i hadn't expected. our first Christmas in our small house in Atlanta, and my husband had found a jazz station on the radio, playing Christmas music like i'd never heard before. (we weren't all about that jazz where i came from. mitch miller, sure, or even perry como, but this? lyrical, but without the lyrics. it was fine.)

soon i was lost in the memory ofpre-Christmas 1984, seeing my (much, much thinner) self wrapping the set of blocks my daughter would get for her first Christmas, tying a bow at the neck of the wooden rocking horse (SO impractical for a baby of one, but what the who?) and wrapping the few but carefully chosen gifts for my family, all in plain brown paper and plaid ribbon. (you can take the girl out of the country, and all that, but...)

i remember that night feeling so full of love for my small family, excited to celebrate the best gift we'd received already that year — the baby who slept just down the hall.

+++

music, of course, is the bridge to memory. 

as Christmases passed, i bought cassette tapes, then CDs of many of my jazz flavor favorites, practically wearing them out from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve in the car and at home. among the melodies is a string version of

"Of the Father's Love Begotten,"

that brings me to tears every time i hear it.

tonight i think about all that's wrapped up in this particular Christmas memory, grateful 

for my not so young family, 

for gifted musicians, and for those years long ago when i worked at a job that taught me about serving others even when i didn't feel like it — and wasn't particularly good at it.

and, by the way, though my mother is probably cringing as she reads this, we are boxer people. 

no 

tighty-whities here, though i do wrap them separately from the socks.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

day 4 — turkey talk

years ago, when my husband and i were dating, both of us reporters for the daily newspaper in Augusta, Ga., we rarely ventured out for lunch alone. when i didn't bring my lunch (practically penniless, i was on a strict budget), a group of us reporters would find some dive place to grab a quick bite.

my then boyfriend wanted to keep our relationship a secret from the mob of news hounds in our presence, so we pretended to not really know each other all that well on these outings. then he would call me on the phone and talk to me, though our desks were barely 20 feet apart.

one favorite lunch place was a small sandwich shop tucked around the corner from the newsroom, and in my memory, we ate there fairly often, when i could afford a lunch out. my favorite thing on the menu was a turkey sandwich with cheese and a dollop of cranberry sauce (the canned, jelled kind my mother always served at Thanksgiving), with cheese and sprouts.

i'd never eaten such a sandwich. the turkey sandwich mama always made for us was but delectable: Wonder Bread, turkey slices, iceberg, sweet pickles (not bread and butter, but the homemade kind) and Duke's. simple. perfect. as i recall, on that reporter's first visit to meet my family, my mother made that sandwich for us to share on the ride back to Augusta from The Neck. (for the un-inititated, that's the nickname of my hometown.)

but i became a city girl, ready to take on new tastes, and this new way to create a turkey sandwich caught my attention. as had the rakish reporter who sometimes shared the table with me. and this sandwich would become a piece of our history as a couple... just like how i remember him giving me my engagement ring over a Wendy's single, no cheese. (and that is the truth.)

in the years since, i've made that turkey sandwich off and on, learning that my husband of 33 years really never liked the sprouts part but he ate it anyway. (he probably never knew that Wendys was not my fav of burgers, but i digress.

 i've been feeling a bit disconnected from that reporter of late, and i miss him. we come and go, sharing too often the spare conversational meal as we head out to work or wherever, our minds set on the next thing and the next, rather than on each other. it feels like after all this time, each other does not matter as much as it should, and this saddens me.

a young woman i work with who recently had her first baby is outright effusive about the love she has for her little nugget and the husband who helped make her. was i ever that effusive about that reporter i once knew? surely i must have felt that way, and  in recent days, i have been mining my memory to find that feeling again.

last night i made that old sandwich, lathering on the Dukes, changing out the spouts for shredded iceberg, piling on the turkey and the cranberry sauce, this time not the canned kind. just to see if he would remember.

i'm not sure he did, but he did say that this was always the best sandwich, which is a start.

what is it that reconnects a couple who have been have together so long that they've forgotten why they came together in the first place?  i have been thinking about this a lot.

i hope it can begin with a simple sandwich and go from there.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

land, ho!

my father grew up in a country crossroad that when i was a child seemed like the prettiest little place on earth. he spent his first 17 years growing tall and fishing in wooded ponds, later working in the shop where his father sold Fords. when Daddy died, my brother told a story i had never heard. that when Daddy was working in the shop, my grandfather asked him to change the oil on a car, which he dutifully did. only he forgot to put new oil back into the car he was working on. so instead of inheriting the family business, my grandfather decided the boy who would become my daddy would be better off fixing people than fixing cars. so he sent my father to medical school.

i spent my childhood going back to my father's home, visiting my grandparents for a week during the summer. there is so much i remember about the place. the back yard swing where my grandfather used to push me into the sky. the storage house that smelled of moth balls but held a thousand treasures. the garden where we used to dig for potatoes and pick butter beans. the old shop, where we would sit in the showroom cars, turning the steering wheel and blinkers, then get cold cocolas from the old stoop-shouldered machine.

our visits also included 'going to ride,' which meant driving down quiet farm paths so my grandfather could check the crops growing on farms he had owned for some time. to my knowledge he didn't plant the rows himself, but he was overseer. one summer, he took friend Lydia and me down the path to see the largest hogs we'd ever seen in our lives.

over the years, as we headed to and from the beach, i would try to point out that farm but could never quite find it. then a couple of years ago, Daddy asked us to go back. 

though my grandparents have been gone for years, he wanted us to see the landmark of their legacy — the three small farms that are now leased, the land worked. Daddy wanted us to know where they were, so we would not forget. 

so we drove down country roads to the familiar places of my childhood and his. the first farm stands between my grandparents' burial place and their house, and that spring, before the crops went in, we could see their breakfast room window from their graves. 

and then down another road and a surprise. a family cemetery i had never seen, where my great-grandfather Moses Byrum is laid to rest. i still can't figure out why i never knew it was there.

and then, back to the farm where those hogs once grew, an expanse of winter wheat waving at us along the short drive toward the old house and barn. i watched, as Daddy's eyes scanned the horizon, the circle of land his father owned that now belonged, in part, to him. And i wondered what would become of it. 

turns out, Daddy knew. 

a few weeks ago, as we headed to the beach, we made a couple of stops with the kids. first, to the family cemetery where their great-great grandfather is buried. then on to the farm where as an 11-year-old, i had tried to pet a few gigantic pigs.

the kids took pictures, as i recounted my last visit there with their grandparents, Daddy in his favorite yellow sweater, Mama telling me how she tried to convince my grandfather to be more progressive and put indoor plumbing in the tenant house, almost 60 years before.

my siblings and i now own this farm with my aunt, my father's sister. Daddy gave us this land in his will. which i have to say was a big surprise. we did not expect anything... and though i always knew he loved this farm, i never imagined he would entrust its future to us. cityfolk though we all are.

i don't think i have ever owned anything outright. maybe a toaster. a book. a pair of shoes. but not land. 

land.

as i write this i don't know quite what to say. even after close to 25 years in our current house, the bank still owns a small part. cars? all loans, though one is coming close to being paid off. i know people who buy cars with cash, but we have never been able to do that. 

but cars are not the same as land.

land. 

the thing that drew the Israelites from Egypt and

 kept them going, 

the thing that kept Noah and Christopher Columbus in the boat, kept Scarlett O'Hara from losing her mind. (well, maybe not.) 

it is a small plot, considering. 

but it is ours. and it is land our father loved, and our grandfather before him, so there you have it.

we often joked in years past that we would one day own a third of a half of something — this land — just about enough to put a lawn chair on so we could watch the sunset on a summer Sunday afternoon.

guess i didn't count on it actually coming true. and now, though i am pretty sure where the sun will go down on a summer Sunday, i am wondering just where Daddy would want us to place those chairs.

susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

of happy hearts and glorious things

as a child i used to sit on the living room floor, slide out the bottom drawer of my parents' secretary until the brass pulls clicked softly against the wood. inside the drawer were treasures — baby books for my siblings and me, old photograph albums showing my brother, sister and me as babies, and a creamed-colored book with gold-leafed edging that contained evidence of my family's beginnings.

it was my favorite — my parents' wedding album — and i would spend hours studying the photographs of the day my parents pledged their troth to each other. my mother, striking in her ballet-length crinoline, my father handsome in his white dinner jacket. they stood with their back to the camera in the center aisle of a church the likes i had never seen. large stone columns stood sentry as my brim-hatted grandmothers, my dapper grandfather and dozens of family and friends gathered around them.

they looked like teenagers, holding each other's hands as the young rector gave God's blessing over their union. (within 10 years, this same man would become bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina. would confirm my brother, my sister and me some years later in our home church.)

i studied the sepia images — the lights hung from the ceiling, the carved fretwork over the pulpit, the stained glass windows, stone floors and marble altar, those stone arches standing watch, protecting them from what lay outside the walls. and as i studied, i wondered what it might be like to sit in a church as grand as that. 

when i was 32, the sepia photograph faded into my reality, and i came to stand myself in the stone aisle of

St. Paul's Episcopal Church

, feel the grasp of those arches and knew i was home. my husband and i had just moved our young family to winston-salem from atlanta, where though we attended church most every Sunday, it never felt quite right. 

that first Sunday morning in Winston, we rose, not questioning where we would go. we set out early — getting to church in atlanta took 45 minutes — and arrived for the 9 o'clock service before the early service had even let out. our five-minute commute left us time to head back home, grab some coffee and start over again, and we marveled at our good fortune. on our return trip, we still arrived early enough to take the kids to Sunday School and the nursery, so the two of us could sit for an hour in peace.

uncertain of this new pace and space, we walked into the back of the church and there it was, the picture i had studied all those years ago. the place where my parents got their start, where i first became a twinkle in God's eye. and that's when home hit me.

that first day, the teacher in my 5-year-old's sunday school class invited us out for hot dogs. in the weeks after, we joined the young families supper club, even hosting it at our house. so easy it seemed to make friends, when in atlanta i struggled to make two close friends in four years.

but here, i wrote essays on my mornings at home, took the dog to show and tell at preschool, walked the baby with my next door neighbor whose son was the same age as mine. it was on the way to st. paul's that one day i found myself singing alone in the car: oh i feel so very happy in my heart, because i was.

we would be there only 18 months. 

the day we found out we would have to move, i came early for preschool pickup, walking into the darkened nave so i could spend a few quiet moments under those stone arches. i found my pew, kneeled, begged out loud for things to be different, for God to let us stay... we had just really gotten started in this place where it seemed so easy to

be

. i cried a bit...might have even screamed in the empty space, but i can't truthfully admit that now.

the arches didn't seem to hear.

we moved, started a new life, found a new church that has become more of a home to me than St. Paul's ever was. my daughter barely remembers her time here, and my son not at all.

but still.

///

ten days ago, we were in town for a family wedding. finding ourselves with an idle hour or so, i asked my mother if she'd like to go to her old church. it would be her first trip there in 61 years (61 years and two weeks, she reminded me.) so we drove up the meandering hill toward the church, and i almost lost my way.

'it's that way,' she said, pointing, never minding that she was 24 years old when she last made this trip. 

the stone bell tower stood right where we'd left it, and i hoped that a June saturday meant the doors would be open, though when we checked they were locked. we took a picture of her in front of the bell tower anyway, talked about that day so long ago in her life, then slowly made our way to the car.

just then i spied a man, keys jangling from his belt, slip out the side door. i approached, asking if there was any way we could get inside, and he pointed to the door he would happily unlock for us.

'take your time,' he said, slipping away quickly as we walked into the narthex. mama edged her walker onto the stone floor of the nave and stood, taking it all in.

at just that moment, the organ shouted through the stone, "Glorious things of thee are spoken," and i couldn't help it, the tears just came. i watched mama, her own eyes wet, but her mouth forming a smile.

///

my husband and i have a habit when we visit churches of slipping into a pew to say prayers for our family. from the corner of my eye, i saw him edge into a pew in the front. (didn't he remember that we always sat in the back?). i didn't want to leave mama, so i motioned to her to move down the aisle toward the pulpit.

she shook her head no, held onto the frame of her walker, listening.

"glorious things of thee are spoken/Zion city of our God; he whose word cannot be broken/formed thee of his own abode; on the Rock of Ages founded, what can shake thy sure repose? with salvation's walls surrounded, thou may'est smile at all they foes."

as i listened, i thought about all my mother had seen of this world from her last day in this church — her wedding day — to this one, the day her grandson would be married. i imagined what she might be thinking of that life well lived, the heartache she must be feeling without my father by her side this time. my family began on this particular rock, and God had formed it as he saw fit, and in my thinking, though Daddy isn't with us physically anymore, the fit was just right.

there is a line later in the hymn that says:

safe they feed upon the manna, which he gives them when they pray.

my family has prayed plenty, has seen plenty of manna in its time, and on this day both my mother and i felt full to bursting with it.

'i'm ready to go,' she said, just as the organist ended hymn 522 and moved on to another. as my husband helped mama, i walked up the aisle to about the fifth row on the right and took to my knees. i asked for blessings on my nephew's new marriage, just as God had given my parents so many blessing they'd begun to feel first in this place. i asked for guidance, for blessings on my children and gave special thanks for my family gathered to celebrate, when for so many weeks we have felt so little joy. and i thanked God for this moment with my mother, etched forever in my mind like the stone arches of this beautiful church that was built the year my parents were born.

'tis his love his people raises over self to reign as kings: and as priests his solemn praises each for a thank offering brings.'

glorious things indeed. amen. 

susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

Friday with Daddy

daddy never went through the front door of our house.

always through the back, by the carport and into the utility room where he might scale a fish (much to my mother's chagrin) where the dog sat and scratched at the door during our supper, where he stitched up a rabbit my sister found injured in the yard. where one morning when he was in his 40s he collapsed into my mother, sobbing because his friend had died at home while reading the paper in his wing chair and daddy had to pronounce him dead.

the front door was reserved for prom dates and the rare trick-or-treater, for strangers stopping by. 

but when daddy came home on last friday — april 19 — they brought him through the front door. 

he came home the same way he left town way back in february, in a giant transport filled with fancy machines, a blue tulip-like flower emblazoned on the side. 

we had made the decision to bring him home two days before, my family and his hospital team crowded around his bed. he'd been asking to go home for more than a month, to leave behind the machines and tubes and take his rest in his bed at home. pat, my father's pa, carefully listed off the options for a man who could no longer breathe completely on his own. a long-term care hospital. palliative care or Hospice. 

when i heard the word 'home' i looked to my mother, praying she would choose that option. in a wheelchair herself, she would be going home herself the next day, to 24-hour caregivers my sister would meet later in the day. my brother leaned into mama, asking quietly: what do you want to do?

'home,' she said. 'let's take him home.'

a week ago now, the transport team pulled up in front of our house drew him out into the crisp spring air. and i was waiting.

'you're home daddy!' i shouted, and he looked around. home, his wish finally granted. i stood there— my family waiting just inside the front door — watching him look around at the sky. they wheeled him into our front hall where the Christmas tree stood in december, 

down the hall he had walked so many times in the middle of the night in his pajamas toward the back door and a patient waiting. down the hall, toward the linen closet, that when i was five i was convinced held a witch. they wheeled him to his room, to a bed he had last slept in on february 5, the room he had shared with my mother for 50 years. 

it felt like a long ride to me, down our hall. across the creaky floorboard that gave my brother's Christmas morning crawl away. past my childhood room. a mile it seemed, as they shifted the gurney to make room for this 6-foot-two man, squeezing him through the door into a room softened by carpet and soothing blue.

daddy brought with him a host of people. the Hospice doctor and two nurses. a respiratory therapist, Pat, who had been caring for him all these weeks. a priest who's liberal views challenged daddy's conservative ones, but in his years as their 

minister, the two had become good friends. 

the team to settled him, and my mother's caregivers helped her into place beside him. it was mid-afternoon.

by the time we gathered next to him, daddy wore his familiar pajamas, sat propped against his favorite pillow, talked to us. i took hold of his hand, and he said something i couldn't grasp... what, daddy?

he looked straight at me and said: your hands are COLD! he wanted chocolate milk, but we had only vanilla ice cream.  i spooned it carefully into his mouth, he swallowed, not seeming to care that we could not grant his original wish.

the day before he came home, daddy talked to all of his grandchildren on the phone. somehow, after all these weeks of quiet, he had much to say. it was a miracle, really. i talked to him, too, as did my mother and sister, all of us overjoyed at hearing his voice again. 

last thursday was her first day home as well, after her fall. we had fixed her crab cakes — the best meal she had ever eaten! — and watched as she pulled herself up on her bed, straighten out that broken leg, beginning the first steps toward her recovery.  

+++

when we gathered everybody around in the room, daddy said: we didn't plan for all these people.' for daddy, it has always been about the plan. each day i visited him in the hospital, he would ask: plan. toward the end, when we had no idea, i'd shrug my shoulders — one of his exercises — and say, 'who knows? that's the plan.' which seemed to satisfy him.

this time we had one. we all joined the priest for last rites from the good ol'

Book of Common Prayer

. and then daddy thanked everyone for coming. thanked them, which is so what my father would do. later on, he FaceTimed with my daughter and my niece. strange, that, this 84-year-old dying man saying when asked by his granddaughters how he felt, he said:'pretty good.'

++++ 

i will tell you that it's something, when your siblings gather round your dying father. 

my brother, a physician, is good with those who are critically ill. i have watched him with my father all these weeks. he leans in, speaks softly, but loud enough to jostle daddy awake when need be. this day was no different. i can't imagine how hard it is to be doctor, lawyer, indian chief, son, for he has been all these things since february, and again on this afternoon, our last friday with daddy. 

my sister brought the dog in, picked her up and put her on the bed with daddy, knowing just how long he had waited to touch her head.

we spent the afternoon and evening gathered around my parents, telling stories and praying and singing. 

After supper, i sat with him and read him the story of his life. 

we kissed him goodnight, leaving he and my mother alone in the room. 

she lay by his side the whole night, and ruby did for most of it. 

and then, a call, footsteps in the hall, my sister running toward the room where i had tried to sleep a little. 

it was over. 

we surrounded his body, talking and crying, naming all the dogs he was now getting to see. our grandparents. his friends. so many who have made this journey before him. 

and then we left the room, all of us, to wait for the next step.

in the wee hours, as we sat up and waited for the Hospice nurse and the funeral director to arrive in the pouring rain, we listened as mama told stories about him and their life together, their early years. Despite all the uncertainty and the trauma we've experienced these many weeks, what a treasure my father's last hours were to all of us.

dawn came, and we called all the children, made arrangements for them to join us in this new life without their Pop B. not one of us has wanted to go there, but at least we will travel together, his legacy to us that he was the magnet that drew us together, keeps drawing, even in his absence.

in the days since daddy died, we have heard a hundred stories from his patients and friends, many reflecting his wry humor, others his humble, caring nature. 

'he was quiet, but he was 

powerful,' the man, a patient, who has kept up our lawn when daddy no longer could told me yesterday. yes he was. 

my father was a great man, so many have said to us in the past week. but aren't all our father's that? 

"so with the sleight of his magician's hand, he will end the show,' 

i wrote back in 1997.

 and i don't know who will miss him more — his patients, or the doctor himself..."  those very words caught in my throat as i read them to him one last time just a few hours before he died.  words appropriate for retirement so many years ago, and, it turns out, for his last friday with us. 

i can't imagine now  how much i'll miss him. it still isn't real to me yet. but i am not alone, because i have a full family and a whole town gathered around me, and we are all holding each other up.

 bye daddy. guess it was finally your time to hit the road. be careful. and have a safe and happy trip. sbr

ps: thank you to all who have called and visited, who have sent food, cards and facebook messages, who had loved my daddy at times it seems as much as i did. your generosity toward my family is overwhelming. maybe now daddy understands just how much he meant to all who knew him. susan

read more about him here

susanbyrumrountree.com is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.