whole food

i spent a long lunch hour today with friends i have known my whole life, celebrating a birthday... our shared history unspoken between us, but sound.

i have known one of them since kindergarten, the two of us sharing those first lessons in creating angular letters on the chalk board. Later, we three shared  reading groups, basketball and  cheerleading tryouts (one of us AlWAYS sat on the sidelines.) 

endured algebra class and diagramming sentences, weathered boyfriends (a few of whom we have in common), college angst, the uncertainty of new marriage (and the 30+year kind), parents who perplex, siblings who sometimes don't give us what we hope, or sharing the complexity of being an only child.

today we weather elderly parents, children launching themselves or who attempt, siblings who have never needed us before but now who suddenly do. all difficult things.

though i don't see them often enough, they make me whole, somehow, in a way only home can do. 

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.

Dreams with Daddy

My father sits in a small metal side chair, the kind you find in a hospital room, a blank wall at his back. He wears his Sunday suit, the silver tie he saves for weddings. He crosses his legs, looks at his fingers like I have seen him do a thousand times. Silent, we wait together, for I know not what. I want to lean into him, and I wonder what he is thinking. 

Daddy’s fingers are thin and nimble, the skin taut, the kind of hands a doctor needs for his work. I notice he is not biting his fingernails or the skin around them, something he has done most of his life. A tiny thing, but significant, it seems.

We wait together like we used to during my mother’s many surgeries. Broken hips — too many times to count — a knee. Her back. In those times I knew he was worried, so I tried to draw him through it with my chatter — about children, neighbors, work, anything but politics.  

This is the first time in many months Daddy has not been lying in a hospital bed, with me trying to keep the one-sided conversation going. I’m talking to him, effusive in my glee at finding him all dressed up and sitting in the chair.

But here’s the thing: It’s a dream. My father died in April.

Right after Daddy died, I was hopeful he would visit me. I climbed in bed each night, wondering when it might be. I had dreamed of others in my life who had died. Why should Daddy be any different? 

I was sure he was coming. It would just be a matter of time.

And he did come, swiftly, standing in the front hall of my childhood home in his Sunday suit, next to the mirror, his hair grayer than I remember. I hugged him, feeling such joy at the warmth of him, telling him I knew he would come, and then he melted away.

But he came again, this time sitting in that chair, in the shadows, while the world goes on around him. And that’s where he has been in a half-dozen dreams since. When I see him there I’m overcome with joy. I feel the knot in my throat, thinking I might cry, just watching him sit, in a room that is neither cold nor hot, so thrilled I am, happier than I have felt for a very long time.

And then the alarm startles, the dream fades, and I am back to day, feeling the ache of a world without Daddy in it.

I am a dreamer. Both night and day. Those who know me well know I often don’t hear the conversation, don’t even know anyone is talking to me. Not solely because I have lost some of my hearing, which I have, but rather I am lost in what I am thinking. 

Daddy knew that about me. Once, when I was about 9, he called me a liar because I had no idea where my sister was. I didn’t. Had she told me? In my memory, I see her form sliding past me in the family room as she says something. I was lost in a book, until his words stung. Was I that? A liar? Is that all he thought of me? I spent years trying to prove otherwise.

We've been looking at the scriptures of Advent during my writing class at church. We're trying to find where we fit in the story of the virgin birth in the manger with the shepherds and all that. 

Since I was a child, I’ve used my dreams to figure out the world. 

The ages-old Christmas story takes on a new slant when I read about Joseph, who learns in a dream what he should do with his not-yet-wife-but-oh-so-pregnant betrothed.

So how do I fit in this story? It feels presumptuous to think God is speaking to me in my dreams. Who am I to be that important? Yet Daddy's not the only person in my life who has died but who has come back in my dreams — my mother-in-law, my grandfather, a childhood friend who was not always so nice — and so, I wonder.

In early February, as Daddy lay fighting pneumonia in the hospital where he  practiced medicine for 50 years, he told me he would not get better. “You’ll have to take care of your mother,” he said. I knew then would not survive this fight and that this was his directive to be followed. But how in the world would we manage?

In the months since his death, the days and decisions have been dizzying. A new home for my mother, a new town. Our home, an empty shell. And yet, there are days when I’ve almost forgotten he’s not still there, just on the other end of the phone when I call, sitting in his chair with the dog in his lap. Except the number we had my whole life doesn’t work anymore, and only my mother answers the new one.

I don’t want to live in a dream world. I want to be awake and alive. Occupy the now. But it feels like I am waiting for Daddy to say something, when he comes in my dreams. I suppose I am looking for specifics — Joseph certainly got them. Like what do to when Mama won’t take her medicine correctly. Or the intangible, like what heaven is all about. And has he found the dogs, like we asked him to when he was dying, and our grandparents? 

I’m looking for comfort, too, that despite the fact that he is not with us anymore, all will be well. 

The move was difficult. Watching my mother as her cherished things were boxed up and loaded into the truck proved heart-wrenching. The packers worked quickly, so we worked behind them, gathering up personal items from his desk, tossing some, keeping others. That first afternoon, we found something torn from a magazine in a small catch-all basket on his desk. It was a poem, no given author, that read in part:

You mustn’t tie yourself to me with tears. I gave you my love. You can only guess how much you gave me in happiness.... let your grief be comforted by trust . . . I won’t be far away, so if you need me, call and I will come. Though you can’t see or touch me, I’ll be near, and if you listen, you’ll hear my love around you, soft and clear.

We felt him there, at that moment and knew he had left the words for us to find, right when we needed them most. 

So I will keep dreaming, in hopes the next time I need him, he'll show up again and this time be ready to talk. 

+ + + + +

To read daily meditations during Advent from the writers of St. Michael's, visit

holymichael.org

, and download These Holy Mysteries.

— Susan Byrum Rountree 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.

take me home, country road

i set out at dawn, driving down the country road away from the home i have known for  50 years.

the fog lay low against the cotton fields, stretched out like a soft blanket over a child almost ready to wake up. 

that's what i wish it was, that fog, my own baby blanket draping right around me, whispering to me that it's not really wakeup time yet, that what i know to be true is not. 

what beauty. the vast fields of cotton and soybeans —  even tobacco — shrouded in a white pall that bore no sense of foreboding. just dawn about to happen. hope. 

a mile on, and the sun spilled over the fields onto the side of a barn. 

how must it feel, to stand at the edge of a field and watch the whole world that belonged to you wake up, the sun's first color shining red on your barn, knowing that your work ahead in that day mattered, was about more than what you had already put on that acre?

you know those moments, don't you, when you sense that your world will never pass quite this same way again? 

this morning a few weeks ago was that. it felt like i was taking in everything. every. thing. the boy waiting by the side of the road for his school bus, checking his iPhone. the hawk perched on the wire looking down on the peanut field, right where i have seen him almost every time i have come this way in the last year or so. the fog. the flat fields sliding past by me one by one — soybeans, peanuts, tobacco, cotton, right ready to be picked. 

i have been trying to write it all down for a month, each day sitting down in front of the blank page thinking: i must do this now. and then i don't. maybe i've been thinking that if i don't put it down it just wont happen. 

and yet, come monday, we will be well into

 what has until six months ago seemed an impossible thing. 

we are leaving my childhood home. 

moving its contents part and parcel to a new house that has been finely painted and polished, one that will take my mother closer to where she needs to be. one that my father never knew about. had never seen. in these few weeks we have gathered to pack and to ponder. 

what looms, seems soon to me — not yet six months since Daddy died — is necessary. just because i am not yet ready to let loose of the walls that raised me up doesn't mean it's not the right thing. what matters is that Mama will be close to family, safe, where she can savor all the years that have rolled out before her like the fog over the fields did for me on that day a month ago now. yes. safe. but sad.

i remember when i first went to college, i was so bent on being away and not looking back on the road that had brought me to the city. but come fall break, i caught a ride with a friend and when we turned at the crossroad toward home, the twilight set in, and i rolled down the window, sticking my face into the country smells, all the peanut hay and the scent of newly-picked tobacco, the cotton bolls ripening and well, i couldn't wait to get there. home. 

for years after i was married and living far away, whenever my husband and i drove out the driveway, i waved to my parents on their back porch perch and cried for 30 miles down the road. (and now, every single time i leave, just thinking about that memory.) 

every single time i walk in the back door, i see the soft lights of the kitchen, and i feel myself settling in. home. 

i can not imagine not knowing that anymore.

it was not supposed to be this way. my parents were going to live out their lives in this house, in this place — Daddy fairly well did — but things we had counted on just didn't come to be. 

the night before i drove away from home a month ago, i slept in my old room, tossing, waking often, trying to remember the hundreds of childhood nights and days i spent there, becoming me. our winter-weighted coverlets came from Sears, and we loved them. in summer, Mama would rearrange the furniture and drape our beds with paper-thin covers — white, with blue ruffles and tiny blue flowers all over — and we would sleep with our heads at the foot of the bed just to put a new slant on things. 

we found our baby clothes in an old attic trunk and dressed our dolls in them. i played 'school' behind the closed doors, with the chalkboard on the wall. barbies. spend-the-nights. tears. (a lot of those, my siblings would say.) winter nights after lights out, listening to cousin brucie on the transistor, memorizing the words to songs that would define my adolescence — jim croce. james taylor. gladys knight and her pips. the beatles.

Memories that come at night

Take me to another time

Back to a happier day....

i remember the day we moved in. i was 5, and i went home from kindergarten with ralph, our next-door-neighbor in our old house. we had hot dogs for lunch, the ones that swelled when you boiled them, not the red kind my mother cooked, and i couldn't eat them. later, my mother showed me my new room, one i would share with my sister til she was a teenager, with our matching closets and desks that Daddy built that looked like ladders on the sides. somewhere i have pictures. 

ours is a story house, full of sounds and smells. the saturday nights when we'd sit at the foot of my mother's bed and watch her smooth her nylons over her legs, attach her pearl earrings to her ears for an evening out with Daddy. the phone ringing at all hours. days when we would climb the ladder to the attic, playing on rainy days when we couldn't go outside. sitting at the kitchen table as teenagers sharing a dinner of steak fondue. or in the living room, on the sofa with Daddy and his banjo, wanting bill bailey, whoever he was, to please come home. listening to my sister play Climb Every Mountain when she had hit a sour note on some other song. the time Daddy gave me honey and whiskey to cure my cough. or the day i was making potato stamps and sliced the tip of my finger nearly off. (you can still see the scar.) the soft click of the pulls on my parent's dresser drawer when we looked inside to marvel at our mother's jewelry. the crinkle of the newspaper as Daddy shined his shoes. it is both present and past tense, will always be that in memory.

the living room chimney Santa came down that never once held a fire. the family room window the tree fell through when the first tornado hit. (there were two, years apart) the dining room window where just last year the squirrel hid in the drapes after chewing out the mullions. the sand pile where the dogs are buried. the front porch where we take our family pictures. the incinerator, where we burned our Christmas wrapping paper and set the yard on fire. 

opening the front door for my sister's first date with the man who would become my brother-in-law. closing it on the boy i would not marry. 

these are just my stories. my brother and sister have their own. my mother has hers, too. some we have shared, some are private, some only the house holds close.

stories: the bricks and mortar of any family's life, much more, i hope we learn, than the underpinnings of the building we have called home for 50 years. 

in an hour or so, my sister and i will set out down the road again toward home. we have business to discuss, lists to make to help this move be as easy on our mother as it can. but in the silence between our chatter lay all those stories, wrapping us up like a soft blanket in the early morning, warming us as we wait to breathe this new day in.

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.

circles, all around

my purple room friend is a gentle prodder. she had not heard much from writemuch these past few weeks and was wondering what i was thinking. writemuch in fact was, too, wondering what i was thinking, as this, my double-nickel birthday week began. 

it began in fact with circles. walking in circles, that is, which when i think about it, is pretty much how my mind works. i start out thinking i'm going to clean out the pantry but that leads somehow to the bedroom closet which leads to the tomato patch which leads to the kitchen window sill which makes me hungry which leads me back to the pantry. and on and on. or how my day goes. circle my block three times with the dog and his friend. spin the tires to work and back. move from desk to copier to kitchen to church and back again. circles.

back to walking. i don't know much about labyrinths or their mystical properties, but there is one where i work. sometimes i walk up through the grass to take pictures of it, but as of last week, i had not actually walked it in a good long while.

but my week began there, with my purple roommate and the others who occupy the work hall with me. our instructions were to walk in silence, and if we bumped into each other along the path not to worry about it too much. that's life, isn't it? distancing ourselves from each other, then circling back, bumping into, distancing again. oh, and we might recognize it as how we meet God on occasion. distancing, bumping into, circling back. letting God circle us sometimes.

i set out on the path and walked those circles and thought, thanked, questioned, petitioned — tried to listen to something more than the soft scuffle of my shoes on brick.

i found myself thanking God for all my years however poorly i have sometimes lived them. just to get up in the morning to begin the circle is a blessing. as i turned a corner down the path (which is really a yellowish sort of brick road) my thinking turned to my hope for my children, which is easy and hard to think about at the same time. both are at corners, each facing change that is unknown and surprising. and as my week began, it was hard for this mother to sit tight and watch, to wait and see.

another corner. another thought. the husband. the job. the community i work for. my own ability to do good in that world and the larger one. what people think of me. and who i really am. heavy and light. light and heavy, thoughts kept coming as gentle as the slow breeze circling me.

back in the office, one of my work friends said they noticed as they turned the corner each time, their thoughts turned a corner, too, their conversation shifted. just like mine.

when i started out my career so many years ago, i worked for a tiny daily newspaper, taking pictures of friday night lights and check presentations. i spent hours in a dark room wearing a shiny yellow apron, dipping my fingers in developer and fix, watching an image emerge from blank paper. the next job — my second one — lasted only one year, yet i wrote and wrote and wrote, made awful mistakes that somehow were forgiven and learned much from them. i learned how to lay out a newspaper, to tell a good story. that job led to this and that through the years, to the job i have now, taking pictures, writing, teaching, designing, questioning. a bit of every little thing i've learned in these 30 years. and last week i produced a little magazine for the people i work for, using all of those skills. circles.

that second job, too, changed me the most, set me on all sorts of paths. it's where i met my husband. got my first dog.

on thursday of last week, my son landed his second career job. oh, the hope i have for him. circles.

on friday, i headed home. if you are born in the South of course you may live anywhere but you are always from one place. on the eve of my birthday, i broke hushpuppies over barbecue and stew at my childhood kitchen table, listening to my parents talk. when i asked them if i was early or late, my mother said a little early. and i learned something new: i had been delivered not by the doctor who was my father's partner, but by the nurse who worked for him much of my childhood. Both doctors were busy with a patient when my mother couldn't hold me in anymore, so the nurse pulled my screaming head into the world.

my mother had a couple of gifts for me. one, a small pillowcase hand-embroidered by an elderly neighbor more than 50 years ago. miss applewhite was blind, and though we can't figure out how, she designed a perfect bouquet of flowers with circular centers, never dropping a stitch. i had used this pillowcase as a child. circles.

yesterday, i spent my birthday lunch over burgers with my boys, then we drove around the block to where my son's new office will be. my supper shared with "friendless" friends whose son shares his birthday with me. more circles.

back in the spring, i took part in an online writing community. each day for 37 days we were to answer a prompt. i was working on my novel at the same time, so on some days, i skipped the prompt, including this one on day 11: notice all the circles you see today.

i guess the circles were tired of me not paying attention.

as is usual when i start to write, i have no real notion of what something is about. just a little niggle in my head. blind-like, i fiddle with stitches that seem not to connect, until somehow something whole emerges, just like images from the developer in that dark room years ago.

circles. 

like double nickels taped to a birthday card from my lifelong friend. a new camera and lens from my family. candles for my patio. a casserole dish decorated with a labyrinth of circles. the last of the season's tomatoes on the window sill. zinnias. the communion cup.

circles, all around.





 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 glory and the power of it

my grandfather sold cars for over 50 years but he didn't believe in power windows. they would break too easily, he was sure, so i'm pretty sure as long as he was selling my parents cars, the windows had to be cranked down by hand. imagine. 

one summer night when i was 9 or so, Mary Wallace, my friend Lydia's mother, drove up in the driveway to show us her new car. and oldsmobile. plush seats, FM radio (Bigdaddy didn't believe in that either,) and windows that moved up and down as if by magic. 

'let's go for a ride!' she said giggling, her eyes as wide as her grin. we piled in and off we went, no doubt rolling the windows down and up in the summer air so much so that they might have broken. but they didn't.

Lydia's mother was fun like that. giggling at us girls as we made onion soup on her front porch from wild onions that grew in the yard, played dress up in her shoes. (we piled the onions in a tin bucket along with dirt and water and left our concoction on the front porch — which nobody ever used — to rot in the spring sun.) giggled as we created beauty parlors on her side porch, ate Oreos in her kitchen (no more than two.) crafted barbie doll houses with wall-to-wall carpet, new in the 70s don't you know, from scraps scavenged from her new house. the only thing that would warrant her ire was if we woke the baby. and there were always babies in the house.

birthdays at her house might mean traveling 40 miles to be on television... Lydia's birthday is in November, and so backyard parties like the rest of us had in summer were out of the question. in my memory, we rode across the miles for what felt like a day, then we marched behind WITN-Y the Marching Hobo, watching ourselves on the black and white screen, LIVE. now THAT was a party.

in first grade, she visited our classroom toting a harpsichord, then sat down with it in her lap and made music, playing the songs from our music book. whose mother could do that?  i can see her fingers now, picking out the songs, her voice taking on the words like a bird singing on the clearest of days. the very idea that mothers could be something other than mothers changed me. i didn't imagine that as work, but joy.

she called me su-su. i don't cotton to nicknames, but this one made me feel as if i were part of her brood. she sang at my wedding, my favorite hymn. "Lord of all hopefulness, lord of all calm, whose trust ever childlike, whose presence is balm..."

betty jean, left, with mary wallace

i remember standing there at the chancel steps as she sang the words i had so often sung to myself in the dark when i felt alone. in her voice, the words were balm to a nervous bride. she had known me all my life, and here she was, singing at my wedding. calming me, just because she was there.

Mary Wallace sang for countless brides, including her own daughter... and it was always an event. not to mention funerals— sending her husband off to heaven with a personal rendition of the Lord's Prayer.

she wrote me letters as i grew older, when i wrote stories she liked, and i still have one or two notes i cherish. she was proud of me, of who i had become. i could recognize her handwriting as if it were my own mother's. 

mary wallace, left, sending sparkles

three years ago, she came to my daughter's wedding. fitting, since my child had been in her daughter's wedding some years before. she stayed to the end, lighting sparklers and cheering the newlyweds on. i could not have had this special day without her. there Lydia is, too, in the checked dress in the picture there, celebrating with her mother as we sent the Pea off with her Prince. 

a couple of years ago i came home one day to a message on my answering machine. 'don't you call me back,' she said, but don't you dare take me off your Christmas card list!' (we routinely lampoon the standard holiday newsletter, and she loved the humor of it, knowing about my family, keeping up.) and i have kept her on my list, still.

this year, i won't get to. she died on Friday, and yesterday, we said goodbye.

if funerals can be great, this was. favorite hymns, stories that made everyone laugh and cry a little, and in the end, her own voice. the voice that celebrated and soothed so many, did all this and more for all of us gathered, once again to grieve for her. there she was, singing the Lord's Prayer, all the glory and the power of it, forever. and we were all blessed by it.

Lydia is not the crier i am. get up and get going, she would often say to me when i faltered. but yesterday, i had the chance to hold her up a little. after the service she looked at me with red eyes and said: "Mama would probably be upset with me, but i had to hear her voice in church one last time."

upset? i doubt it. just filled with joy to have a few last words for her brood.

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.