this friday is so much better than last

.... everything came out ok, in the end, so to speak.

so we trudged through our week with temps over 100, the air so think in the morning that one of my friends posted on FB that it felt like living inside a cantaloupe. she was right on. the air, which smelled like smoke last week because of coastal fires and a wind shifting inland, smelled a little sweet now but can you imagine having your nose stuffed up against one of those cantaloupeon walls with no knife to cut yourself out? each morning we met at the end of the driveway and by the end of our 40-minute dog walk we truly felt like those cantaloupe seeds were stuck to our skin and we had no air.
but today i woke to 65 degrees. 65! and a breeze outside that felt like fall might indeed not have forgotten the way here when we're ready for it. but right now it's still summer, and we just want to be able to be outside. tomorrow, as some song says, that's just where i'll be.

the brownies are just out of the oven, and my dining room floor is covered with grocery bags filled everything my family will need for a week looking out over the crisp blue atlantic. towels and sunscreen, Fritos and Butterfly crackers, body wash for the outdoor shower and my husband's favorite black seal rum. 


and these. i grew them myself, all of them, plopped that plant in just the right spot and now here they are, ready to go with me to my favorite spot on the planet. by sunday i hope they find themselves in a pie or a blt or something like that. (the green one fell of the vine and even if he was a different color, it just didn't want to be alone.) he gets to ride along, and maybe he'll catch a few rays on the porch while we are there and be just right with a little goat cheese and some bacon and basilon the side.

we are celebrating, not just our annual vacay but the birthday of that book i wrote about this beach and blogged about a few posts ago. now that i am a paid writing hack, i have to be reminded sometimes that the dream i had since i was six actually came true 10 years ago this week. wow. and all because i have loved it here since my earliest memory.

but we are also celebrating family.

my daughter, cute in her bikini, will play her beach music, take in too much sun and shag in the kitchen with her dad (and me)... her husband will likely make the shrimp scampi (that is too spicy for me, but still — he's the only family member that actually lets me sit while he prepares) — and my son will fish and eat my marinated shrimp and have his beer and wax wryly about the people who walk across our path in front of the cottage and those who cross his path every day at work... and maybe by thursday, our boatless skipper will relax, finally. though he will miss the dog.

my father will sit on the deck and look at the ocean he's known since he was a child and think about things he won't share, and my mother will bring her caramel cake, along with a story, to share with us all.

i will read and wear my hat and get sunburned and maybe write a little and i will watch it all. w-a-t-c-h...breathe in the movement of my family, as changing as the ocean these days.

i first knew the atlantic when i was one, when we stayed in a cottage named the Coolamee in a second story room that stretched from streetside to beach. i remember feeling rocked by that ocean as the breezes blew through the windows, and how after a day on the beach, my sister and i would get our baths, then clean and warm in our clothes we would go back out and look for shells. i remember a pot full of crabs on the stove, my father using his pocket knife to clean the croakers on the porch and in my memory there was not a minute that i was bored.

and though i don't often swim the ocean anymore except to cool off on a hot day (the reason why is a story for another day) just listening to it and watching it fuels my soul. i have seen it calm as a kitten and as angry an an arching, growling bob cat... i can't explain it, but the rushing and the roaring and the calm gathering at the shoreline as all those angry waves almost hug each other somehow make sense to me. and i miss its absence in my life. but it'll be there tomorrow when i get there, changing, but forever the same.

every party has a pooper, II, or of Jell-O shots and the long and winding road

Trust 30: “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could.”

What is one thing you can do that would make today worthwhile? What’s stopping you from getting started right now?

(Author: Jessica Dang)

editor's note: the story you are about to read contains unmentionables.

watching giada delaurentis make a tomato salad with corn and red onion is not a good idea when you're on a strickly Jell-O and clear liquids diet. even if it is for only a day, doesn't the guy who will be putting me to sleep tomorrow morning after a ghastly night of not eating and, well, you know, doesn't he know that it is high tomato season right now and even in my own paltry tomato garden they're turning ripe as we speak? thinking about those red, juicy, meaty morsels makes my mouth water.

i'm having a party tonight, but red is not invited. and though whenever i host a party, i make sure the necessaries are all appropriately stocked for my guests, this time, i'm the only one i'm stocking up for.

today i have eaten this: three Jell-O shots (sans any additive except food coloring) for breakfast. four for lunch. a JI-nor-mous decaf iced tea of my own making, a couple of glasses of cranberry/pomegranate juice (no wait, does that have RED in it?!?) and another Jell-O shot for a snack. all of the green variety. in another hour or so, i'll carefully measure out five 8-oz glasses of my favorite beverage ginger ale or water or something like that  and get ready for a downer for the next hour. down the hatch with the pills (20 in an hour, happy cocktail!), down the long and winding road, then down down down the drain. and down some more. i hope. and that it won't take long.

i've been carrying the instructions around in my purse for a week. taking them out, reading through them as if they contain the cryptic key to some way OUT OF THIS. i've pulled them out at the grocery store, carefully filling my cart with baby wipes, ginger ale, tp purchases to fill my necessary for the BIG D. today i have moped like a child who knows santa's coming in july because she's been so bad the first half of the year that he has to come when the switches are particularly pliable. i have convinced myself that i am the first person on the planet to ever EVER voluntarily go without food freshly ripe heirloom tomatoes, sweet corn, cucumbers and peaches for a full summer day, just so a stranger wearing latex gloves the doctor can have the pleasure of the  poke & prod my clean as whistle (what does that mean anyway?) parts of me to make sure they are, in fact, clean as a whistle.

oh, lookey here: the directions say no VEGETABLES, so technically, since tomatoes are a FRUIT, i can have just a little sliver with a little salt and pepper sprinkled on them, i mean it'll be digested and purged gone before i get there, so how will they know? even if i puree?

oh, but there's that red thing.

when i was in college, i got my wisdom teeth out on a summer day and had to do without tomatoes during peak season. i could only eat things like apple sauce. so after about a week of that, i came home and made the most beautiful beefsteak tomato sandwich on Wonder bread with Dukes i have ever seek, cutting it up into the tiniest of pieces and fitting it into my mouth around my swollen gums. i swear the vitamins hastened my recovery. i love summer tomatoes that much. and it's been two days since i had even the heel. imagine.

ok so i am a year or so little behind schedule. i have known it was an eventuality ever since i saw katie couric show how to right on television, though as i recall, she did not have cameras rolling in the necessary. despite evidence to the contrary, there are things even morning television won't show. i do know how important this is, and that's why, though i have been tempted all day to cheat, i mean really, how would they know if i ate a cracker, just one little pepperidge farm butterfly cracker wouldn't hurt a thing now would it? i have followed the directions very carefully. 

my walking friend succumbed to pressure worse than a hemorrhoid and got hers done over the winter, so she got to drink warm chicken broth when her time came. 'the procedure is nothing.' she said. 'i'm good for 10 years.'

this morning on our walk i wondered aloud if i could just call my favorite mexican restaurant and ask them for the chicken soup but could they hold the chicken, the rice, the onions, the tomatoes, the avocado just this once? it's the broth that makes it good, right? and then i remembered how last winter, after trying to swallow the ji-nor-mous amount of prescribed poo potion, my friend called me saying it was the worst thing she'd ever had to do. the worst. so of course i can't wait. there is such pleasure in company. but i opted for the pills, which themselves are of ji-nor-mous portions. choose your poo portion carefully.

giada is ending her party with peanut butter oatmeal bars, just in time for my party to begin. i'm getting hungry now, so guess that meas ANOTHER JELL-O SHOT. what flavor shall I choose?

even i, the doctor's daughter who hates to go to the doctor know how important this is. so there's no part time partying this time. one thing's for sure: no question about who the pooper will be.

because you just never know

in march, she was caught by the fluid building in her lungs, unable to get out of bed or dress without assistance. they brought her home, found caregivers, knowing that at 93, her heart was slowing to a turtle's pace. wondered if at some point the ticker that had been ticking since the end of january 1918, would soon come to a full stop. I wrote about her then, about how worried we were for her.

but she kept on ticking, in the best john cameron swazye kind of way.

just a few days ago, we paid her a visit for our annual july 4th weekend with our 'fake family', and there she was, beaproned and standing in the kitchen making her special congealed salad which she makes every year for us. and on another day, she reached into the oven to check on her two perfectly baked lemon chess pies. she sat with us at the table as 11 of us gathered — for all 10 meals — laughing and talking, posing with her grandson, sharing a cocktail in the evening with granddaughters and friends, rocking on the porch in the heat.... sure she was tethered to her artificial breath, but still.

in our time together, we talked about how her unmarried uncle in the 1920s used to take she and her sister to town, dressed in fine feathers and spats to cover their shoes, driving them the 30 miles to the capital city, promising her a new car when she turned 16 so she could drive him instead.                 only he got married before her birthday, and she never got that car. 

she told me how much she liked my husband when she first met him 30 years ago. 'he was a good one,' she said, 'i could tell.' and don'tcha know for the most part, he has been? and he dotes on her, that he does.

as the holiday ended, she was doing this: talking into the face of an iPad, recording her voice into the heart Talking Tom Cat, laughing with her granddaughters at this new technology which was only invented when she turned 92. 

that night she watched The Bachelorette. THE BACHELORETTE. i have never seen the show myself, but apparently everybody spends a lot of time in the hot tub, and the bachelor in question kicked out the prettiest one. and as the fireworks flew and boomed outside, inside her room with the tv on nana comforted the three dogs (two of them large) who cowered at her feet. nothing gets this farm girl down. not a faint ticker. and not something as newfangled as a computer the size of a good book with a crazy kind of kitty on the screen who talks back, surely not that. because there is always something newfangled appearing out there in the world and it appears that nana's ticker is ticking around to see just what turns up next.

me, as me

When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—— the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Can you remember a moment in your life when you had life in yourself and it was wholly strange and new? Can you remember the moment when you stopped walking a path of someone else, and started cutting your own?

Write about that moment.

(Author: Bridget Pilloud)

It was a summer sunday afternoon just like this one when i hugged my kids goodbye at camp and instead of driving south, toward home, i headed north. i had never been on this particular road right by myself — had actually never been alone on a trip in fact — and with each mile marker i passed, i knew i was plotting new ground.

a few weeks before, a plain brown box had arrived at my door with books inside. books with my name in 64-point type stretched across the cover. books that as i cracked open the spine, for the first time in my life i knew the plot, the sentence structure, almost by heart.

and on this particular sunday, i was headed out on my very first book tour. first stop, richmond and a radio interview. r-a-d-i-o? with my squeaky voice? (let me say to any of the book writing folks out there: choose radio over the talking heads of tv.)  the pr flack i share bed space with had spent months with me it seemed, rehearsing talking points about the regional history i had put to paper — the people and the houses that had shaped the beach i had loved my whole life. how was it, that i, an outsider to this provincial world had been the one to capture it? or that the 12-year-old girl inside me who had always dreamed of writing had actually gotten an advance check (however small, it was the largest one-time paycheck i had ever gotten... a record that still stands.) that my publisher actually expected to see 7,000 books. Seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d! dear lord. a third of those in hard cover.

yet i had already sold some. many to the very people i wrote about. had a book signing party in an old cottage on the oceanfront on a glorious blue-sky day. and now i was going all over the place, it seemed, all by my little pea-picking self, to talk to strangers about why they should buy it, too.

at the time, it felt as if my whole life's work had come to this moment, me rambling down the highway to THE FUTURE. all those poorly constructed sentences in third grade, all the dangling phrases in 9th, the misspelled words that first year out of journalism school... in time my grammatical ineptitude shape-shifted into something real enough to be clipped and posted to refrigerators in homes of people (not just my mother) i didn't even know. how had that happened?

but seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books? i had never sold so much as a stadium seat cushion sporting my high school mascot without apology. 

and yet i would not apologize for this book. not the three years it took me to write it or the year it took for me to convince the publisher that my vision was right. (oh well, i would apologize about the cover, just a little because i had no control and i didn't like it at first. but it has grown on me.) and i did apologize to my pr flack for the money we spent just trying to realize my vision. (i do think we have realized about a nickle profit.)

but on that Sunday afternoon, i was thinking about none of that. just that in the back of the car i had a box of books and they were m-i-n-e. my own creation (with the help of many, many others and of course G-O-D) but my words. at least those that lay outside the margins of quotation marks.

on that drive north (well, richmond is not too north) i thought about the summer morning three years before when i sat in the parking lot of the episcopal church across the street and looked at the grand old ladies i was writing about, thinking: what do they look like to me? just to me? and came up with it, right there (G-O-D loves and helps people, even if all they do is sit in church parking lots) staring at the ladies' wide porches and how they are just like wide-brimmed summer hats. they surely surely are, their propped shutters like eyelids, looking out toward the open sea.

that, come to think of it, is just like me. or where i will be in a couple of weeks, celebrating the 10th anniversary of this remarkable experience, remarkable if only that i wrote the damn book and sold those seven t-h-o-u-s-a-n-d books (and then some). funny that my publisher didn't think of putting out a 10th anniversary edition. but still.

after richmond i drove to norfolk (arriving two hours early for a tv interview. the tv part of this story is a whole nother story...), then back to north carolina through the great dismal swamp with the windows rolled down — a swamp that on that day was not dismal but promising, for some strange reason. it reminded me of a high school girl a few years before that on her first solo drive to and from that marvelous beach in an un-air-conditioned light blue ford maverick, driving down a country highway all by herself but not afraid of anything. oh, how i wish i could connect with that girl again, out on a straight stretch of road, windows open, headed to what yet awaits.

empty chair, empty, there

 

she was supposed to be here, 

sitting in that empty chair there, 

as the dog sleeps behind her on the carpet. 

having eaten her hot dog with her mother's homemade chili, having chatted with her grandparents for the first time in person since last summer,

having had her nails done in pretty princess pink

and found gold slippers that don't hurt her feet,

to go with the dress we bought her in new york last month. 

was supposed to be talking to me 

while her husband ate the marinated shrimp he loves 

while her dad gets her hugs for father's day.

but she didn't get here. 

two canceled flights and $100 cab ride for naught 

left them anxious about trying yet another 

and left me (and her dad) once again more than disappointed 

that sometimes it seems NYC just won't let their displaced southerners 

go

so instead of a house full of people 

and the chance to watch my daughter 

watch her friend since 4th grade tie the knot this afternoon,

i will spend my evening wishing she were here

and wiping my eyes, imagining the two of them in their 

 stoplight halloween costumes 

or as a diamond and spade

in a deck of life-sized cards the year after that.

that will be me, looking at her empty chair knowing

just how much she would love the flowers, 

imagining her smile and her bare feet on the dance floor 

with her husband and her high school friends. 

and she will be wondering and texting and calling 

but will have to wait for my pictures 

to see just how much the groom looks like her husband, 

and how the bride's wedding gown

looks so much like her own.

good flying weather, part II

when my mother talked about her wedding day, she would say this: we were married on Flag Day. and that made it easy for me to remember. one of my favorite things to do as a child was to open the secretary drawer in the living room and pull out their wedding album, scouring the pictures for glimpses of the parents i knew. my favorite photo has always been the one when they are leaving the church (i wish i could show you that here) — arm in arm, my mother in her ballet-length crinoline — arm in arm with the skinny boy who would be my dad — looking a little stiff and more than a bit pale in his white dinner jacket. (the next day, he graduated from medical school and moved further away from his family with a girl he'd met only six months before.)

but my mother is smiling a hollywood smile as she steps off the porch of the church that one day i would attend. beaming, she is, a real beauty like she has never been happier in her life. i suspect she knew just what she was ahead.

today is flag day. of course that we wave the flag to honor all who have served under it — including my father, who joined the navy a year after that wedding and would deposit his wife (and new son) with my grandparents before he set sail around the world as the 'doc' on a destroyer. for us, it also means that on flag day, my brother and sister and i get to celebrate the fact that because a skinny boy from gates county, n.c., and a city girl from florida with good-looking legs, happened to meet each other at a dance, we got to be.

their union has lasted for 59 years today. (though i haven't yet called them, i suspect neither has walked out the door.) next year we are planning a throwdown with the FAM, but as they pass yet another year betrothed, i just want to fly that flag a little higher, wave it a little more crazily because i mean 59 years? with one person and nary an argument? twice as many years (and then some) than they ever were apart. i haven't even lived that long but i know it's not such an easy thing to do now is it? just sayin'.

when they'd been married for 50 years, i wrote about them. "they've been through what i've come to understand as several marriages," i wrote, "albeit to the same spouse. the newlywed year, when they were alone and getting to know each other. The next a year later when my father joined the navy. the third one came when they finally settled in a town where they didn't know a soul and made a life together. the last one, crowded with church and children and grandchildren," and now great-grands, "began when my father retired. It may be the best yet."  now that my own children are grown, i realize they actually had another marriage, then one when i moved out of the house and got married myself, forcing them to get to know each other for the first time since way back when they were turning 25. they built a beach house that year — my father's dream — and maybe yet another marriage began when they reluctantly sold it.

throughout every stage, they have been an example for many, including my daughter, who wrote about them last year here.

vance and bj are not storytellers, as i said when i wrote about them in 2002 — never outwardly shared their secret to a happy marriage with us. "they've simply lived it, hoping we would learn by watching."

i guess we did learn a thing or two. my brother and his wife have been married 33 years, my sister and her husband 32, and my husband and i will mark our own three decades together this year.

"what makes marriage last, after the kids are grown, the parents gone, the paying work behind you?" i asked nine years ago. i wish i knew. i only know it's not nearly as easy as the couple who married at 24 on Flag Day have made it seem.

their days now are filled with doctors appointments, with worry about the health of neighbors, about grandchildren with new jobs and new babies, and i imagine, about how many more years they have to together.

their favorite days are spent when all or some of the FAM can be together — like this past saturday, when they got to meet our newest member. my own grandparents met every single one of their great-grands, so since i don't have a grand yet, i'm expecting them to stick around for a good long while.

what joy it must have been to them, to look into little LG's beautiful blue eyes and know that because of them, she got to be, too.  and that the grand ol' flag first unfurled 59 years ago today has some good flying weather left in it yet.

son days

my friend katbird posted on facebook this week that friday was her oldest son's last day of kindergarten. in between his first day and this, she wrote, he: "learned to read and write and play the piano. he figured out math." (well good luck with that one, says i) "he grew two hu-normous front teeth. he can tie his shoelaces and ride a bike without training wheels (mostly).  he can smack a baseball and shoot a hoop.  he had his first communion and saved money for a good cause. he teared up for the first time while watching a movie (Kung Fu Panda II, go figure). wow. It blows my tiny mind. how could it not have blown his?"

that's a lot, for one little guy, in just a year. yes it is.

i knew this had been on her mind. she came into my office a few days before, talking about how much she hated Velcro shoes because how can anybody ever learn to tie shoes if all they wear is Velcro? i said the exact same thing into the air when mine were the age of hers. tying those shoes all by yourself seemed to me, as a young mom, the symbol of all there was yet to learn, and the independence of it. if my children could tie their own shoes without me, well, they might just do ok.

"all of a sudden, he could just do it," she said. yes. so sudden it takes our breath away, these things new to our children that we have known so long we can't remember when or how we learned them for ourselves.

i love the fact that, though she visited on the pretense of showing me how to use Illustrator, she felt at home enough with me in the purple office to plop herself down say just what was on her mind. and after we'd gotten our Velcro rant out of the way it was this: should she should jump more fully into her business, or stay in the 'life right now' she had planned as a stay at home mom, with her cool little boy and his cool little brother.

her boys are growing up and eventually away, and that seems a little bit (a lot?) at odds with her dream to embrace the artist she is. what if, as she sinks herself into that creative zone she misses the 12 things he will next learn to do in the next 12 days or weeks or months? "i don't feel like i'm doing any of my jobs well," she admitted. but the mother of the grown up children in me says that if she is thinking about that at all, she is probably doing just fine.

we've both had son days this week. i met mine for lunch at a busy downtown restaurant on a corner in the city where we both live and work. we moved here when he was on the cusp of three, clumping around in cowboy boots we found at a thrift shop. he wore them with jeans, shorts, with diapers probably. back then, he was not even three feet tall and often roamed the house brandishing a wooden gun carved by my father. and now he, actually, is marketing our city to visitors, conventioneers, even film makers. (just yesterday.)

i remember when he was learning some of the things my friend's boy put in his brain in the past year. how at not quite 5 he said: take off the training wheels, and we did and he was off, never turning around, never even wobbling. it had taken his sister three days to learn this new skill. how he would disappear for awhile and show up wearing a robot costume he'd fashioned out of leftovers from a packing box, staplers and tape. how later, his angular fingers began plucking the guitar strings into a tune i could easily recognize. and this: dear kat has many years, thank goodness, until she is on the sidelines of her own son's broken heart.

this boy of ours hates to shop, so when in middle school he found a pair of tennis shoes that worked, we just ordered them over and over. have been doing that since.

my son arrived for lunch this week wearing a crisp white dress shirt and new slacks — (how did the three-foot boy become a six-foot-two man is what i want to know) — he is tall and thin and everything he wears hangs just right, and i couldn't help but think of that boy i sent off to college with a closet full of madras shirts. and bow ties. i taught him that, too, how to tie the bow tie. (now if he had always worn Velcro would he have been asked by his fraternity to teach his new brothers this particular skill as part of his pledge responsibility?)

the new business clothes he has taken to wearing since he started his first post-college job a year ago suit him. but i didn't recall buying the slacks.


"i went shopping," he told me. "my clothes were wearing out." he means the clothes i bought him just as he was about to graduate — two years ago. "i waited until jobanks had a sale." wow. i felt like katbird. how did this happen?

his great-grandfather, who bought all his suits on sale — so goes the legend — would be happy about that. a man who knows how to hang onto his money.


we had a nice lunch (of course, though he makes more than i do, i picked up the tab.) we talked about work with his high school buddy who is now his coworker, how they play trivia every week at a local bar. "do you win?" i asked. "not a lot," his friend said. "hey maybe you know the answer to this one. what's apgar?"

"what do you think it is?" i asked, and they both laughed. "we said it had something to do with engineering," he said, "nobody at our table is an engineer," though both agreed they had heard it before.

well yes, in a way. and then i told them what it was, a measurement, sort of, of how well you are engineered at birth — the first score of many you get in life. "he scored 9 on the apgar!" a new parent will say, like they might years later: "he scored 1600 on his SAT!"

"no wonder we didn't know what it was," my son said. "how would we know that? only parents know that."

what is it with sons and their hold on us? that they share so little of their lives as compared to daughters that we celebrate every single thing they do tell us? probably. 

we welcome them home from that first year of kindergarten, our arms and hearts like sponges, absorbing the minutia of their days spent at lunch, on the playground, at nap and snack time. year by year their sharing becomes a little more guarded, but we welcome them just as hopeful, as we will a thousand times over — after their first great ball game, as they stretch their arms toward the finish in their first swim meet, after their first trip abroad. we hold them in their failures and their broken hearts, as they graduate from high school and college, and as they bury their friends. 

and some of us — as my friend martha did her son a couple of weeks ago — get to hug the whole man after his first experience (and we hope his last) at war. 

we wait for the details, celebrate the rare phone call, the ride to airport, welcoming every single chance we get to be the mother of them again.


this week, my friend lee celebrated her youngest son's high school graduation. the salutatorian talked of his friend, another mother's son — headed for Yale — who died in an accident, the result of a senior prank. he was the fourth mother's son to die in accidents in just two days in our city. (a daughter died, too.) it always happens during graduation week. these mothers do not get this chance again — any more son days — and i can barely breathe just thinking of their insurmountable loss.

to paraphrase, the salutatorian spoke to his classmates about what they each have been given, how our job is to figure out our God-given gifts and use them as best we can in the world. he got a standing ovation — something rare in the high school graduations of my memory.


as i read his words today, i thought about my gifts — my kids —and i wonder how well i have helped them become who they are, launched them out into the world as good people. have i, like katbird worries, not done a good job at mothering because i have been so focused on something else?

a little while ago, my phone jingled like robin hood's men announcing their arrival in sherwood forest.


'are you cooking tonight?' read the text.


sure. 6:30.


k. see y'all then.


k.yes. 

another son day.

go ahead, pick up the pencil

Your Personal Message by Eric Handler

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is burning deep inside of you? If you could spread your personal message RIGHT NOW to 1 million people, what would you say?

=:=:=:

i prefer pencils. for my calendar (yes, i'm one of those people), for my shopping lists, for chewing on when i need to think. i remember as a kid nothing was prettier to me than a spelling list complete with definitions, all written out on a piece of clean notebook paper. i'm weird like that.

my papers weren't so clean when it came to math class though. there was lots to erase. i think i stopped understanding math along about 9th grade algebra, all those letters and parenthetical numbers scrambled my brain in such a way that i sometimes felt like i'd dropped it into a spin art machine.

then came 10th grade and basic geometry, which for some strange reason i could actually do.  i think it was the fact that i loved all the angles and lines and rays — the arrows pointing off the page assuring me that there was something beyond that page where it lay on my desk in mrs. anderson's math class, something out there, beyond the cinderblock walls of my school, beyond the edge of my back yard, just waiting for me to step my foot outside and figure out what. this may come as a surprise to my mother, whose memory of me is that i wanted nothing more than to build a house in the back yard and live there all of my life. but that didn't mean i didn't want to be something, and to go somewhere to seek what i would be.

i actually loved the triangles, too, how no matter how you drew them, those angles were always pointing somewhere out.

by the next year, i felt pretty confident about the whole math thing, that is until i took a seat in mrs. winfree's trig class. now mrs. winfree was a excellent teacher, who 40 years ago was just out of school and excited to share how much she loved trig with us. but staring at the images on the board i felt fairly confident that there was no way i would be able to take a math i loved and combine it with one i had taken two years before and forgotten already whatever right i knew, and somehow come out with an answer. well, mrs. winfree should have known i could almost never do that.

and then of course there is that moment in college when (i think i have written about this before) — i left my calculus exam in the middle of it — now there's a foreign language for us right brained folks — finding the TA in his office and pleading with him to let me pass. (i did purely on my math skills, though i don't know how.)

through the years there have been many things i wish i could take my pencil to, and even more i wish i could erase. but even what might fall victim to the eraser's rub is something that when i really think about it, taught me something valuable.

something about this magnet struck me when i saw it a few weeks ago. the bluebird with a glint in her eye, the cutout words, the whole math thing. that's me all over. but there's that word "risk", too. plain and simple, there is just no way to figure out how to be anything without risking some of what you already are.

sure, you might find out that though your diagrammed sentence may indeed look like a work of art, you can't draw a stick figure. or though you can pull together thousands of words into a story, you still have to use the e-z-tip calculator on your phone to figure out how much to pay for lunch.

here is the certainty: there is not one single way to find out if you are good or bad at any of it without picking up the pencil. risking failure can be instead a chance to shine.

so that's what i want to say to those 1 million people who are not (yet) reading my blog (mainly, i want to say it to my children) — don't be afraid to pick up the pencil, whatever form that pencil may take. i mean, how in the world can you know whether you are destined to solve pythagorean's theorem or to discover your own if you don't scribble a little first? how will you ever get to the ending of a story if you don't write the first word?

you may not always choose the right words — and if you're like me, you rarely choose the perfect number — but that's when you can put that trusty ol' eraser to good use.

seven year itch

June 3

That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? . . . Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Identify one of your biggest challenges at the moment (ie I don’t feel passionate about my work) and turn it into a question (ie How can I do work I’m passionate about?) Write it on a post-it and put it up on your bathroom mirror or the back of your front door. After 48-hours, journal what answers came up for you and be sure to evaluate them.

Bonus: tweet or blog a photo of your post-it.

Start To Finish

The folder sits on my desktop on the bottom right corner. Its name: Cloo's Club Complete. A misnomer, because complete it is not. Inside, some 65,000 words of a novel that I have been working on off and on for seven years. Seven. 47 dog years. the time it takes for a child to grow from birth to second grade. from undergraduate to PhD. the itch.

The last time I even opened the file before today was October 30 of last year. Last year.

I began writing it one sultry June night after whining to my mother on the phone that I had no place to put my writing. A short gig as a newspaper essayist had ended, and it seemed as if nobody wanted to hear what I had to say. (and lord, do i need attention.) My children were grown, and though I had a reasonable part time freelance business, I felt stuck, my file drawers full of wannabees. 

"You need to write yourself a trashy novel," she said. I swear. Now my mother, a pearl wearing devout Episcopalian who has never said so much as Damn, unless quoting someone else, does not read such trash. She didn't even watch soap operas when I was growing up, not even when she ironed. And I grew up watching the Guiding Light (for like 30 years), dreaming of writing for it. (What the Reva and Josh story could have been in my hands.)

I can't even imagine what my mother might think of as "trash," that she would know how to define it except maybe Tess of the D'urbervilles. (Which is sort of trash, but quite literary, of course.) Certainly she didn't read Sweet Savage Love like my sister and I did in high school. Oh, be still my beating heart! (or is it bleeding heart.. I never know.)

But somewhere in the caverns of this brain of mine rests the edict: Do what your mother says do. As in the whole underwear thing, the church thing, the cab cash thing (not "Cash Cab" — and never mind that we didn't have cabs in my home town), because you just... never ... know... and then there was the "don't do anything I wouldn't do, because I am always looking in the window. that kind of thing. (Lord.)

So I did what I was raised to do. I started the trashy novel with my mother's mantra the boot in my back. My friends in Cloo's Club, whom I meet for lunch on many a Friday at a hot dog place called Cloo's, had been after me too. Could it be that hard, to use the words "burgeoning"  and "buxom" and "flummoxed" in the same sentence, then rinse and repeat?

My friends had even gone so far as to ask to be in the book, at least in spirit, giving me clues to nuances of character and who they wanted to play themselves in the movie. (for me, only Meryl Streep.)  At night I sent them chapters, took my words to Friday lunch and to the beach, reading them aloud — and we howled until we just about wet our pants, imagining ourselves in the situations I had created practically out of thin air. The (grammatical) jewels were burgeoning close to ecstasy, or so it felt.

A few months into my little project, I dared share it with my critique group — tough ladies I was sure would laugh me away from the literary table, saying: when are you going to get serious about your craft?

And yet, they didn't. They took each line, each character, each plot point and treated it as seriously as if I were Thomas Hardy — not once thinking: how does she know this stuff? Has she done this before? I mean, how does she know this stuff? (well, at least they never told me if they thought it.) 

And then, after those burgeoning 65,000 words, I  became quite flummoxed, thinking my grammar too feeble, my plot not virile enough to survive.

And so, the excuses. No time. A regular job working for my church is counter intuitive to writing such vim and vinegar, especially because said novel is about women who are members of a certain denomination I know all too well. (They serve on the altar guild for heaven's sake.)

I've been through the stages. Loved it, laughed with it... at first, hated it for awhile. (for the record, the term "burgeoning" is used only twice, and not until page 57.) mourned it. gotten angry at it.

I even took an online class with a woman who was an 'agent' looking for new talent, just so I could finish. (That was two years ago.) She liked it, laughed out loud in many places, but in the end, it felt to me like when I edited based on her suggestions, I also took out the soul of it. And so I hated it again, felt I could never really pull the whole novel thing off. What was I thinking? That I was that good? PA-LEESE.

So into the drawer it went.

Last fall my critique group took a retreat, and before we left, I asked these marvelous ladies to read the whole manuscript as it stood. They did, spending a whole evening with me talking once again about characters and plot points and pacing and all of that, attending to it like I was writing the next great, bourgeoning thing. Oh, how I thank them.

I read the manuscript myself, sitting in an Adirondack chair at the water's edge, wondering if I would ever let my mother read it, published or not. (No. She's 83, and it might give her a stroke.)

My friend since 8th grade has herself a friend who writes erotica. EROTICA. ABSU sent me a couple of short stories and OMG I blushed reading it. Blushed. Flashed. Fanned myself.  How does she know such things? Does she write from her own experience? And then I found out her parents are her early critiquers. Never happen to this former debutante. I'm just sayin'.

My friends at Cloo's Club think I have abandoned it, have discarded these wonderful, quirky women because I can't bear for it not to be a good book. That's partly the case. It's also that what if, like a gazillion other writers out there, I do finish it and then nothing happens. no agent, no publisher, nada. and of course, what if something does happen, and my mother, my children, all those sweet old ladies at church who love me read it, raise their eyebrows and say hummmm...

But there it is, the folder staring me in the face every day.

A few weeks ago, my book club met, and after reading a wonderful winter novel, they asked for a trashy, sexy beach read. When I threw the question of what title to my writer friends, dear Jane said: Cloo's Club. Finish it! Ha.

I must say that I thought about going on Lulu and putting it together under a nom de plum with a buxom heroine on a burgeoning cover, just to see what they might say. only what if they hated it? what if they thought I had done those things I write about, that they thought I was writing about me? and of course there are all the typos to contend with...

So. To the question at hand: what stops me from finishing? It's probably not my mother, nor my daughter (who said one night some years ago that she had found a draft in my closet and read a few chapters.) not those wonderful old ladies at church. and at this point, not my book club. well, not really.

I am afraid of me.

Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.

Though I do believe I have a gift, I guess I didn't bargain that God would want me to write a trashy novel. Maybe he meant "literary trash," but so far I've not found an agent who represents just that genre.

So what's my biggest challenge?

Me. Clear and simple. Burgeoning, buxom and flummoxed. Me.

So. How do I overcome me, say to hell with it and dive in — ever blushing, until this too is done?

Today, well, actually yesterday and the day before

For the month of June, I am participating in Trust 30, a challenge designed to celebrate Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 208th birthday, and to prove that i can trust myself. (really?) One prompt a day, just like in December with Reverb10. Only this one celebrates being the non-conformist. Which i am never been known to be. talk about a challenge. and of course the first thing i notice is how behind i am, already, before i even start.

May 31:

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

 
You just discovered you have fifteen minutes to live.
1. Set a timer for fifteen minutes.
2. Write the story that has to be written.

i'm sorry. honestly. i didn't say that enough. not at all. for all those words that hurt, for the actions that pierced you to pieces, even though on the outside you appeared to remain whole — all those lines that make up the puzzle of you undetectable — as if they didn't exist. 

you may have thought i didn't care, but i was only pretending.

oh, how i wish i could have fixed it, could have mended what's broken inside me and reached for you whole. but i never reached far enough inside myself to find the broken valve, to turn it off. 

but you loved me still. from the first day to this.

and yet, though deep inside me that rusty valve continues to leak, there are a thousand others pumping the good of me out into the world. can i tap into those instead, rerouting and reconnecting the moments when i got it right?

yes, you loved me still, and i didn't deserve it.

june 1:

Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. The force of character is cumulative. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

If ‘the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tracks,’ then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays. How would you describe today using only one sentence? Tell today’s sentence to one other person. Repeat each day.

Today I strolled & sweated, wept & rejoiced, embraced & retreated, giggled & sang, watched & waited, complained and supported, sent and received, and then received some more.




up next: today.

both sides now

one of my favorite songs is joni mitchell's 'both sides now', her artful description of all those feathered canyons just waiting to be explored. on a lot of days lately, i spend my drive home from work, my head in the middle of cloud canyons.

i was always one of those kids, immersed in the moment of something so that i often forgot i was in the middle of class when i should have been paying attention — the snow falling outside was much more beautiful — or sitting in a chair reading a book, when my sister told me where she was going before she walked out the door. (in my memory, the fact that i couldn't remember where she was earned me admonishment and punishment by my father, who rarely yelled at all.)

as an adult, so caught i was in a room full of readers of my own work — or in the presence of other writers — that i admit to (almost) forgetting that back home, i had a couple of kids, a husband, a dog and loads of laundry waiting for me to come back. that can be a bad thing, but for writers, it is almost a necessity, the ability to escape your own kitchen table and into the clouds from time to time.

i used to be better at it, the whole immersion thing, but in the past few years i've found myself way too distracted, by technology — and that fact that every day, it seems, i have to learn something new about it to do my job. by facebook — though how i love connecting with folks. by the weather. by food network and yesterday's to do list. by reading. by failure. and by all that napping i so like to do.

but somehow, in the last month or two i have found that old ability again and have put my head right back into the clouds.

years ago, before i even had children, my sister had her first. my sweet little niece, who looked a little bit like Tweety Bird, found herself looking at clouds one day and said: mama, where do clouds sleep? back then my sister and i talked every day, and she called me to tell me what cute thing little susan hooks had said. cute indeed, enough to nudge this dreamy-headed girl out there under the vast blue georgia sky and see for myself what the clouds were doing. 

and i wrote myself a little book, for my niece and for my brother's daughter — both about two at the time — carefully cutting and gluing construction paper shapes of windows and moons — my father's nose was the moon, his skinny legs jogging giant's knees, don't you know? — fastening cotton balls to the pages for the clouds.

when my daughter was born i made one for her — i still have it. (true to my nature, there is an actual typo in the handwritten manuscript.) at the time i was taking a children's book survey class at a local college. the final exam was to write a book (YEAH!), and  i wrote another book about bats in the attic with a similar construction paper cover. that book won the class award, though garnered a scathing critique from a woman who actually published such books. it's in my home office, collecting dust.

through the years my 'cloud book' as I came to call it, took on as many shapes as clouds themselves, amoebic in rhythm and rhyme to the point that no matter how much i loved the verses individually, they never seemed to work together. so eventually it hit the drawer.

a few weeks ago, though, i dug it out again. inspired by reverb11's prompts of what's blossoming in you?, i spent what seemed like hours looking at just what it is clouds do. and i revised. i asked my dear poetic mentor, sally buckner, if she would take a shrewd pen to it, and with her help, the problems with the rhythm and rhyme so stuck in my brain shifted like a stormy sky clearing itself to blue.  i wrote new verses, felt the lullaby take root in my head where it stayed, gently rocking my days.

And magically — after changing a word here, a line there, it is done.

it's been a long time since i could say 'done' to any of my creative work. years. i have a lot of 'almosts' and a few false starts, but to have something complete and wholly its own feels good.

and this time, i am hopeful that when i ever have grandchildren of my own, i won't have to give them to construction paper cutout version made from leftover cardboard — i can give them the book.

so hopeful i am, that over the past weeks, in addition to finishing, i reached this crazy head of mine higher in the clouds. and today i sent my manuscript to an agent. 

only once have i queried an agent, and it didn't turn out well. turns out i wasn't ready, hadn't done my homework — about the agent or her clients — and i am pretty sure there was a typo in the letter. (why do i always do that?)

but this time, i studied what to do, printing my manuscript as if it might be a book (these days, though it doesn't involve actual scissors and glue, it does require an understanding of how to print on both sides of the paper on a desktop printer, so each page is right side up... no easy task, let me tell you.) i looked at the pacing, the placing of the words on the page, studying other picture books i love for understanding of just how that works. 

and in the end, i liked what i created. a lot. (is this bragging? i hope not.)

i haven't always been so intentional. when i was just out of college, i sent my resume to the Atlanta Journal and the Washington Post — having never read either paper or been to Atlanta (i'd only driven around DC), not even bothering to check that my clips — and probably my resume — were riddled with typos. thank heaven, literally, that my next resume went to a much smaller paper and to someone who could see beyond my errors and my naivete.

i've sent essays i've written to magazines but never told anyone. didn't want to have to admit that i failed. but today it feels less like a failure than a leap of faith. somebody gets published, and those who do don't keep their manuscripts in the drawer.  (Some of the worst books i've read i've actually bought in book stores, so what is that about?)

it's a long shot, to be sure. and if i don't hear by the end of July, I am supposed to submit elsewhere. which i will do. right now, as summer begins, i'll move on to the novel i've been writing for too many years to count, knowing now that recent history proves i can finish something. after that, there are others in the drawer, so there is still much yet to do.

wish me luck. i'll keep you posted. having read an article posted by Lyn Fairchild Hawks, a great writer who a few years ago shared one of those rooms where i lost myself, i know it might take awhile. lyn is at 100 rejections for her young adult novel. but she has not lost hope. for katherine stockett, it took 60 agents before one said yes. and having let the cloud book sit in the drawer for so many years, i think i can be patient.

in the time being, i'll keep my head in those clouds. somehow i still keep looking up.

and if you feel like it, poke your head up there with me, into the feathered canyons and above them, where the sky is always the most brilliant blue.

who do you say that I am?

years ago, i opened my mailbox to find an unsigned letter that can only be described as hate mail. a few days before, i had written an opinion piece in the local newspaper — my first — about the 'academically gifted' designation at my daughter's school. she was not labeled as such, scoring abysmally on those end of grade tests i came to abhor by the time she hit high school. Not 'gifted', according to a set of questions with bubbled answers, she was among a handful of students left in her grade one day while the AG kids went on an overnight trip to a museum in a city across the state. even the teachers went. and everybody spent the night in the museum. sounds fun, doesn't it? those left behind had a substitute teacher and watched Disney movies as i recall.

after the piece ran, a few people from our school i served with on the PTA board wrote letters to the editor challenging me, and i was glad for it. some of us have to be bench sitters — sometimes not picked at all. we all can't get the blue ribbon at the end of the swim meet. but my frustration was not at the gifted program per se, it was the treatment of the 'non-gifted'...the expectation that a day watching movies was the best they deserved. 

(in later years, i would teach writing to all levels of kids from first grade to high school, and among the best writers were those designated as 'academic'.)

i don't want to start this debate again. we've moved on. 

back to the letter. the writer — who felt she knew just enough about me to make it personal — suggested that if i read something besides babysitter club books to my child maybe she would be gifted. (now how did this person know what my daughter brought home from the school library?) she went on to write that if i spent less time mopping my kitchen floor and more time engaging my children that they both would be gifted. really?  (for the record, my son was later designated as AG in language arts, so i guess i left crumbs on the floor for at least a day or two and paid him some attention. the dog was bound to lick them up anyway.) i seem to recall playing Memory with him at least twice in 18 years. wouldn't that do it?

as i read the letter i thought: this person has been in my house. she is someone who hates me thinks she knows me, though apparently hadn't snooped around not well enough to know what titles my children's bookshelves contained. my daughter loved the babysitter club books, yes, but at home we read the classics, the Newberrys and the Caldecots. (true: that by the time my kids had reached the fifth grade they had passed me in the math department, but don't attack my reading list.)

what makes me angry as i think about this now is not only did i feel attacked for my mother skills, but i allowed that letter to stop me from writing for a very long time. from the thing that is my soul. i shrank from expressing my opinion for fear of the backlash. 

somehow, though, i didn't teach my child to shrink. i knew her inner beauty, her humor, her brilliance — and her sheer tenacity — would take her places, even if her bubbled answers said she wouldn't go far. and so we kept at it, encouraging her to be our own little miss engine that could.

those test scores would never earn her the 'gifted' moniker of most of her friends. yet she thrived. excelled in student government, edited the school newspaper, even earned a couple of small scholarships. (i admit to wishing she would, just once, be tapped for the honor society, but it was not to be. damn that geometry! curse the chemistry!) 

when the time came, she was wait-listed for the college of her choice — on her very first visit she knew in her soul it was the place for her. 'i'm going to see them,' she told me when the letter came. and she did. walked right into the office of the dean of admissions saying: just let me in. i won't disappoint. 'she's borderline,' the dean said, but a few days later, they accepted her.

and she did as promised. graduated in four years if not with honors, then honorably, proudly, beautifully — with a major and a minor.

'if only every one of my students could be like her,' her advisor told her dad and me.

within three months, she had a job in her career field in NYC — a goal she had set for herself when she first saw the city at 13. two years ago, she found a new job, where she recently won the office's 'unsung hero' award. she has a blog,too.

and this morning, she reported to the corporate communications office of one of the largest — and among the most respected — newspapers in the country. she'll be working there one day a week. my child. my beautiful apparently ungifted child.

my friend Mel writes a terrific blog. she is not afraid to put her mind down on paper, but after just her second post, a riled up reader posted a comment that disturbed her. what do i do? she asked. it's part of the game, i told her. but don't let it stop you from saying what you need to say.

:=:=:

i burned that letter long ago. got back to writing at last, choosing most often to write about my own life — knowing any wrath would most likely come from my husband. and i can handle him. but i always wondered who might have been so angry at me to write it, and to put it in the mail. i have learned enough in the years since to wonder what in her own life was so unsettled that she felt the need to attack me and my child. did i know her well? do i know her still?

back then, i wanted the chance to answer her, to shake my fists in her face and say just watch what my daughter can do. but she didn't do me the courtesy of signing her name. now i want to say SEE? And this: that some of us don't need a piece of paper to predict how we'll do in the world. some of us become our best selves because it never occurs to us that we can't. or shouldn't. or won't. and sometimes we do it because of the silly paper, we know so strongly that it is wrong. 

i do have to say that my daughter likes to keep her home clean. comes to see us and can't wait to do the laundry and clean out the dishwasher. i'm not nearly as manic in my mopping as i was when she was a child, but i love the fact that i taught her something when she was growing up in my very clean — if not particularly gifted — house.

a few words

Mothers cradle and they rock.

They coach and they soothe,

aggravate and persist,

sing and celebrate,

praise and punish,

meddle and forgive.

Mothers worry and they hope.

They confuse and they cheer,

scold and brag,

spoil and surprise,

inspect and apologize.

Mothers worry.

Mothers pray and they mourn.

They plant and they believe,

provoke and protect,

bandage and bend,

push and pick up,

Mothers cope.

And they bathe us

in their love without ceasing,

and give us room

to breathe.

Children cuddle and they coo.

Children reach and they console,

annoy and prevail,

challenge and accept,

inspire and emulate,

pray and pretend.

Children play and they create.

They celebrate and they whine.

tickle and rebel,

inspect and energize,

climb and inquire,

Children dance.

Children play and they grieve.

They doubt and make believe,

Dream and disappoint,

struggle and soar,

hide and seek,

children hope.

And they grow without ceasing,

when we give them room

to breathe. 

and while you're at it, give her a bath

From In Mother Words, by Susan Byrum Rountree, 

Copyright 2003 (revised May 2011)

When I gave birth to my daughter on a frigid morning in December almost 28 years ago, I thought that meant I had become a mother. A baby to rock and coo to, that’s what I’d wanted for so long. But it wasn’t until a few days later that my transformation occurred. It happened when my own mother, who’d come to take care of us for awhile, walked out my front door with my husband and said: “Give her a bath while I’m gone.”

Now you have to know my mother to understand the power of these words. Take a bath, she was always telling me while growing up, and make it scalding. It’ll serve to scrub away whatever ails you, be it headache, splinter or broken heart.

She’d been right, of course. I’d even followed her advice not four days before. Tired of being swollen and perpetually in wait, I lowered my nine-months’ pregnant body into a scalding tub and sat, knowing this was exactly what my mother would advise me to do. And believe me, it soon cured what ailed me and my baby. A few hours later, in the middle of the night, the baby who would be named Meredith told me it was time to come into the world.

A week later, when Mama handed my daughter over to me before heading out the door, she knew full well that “Give her a bath” was code for me — her own baby girl — to take my place among the mothers of my family. It was time, not to take the bath, but give it.

Of course I resisted. I’d watched her give Meredith a bath on the giant sponge on my tiny bathroom counter, but aside from wringing a dripping washcloth over her squirming body, I’d never been in charge. I had no idea how much baby bath to use or if I should wash her hair. Where would I put her while the water was heating up? What if it got too hot? How would I, with only two hands between me, find all the soiled places between her folds, hold her slick form without dropping her on the floor?

I heard the door slam behind me and pondered all these things in my heart. Then I stared at the pink form in my arms, realizing for the very first time that my mother would be going home soon, and this baby was mine to keep.

As I remember this, I think about the time we’d been studying the Chinese culture in 6^th grade, and I asked my mother if I could take one of her china bowls for show and tell.

“Only if you don’t break it,” she said to me. So I wrapped it carefully in newspaper, put it in a paper grocery bag and set out. That afternoon I triumphantly walked the mile home, juggling my mother’s bowl and an armful of books. I made it all the way to the back door, then paused, the books and the bowl in one arm, trying to open the door handle. Need I say more?  If I couldn’t be trusted with a china bowl, how on earth could I be trusted with a baby?

I thought about not giving my baby a bath at all and just saying I did. I mean, she looked clean enough to me. But after 20 years of living under the roof of the master of bath giving, I knew full well she’d find me out.

Poor Meredith. I tried to be gentle. Her wide eyes watched as I tested the water and soaped the soft cloth. She was tiny, slippery, not six pounds, but to me she weighed 16. I was as careful as I knew to be, and after a minute or two, my heart slowed a little, and I began singing to her, marveling at the very idea that this tiny form was so much a part of me.

When my mother came home that afternoon, Meredith was not only clean, but fed, burped and sleeping. I had finally begun my journey as her mother.

Soon enough, though, you learn that when you are out in the world with your new baby, everyone becomes your mother. They are well-meaning when they tell you you’re holding her the wrong way, offer advice on how to properly burp her or what to do if she won’t stop crying. Sometimes their advice is worth keeping.

I learned this lesson on my first trip out of the house with Meredith when we paid our first visit to the pediatrician’s office, that command post for mothers who claim to know more about how to raise a baby than other mothers in the room.

 This was January, middle Georgia, and though that part of the South is known more for its gentle winters, 1984 began as the year before it had ended, biting cold and blustery.

I had dressed Meredith for her outing, first in t-shirt and diapers, then in tiny white tights and pink sailor dress. Next came a hooded sweater and socks. After that, a quilted snowsuit that was so big her feet didn’t reach the toes. Then came a blue toboggan, bought when we thought sure she’d be a boy. The final layer was made up of two, mind you, two soft blankets.

 So tightly bound was she that you could barely see her tiny face. Her body wouldn’t bend in the car seat, not doubt, since she’d doubled her weight in the 10 minutes it took me to dress her. Never mind. My baby would not be catching cold in this weather.

When I reached the doctor’s office, the nurses gathered around to see her. I beamed, at this most perfect creature I’d created, almost by myself.

“Take some of these covers off this baby,” said one of them, surely a mother of 10. Could she tell that I’d been at it less than two weeks?

 I stood back, mortified, as she began to peel the layers away from my newborn, revealing the face of a child who has loved hot weather ever since.

 “Always be sure that you give her space to breathe, ” the nurse told me.

(If I’d tried to take Meredith out of the house when my mother was still visiting, not doubt she would have been the one to give me this advice. I related this story to my sister, and she admitted that though her daughter was born in the middle of August, the first time she took her outside, she wrapped her accordingly. My mother, who was a witness to this folly, was quick to remove the layers from my niece, lest she have a heat stroke. )

Give her a bath, give her room to breathe. I think of my own mother, and how many times she bathed me, not only in scalding water to scrub my ills away, but in the love she gave while I was growing up. I had no other model and surely I didn’t need one. She gave me room to breathe, too, to learn the ropes without her looking over my shoulder every minute.

We all need the bath to still us, and the breathing room to keep our lives moving forward on our own power.

Bathe the baby. Then give her room to breathe.

When I look back on these almost 28 years of being a mother, I know I’ve tried to follow these two rules. Both my children, now grown, know all about the power of the hot bath, and though they may think I’ve suffocated them with my questions about their lives, I hope they can appreciate those times when I’ve given them some needed air, allowing them to shape their own futures the way they see fit.

One day it will be my turn from my children to mother me. I hope they’ll remember that I’ll need to be bathed, not only with water, but in love and understanding. And I can tell you for sure, I will never outgrown my own need for room to breathe.

21 — a little ramble down the road

i remember the day i met my little niece, kendall. she was a newborn, lying on my grandmother's bed on a summer sunday, and suddenly i wasn't the baby of the family anymore. she didn't look like us — we the fair haired, blue-eyed blondes as babies — she, a  dark wisp of hair framing a pudgy face (now that was like me). As i studied her features, i searched for traces of my brother and sister, my parents in her face.

i remember watching my grandmother — her knotted fingers dancing over kendall's tiny pinched lips in hopes of sparking a giggle — wondering how this little baby with the brown hair and olive complexion would fit into the 'we' we had always been.

this was new to me. all of a sudden, our little family of five had grown to seven — with my sister-in-law, then eight with baby kendall — we would be 10 by that fall, as my second niece, susan hooks, would be born just six weeks later. In another six I would be married. how could it be that we had expanded so quickly, when we had been five for so long?

another five years, and we were 13, with the addition of five little boys and another girl, two of those children my own.

the three girls grew up and fell in love, had the whole fairy princess wedding thing only a few months apart. in between, one nephew found out he was a father of a one-year-old. blink, and our original five had multiplied ourselves by four. you would think we were rabbits.

laura gray

a week ago, we became an uneven number, as kendall had the second great-grandchild for my parents, a baby girl.

21. i seem to recall that my father used to say he wanted enough grandchildren to have a basketball team. now we have two starting lineups with a pretty deep bench on each. (baby laura gray, at 20 inches, is pretty tall, come to think of it.) we could have a whole tournament roster before we are finished with our expansion project.

about a month before lg was born, my parents came to town for a baby shower for her. the first thing my dad said when he walked in the door was that he wanted us to look at our calendars and find a date when he could show us the farms. my father rarely asks his children for much, and so we wanted to oblige.

we are not farmers. but my grandfather grew up with a man who farmed sometimes, and bigdaddy like land. i spent many sundays in my childhood in the back seat of his ford, driving down dirt roads, watching bigdaddy pick up a clod of dirt and throw it, pull a bloom off the cotton plant and crumble it in his fingers. from the back seat of his car i learned how to tell soy beans from cotton, to appreciate the beauty of a perfectly-laid field of tobacco, rows of corn not parched from summer sun. in his own garden, which was massive, i helped my grandfather dig potatoes from the ground, pick corn and tomatoes, helped my grandmother shell butterbeans on the front porch. i knew just about where my grandfather's small farms were — one down the road just north of their little village, the other on the way to nags head, near the great dismal swamp. but daddy, at 82, wanted us to know exactly. and so on saturday, we went.

the first i would call a field. it's where the man who rents it from my father and his sister used to plant a few rows of sweet corn at the edge nearest my grandparents' kitchen, so they would always have corn for Christmas. on one side is what used to be their kitchen window, on the other are their graves. 

bigdaddy chose this burial spot so my grandmother could look out at him, there under the cedar tree that shaded his headstone, as he waited for her to join him one day. the cedar tree is gone now.

on the day of his funeral when i visited my grandfather's grave i felt suffocated, for if ever there was a man all about fresh air, it was my bigdaddy... and there, stuck under all that ground, he couldn't so much as a wisp. an unreasonable thought i know, for if ever there is a man in heaven, it is him. just his body is under all that earth. but still.

there is a story, that on the day bigdaddy was buried, a man who had worked with him had shown up too late to view his body in the funeral home, so while the family greeted relatives and friends inside the church, the funeral guys surrounded his casket, opening it up, so the man could pay his respects. it was a glorious fall day, and 20 years later i think of that day and how my grandfather likely took a great, deep breath looking out at the blue sky above him, the clouds swirling by and was just at peace with God. and life. and death. nobody ever told my grandmother, but i know she would have liked this, his last grasp of air.

when i looked at his grave this week, i found a small blue flower growing next to his foot stone. life. again.

my husband and i drove with my parents to two other small farms that day, then ended our tour in a place i have never been. though as the crow flies not four miles from where my grandparents lived for over 60 years, i had never even seen — nor had known it was there — the family cemetery where my great-grandparents are buried. my grandfather's parents. it sits behind my father's cousin's house.

now my grandfather was the youngest of 13, so my daddy has a lot of cousins. one of bigdaddy's sisters was named mildred minnesota— living in the northeastern corner of north carolina i know not why —  but aint (aunt) minnie is there. as is moses, my great-grandfather, and mary, my grandfather's mother.

my father at the family cemetery

moses died not long after my father was born. no doubt, since my grandfather was so much younger than his oldest siblings, moses knew some of his great-grandchildren. as i stood over my his grave this week i wondered what sort of man he was — born just 10 years before the civil war began, died just six months before the stock market crash of 1929 — he must have had a thing or two to say.

and he must have been a good man, because his youngest child certainly was a good enough man to require someone who respected him so much that he asked the casket handlers open it, one last time, to the open air.

on saturday, as i looked around this little family plot, eyeing the stump of a cedar tree that must have shaded ol' moses from the hot sun, i couldn't help but think that bigdaddy had chosen beneath the cedar tree as his resting spot because his father had done the same.

what does this have to do with little laura gray, you ask. well, i'm getting to that. 

my father, just the other day, asked my mother if she thought when she was young that she would ever live to meet her great-grandchildren. "I never thought about it," my mother said. Somehow I think my father did. His own father met every single one of his greats, those children of my siblings and my cousins who are now grown and making their ways in the world. Though daddy yet has not met laura gray, he will soon, knowing i am sure that he hopes he can meet all of the greats in his life yet to come.

great-bigdaddy moses didn't know me. he died just four months after my father was born. but if you start with his youngest child, add my grandmother, my father and his sister — their spouses and their children each...

i am number 21 on that list. just like little lg is on ours. 21.

maybe someday her grandfather will bring her to the farms, show her where her great-great grandfather built his house and watched over his bluebirds. where her grandfather grew up. maybe he will take her to the family cemetery. i hope, though he is not so much the family storyteller as i am, he will tell her a little something of the people whose names are on the stones, will tell her just how much it means that she is tied to them, and to their land, too.

Welcome Happy Morning — this is not an Easter story, well, not really

This morning I woke to my dog sniffing out our bedroom window at the wind. He does this every morning, rising usually before the sun is up, and now that it's warm enough for us to sleep with the window open, he sniffs. If you watch him, his nose is the only thing on his body that moves...often he keeps his eyes shut tight against the rising sun, so he can get the pulse of the morning. What creatures may have traipsed through our yard in the night, who (meaning neighborhood dog) has already walked by before day was up? Has his friend Sookie walked by without him? Is there a new girl dog in town? And I like to think he is, after living all this time with me, listening to the birds. He sees things with that nose, that it takes a discerned human mind to detect.

It is Easter. I love Easter. The new chance for everyone. All church and new birth, hymns and lilies, all the welcoming of this happy morning and the trumpets and drums. The Good News. I used to take my kids' pictures every year in their Easter outfits, and today I have looked through the Facebook postings of my younger friends — of dying eggs and fitting heads with bonnets, plucking flowers from the yard for the Easter cross, and I just miss it. Just plain miss it all over the place. The whole making of the Easter Bunny cake and the jelly beans in the basket that somehow don't ever get eaten, even that. (Now I just keep a bowl of jelly beans on the counter, and they disappear.)

But Easter is not Easter without church for me, and in the past few years, our church has become so crowded on Easter morning that we have found ourselves at times so pinched in our seats that we wondered if we could find enough welcome in our morning to say "Happy Easter!" (Please, don't say: what a Scrooge!)

So in the past couple of years, we have chosen the Easter Vigil, an ancient service that starts with fire in the dark and ends with trumpets and light, and a welcome, for the day that is yet to rise. And room in the pew. So that's what we did last night.

Mind you that this has changed my entire Easter tradition. The whole dying of the egg thing, the baskets with straw, the lamb after the morning service. This year, like the past few,  our daughter and her husband were not here, so we had lamb chops on the grill before the Vigil, broke bread with our son in the back yard with the bluebirds flitting in and out of the box. Not at all a bad thing, but different.

And today, well, today, instead of church —and because we had already celebrated the Resurrection — we went sailing.

My husband is a sailor. On Saturdays, he heads due north (in the car), an hour away to the Fortune's Fool, which (six boats, different names ago) I accused of being his mistress. I've calmed down about that a bit now. He has his Saturday sails and I have my Saturday writing and reading and naps, (my laundry), and only on the prettiest, windiest days do I feel guilty that I am not with him.

But today... well, today, we planned it. Looked at the weather forecast five days ago and planned our whole weekend around our afternoon sail. Our son, who lives in our same town but you would never know it unless he is hungry, came "home for the weekend," for church, for sleep, to eat, to sail.

It is a rare day when the three of us are together, untethered to anything but each other. And on a sailboat, in the middle of a windy lake, well, that's what we were. Tethered. Or at least I imagine that's how he felt at times during our weekend.

Our son often thinks we are idiots, bumbling middle-aged folks who can't possibly have one interesting thing to say, not one inkling of a creative bone between the two of us. Honestly, what do we do with our lives when our children leave us to start theirs? I can't possibly imagine.

I took the new camera I am still trying to learn how to use,  and he said it's too dark to capture the Whooping Crane I saw. (He does know how to take pictures, and he was right.) When the boat veered too close to shore, his dad said: see any Indians? My 24-year-old threw back that he "was 24-years-old," and his dad needed to cultivate a few new jokes. He was, again, right.

It was not a day of crisp conversation, as it would have been if Big Sis had been aboard. I spent much of the time with my eyes closed, listening to the wind, or watching the clouds (I am working on a children's book with clouds as the main characters, but though I read renditions of this book to him as a child, did I share it with him? No... )

But none of this mattered, because we were together, the three of us, breaking bread in a boat with the wind whipping and the sails furled and the clouds spinning all around. (I did once or twice think about the story of Jesus visiting the disciples after the Resurrection, as they sailed and fished, but would have left with empty nets, had he not told them to fish from the other side.)

I sat, as two of the most important men in my life worked in tandem to manage that wind as it filled the sails, whipped them round and about and round again, my hands on the dog. (We were only scared once.)

On the way home, the dog sat in my lap, exhausted from hanging on. (There is of course another story as to why.) I watched my two men in the front seat, silent except on occasion, trying to find piece of my son in his dad. They don't look much alike, but if you know what to look for, it is there.

we have hail

when the Princess Pea was young, her favorite movie was Twister. there is a scene in the movie, when the storm chasers say: we have hail! we have hail! seconds later, a category five tornado touches down in the field around them and lays havoc on the land. the princess so wanted to chase those storms, but i knew better.

when I was a child, a tornado blew through my town, felling a 200-year-old oak tree on my house. i remember watching branches blow by the window, how it sounded like a giant freight train screeching on brakes, the crashing glass, how we couldn't find my sister, who had just ridden through the back yard on her banana bike.

years later, a second old oak was felled in my parents' yard, not long after we drove into the driveway on our way to the beach. though nothing hit our house, we later walked down the streets of my childhood, marveling at the holes the fallen trees had left in the sky. Add in another tornado on a may night in 1989 the felled trees in our yard in winston-salem, a hurricane 1996 when we lost more than a dozen, and let's just say i have great respect for wind, and the randomness of its ways.

yesterday, when my husband brought to me in his palm a chunk of ice the size of a golf ball and said: we have hail, i paid attention. crystallized, an iced jewel, cold and melting against the heat of his hand, it was a harbinger, to be sure.

we were attending a wedding reception — the bride having just dance with her father, the groom just about to take over the floor with his mom — when the lights went out, silencing the dj. minutes before, the lights had been flickering off and on as kids checked their smart phones for news... it was coming our way.  and then, all was dark, silent — all except the wind and rain, that hail... my friend grace, who survived a twister in 1988 that blew her dining room table into her neighbor's yard and her daughter's crib into the living room, hid in the hallway.

And then my husband brought the hail.

We watched, as whitecaps filled the club swimming pool, as sheets of wind blew through and through and through, and then, as always happens, the sun just came on out. the reception went on, though in the dark, still. we wondered what was out there, what had happened from all that wind.

our dog was alone, and so we left earlier than planned. on our way home, i checked my phone and had texts from friends who had seen the news. were we ok? we checked with our son, living near the reception site, and he was fine, had called about the dog. i wondered what we would find at home. he was safe, our yard scattered with scraps of insulation, from we knew not where.

once home, we checked the weather — bad news — a home improvement warehouse in a town some 40 miles south, destroyed, customers safely huddled in the back. houses all around destroyed, people missing. power poles down, but lines nowhere to be found. we watched the radar, called my parents, told them to get to the hall, the closet, because it was headed their way.

an hour later, they had been spared, their dog annoyed at the interruption of her day. 30 miles away, 11 people were killed. many in the same family. three little children died a few miles from here when a tree fell on their trailer. one friend told me this morning that her neighborhood streets were scattered with mail from Sanford, where the lowe's warehouse was destroyed.

today people all around us are sorting through, picking up, grieving. the rest of us are praying, trying to figure out how to help. i've been watching news accounts and youtube videos made by storm chasers and others, marveling at the beauty and violence swirled together in the clouds.

the wind has its ways, and no one knows the strength of them. pay attention. help wherever you can.

Beety Jean

I don't remember who first called my mother Beety Jean. I don't think it was me. But sometimes, in our most endearing moments, I call her that. Beety Jean.

Her name is Betty Jean. When she goes to the doctor, which is frequent these days, they call her Betty, and I don't know who they are calling when they come to the waiting room door. Most people who know and love her now, just call her BehJean. That's what my father calls her.  Don't cross the ts, don't take on the y...just BehJean... 

Today she turned 83. 83. What I remember about her birthday growing up, is that we gave her azaleas for the yard, and that she told us that Roosevelt died that day, in Warm Springs, Ga., when she was 17.
I hope to live as long as she has, to see my children settled,  grandchildren just about, have a great-grandchild  — as she does — one just starting out, and another on the way.  Her life has not been easy, but most folks who know her now think it has been. And she will never say.

She is funny, but she does not often show it. She is fond of her granddaughters and grandsons, especially, and loves when they make something over her. (hint hint)

I can recall only once when she ever raised her voice at us as children, though I know there were many times when she must have wanted to. She had practice, at being patient.

Some years ago, I wrote  a story of what I remembered about her as my mother, and how that connected to the mother that was me. Here it is. One day, if she will let me, I will write her story, as she remembers it herself.

Hat Check copyright 1995

By Susan Byrum Rountree

My mother had a hat to match every Sunday outfit: a wide-rimmed black hat with a crisp grosgrain bow, a red straw hat with netting for her face, and her favorite, a bright blue cloche style covered with pink flowers and tiny green feathers that waved in the breeze. Each Sunday be it winter or spring, she would delve deep into her closet through her neat hatbox stack, emerging, matched and stunning, ready for church in her best hat. She was beautiful, poised, reserved and in control, her silver hair curling softly from beneath her chosen covering.  Watching her from my place on the pew, she was all I ever dreamed of being — thin and beautiful and stunning in a hat.

I should have known I could never emulate my mother. I wore a few hats myself as a child, always with elastic bands uncomfortably hugging my chin. But I was silly, not sophisticated like my mother. Her hats were an extension of her personality, each one chosen carefully as a way for her, the mother of three young children, to show the world that despite our prickly heat, bandaged elbows and broken bones, she still had control. Just look at her hats.

I’ve always looked awful in hats. My hair is just short enough to be crushed beneath a brim, and my ears poke out just a little too far. That’s not to say I don’t have hats of my own. I actually have many more than my mother could ever dream of fitting into her small bedroom closet, but each one is invisible to the naked eye.

My self-portrait mirrors the  drawing of the old man in a favorite children’s story of mine, Hats for Sale.  There I am with poked out ears and oogling eyes trying to balance a wobbly row of hats on my unkempt head.

On top is my mother hat, a hardhat, its shell stuffed with tissue, Band-Aids, and shrill sounding whistles, should I need to be a nurse, a referee, tutor, guidance counselor, fireman, handyman, construction worker and a host of other people, depending upon my momentary needs. (This of course is not to be confused with the parent hat, a beanie which is worn specifically during moments when your preteen daughter’s boyfriend calls and you want to embarrass her by actually saying hello.) Below the mother hat is a chauffeur’s cap, under which I can be baseball coach, piano player, ambulance or sportsfan, depending, again, on moments and needs.  Squeezed in the middle is the wife hat, which comes complete with it’s own “I told you so” ribbon tied around it’s brim, a honeydo list waving like Minnie Pearl’s price tag and a night light, should I fall asleep before my husband’s flight gets in. This hat, which doubles as a video prompt screen to remind me how to conduct adult conversation, is a must for nights out at the movies, and dinner with friends.

Scattered in the pile are a dozen other styles for when I need to be a daughter, sister, neighbor or friend, and a “don’t mess with me” Stetson I keep on the kitchen counter at supper in case one of those annoying telephone salesmen should call. Somewhere far below them all is my writer’s hat, a tiny pillbox, which I never really ever take off, but which is only seen in rare moments when all the other hats are not otherwise occupied.

Not being a one-hat-at-a-time kind of person, I usually have several hats fighting for head space at once. My chef’s hat creates at the stove while I talk on the phone with the help of my business hat and prepare a snack for the kids in my short-order cook hat, my writer’s hat constantly feeding me with first lines of stories it wishes I’d write. (Perhaps I’ll get a secretary hat to write them all down.)  But you won’t find my unworn hats tucked neatly away in boxes. They are likely strewn across the kitchen counter, waiting for someone responsible, like my mother, to put them away.

The difference between my mother and me is that she chose each and every one of her hats for a purpose; if anyone had asked, I would choose to keep only a few of mine. Most, as a friend reminded me the other day, are thrown at me as if I were a hat rack, standing empty and inviting.

I daydream of being a magician, top hat in hand, trying to pull one hat out of the pile to wear alone without all the others spilling onto the floor. Every now and then, I can do it, though on most days, my hat stack tips and sways like the deck of a ship in stormy weather. A few stay put, but many fall, and I scramble to put them back in place before anyone notices I’m not managing.

Despite my varied collection, I still lack that one hat to give me the poise provided by my mother’s feathered cloche. Perhaps its because I’ve never been in control of my life as my mother was of hers. Or maybe, as I’d rather think, she  really wore all the same hats I do, but she just used her favorite feathered one to hide them all. 

Happy Birthday, Beety Jean. Once again. sbr

i could write this so many ways

my day began at 6:15 a.m., with a black dog on the deck next door, covered with a blanket. and she was dead. though i have not quite ended this day literally, it ended for me with a phone call from an 82-year-old woman whom i didn't know until this morning, telling me she is all right.

my neighbor lost is beloved 13-year-old black lab last night. and because he is grieving, he could not bare to do anything but leave her, her head resting on her dog bed, a blanket covering her as if she had only gone to sleep.

i knew she was there, having said my peace to her as she lay, still warm. I rose this morning to walk my own dog, checking as i went out, and she was there. (she has since gone to her final resting place.)

i was late to work, which is fairly usual for me — (since i work for my church they are forgiving:) — having stopped for a minute to visit a friend... and so i was in a hurry, and as i rushed along the road, something struck me as odd.

 a lincoln town car, just like my parents used to own, crammed into a utility pole.

weird place to leave your car, i thought as i passed, crammed into an utility pole like that  (i am not entirely sure why i thought this)..  then i saw them. an elderly couple inside the car. and no one else but me around. the car steaming, just a little.

i did a u-turn on what is usually a very busy street, thinking only: this could be my parents. as i approached, the man — the driver — dressed in a suit, opened the door to the car. i saw a woman in the passenger seat trying to dial her cell phone. 

have you called 911? no, tried, to, but no. so i did. it took six rings. the utility pole was severed, held precariously by lines above our heads. the man and the woman sat, all of us unsure of what to do... they were not visibly injured.  

at this point i have to remind everybody that i am the only person in my immediately family with NO medical training. i am grateful no one was bleeding.

more people came, helped them get out of the car as i talked to 911 dispatchers.  moved them to safety.

this is a road i take every single day to work, and again on Sundays, to church. 

a man stopped in the turn lane. rolled down his window: is anybody hurt? not that we could see. he got out of his car, wearing a neon vest: police chaplain. just happened to be passing by. God puts us where we need to be, he said.

i sat with the woman. her name was Gaynelle. she was from out of town, a small town i had heard of but have never visited, and she was headed with her brother to a funeral, just one street over from where they were. her brother was fine, then veered right, ran over a mail box, slammed into the pole. seemed to remember he had a coughing fit.

as we talked, i told her my name. she told me hers. where she was from.. which if you are from Eastern NC, which I am, is really the second thing you say to anyone you meet. the third thing is: what does your daddy do... we never got to that.

"it is so nice to meet you," she said.. and so as i said: so nice to meet you, too, but i wish the circumstances were different,  i thought this lady has some salt. i was about to cry, and she was making introductions. she is 80, at least. trying to find a number on her cell. i thought of my own mother, my dad, who won't even turn on the cell phone when they are in the car. 

help arrived. they were in safe hands, so i left after what seemed a very long time, but was probably only about 20 minutes from their hitting the pole. 

i was unable, honestly, to concentrate on my work. with the glory of google and the nature of small towns in n.c., i plugged her first name into a box, and found where she lives, her phone number.

all day i wondered about her. i drove home, and six hours later, the nice people who work those utility poles were still trying to replace the one that broke in the crash. in late afternoon, i called, left a message.

20 minutes later she called. she was home. safe. she and her brother had been declared just fine, and the nice police chaplain had followed them to the church, where they made most of the funeral, went to the burial, came back and had lunch, and then made their way two hours south, with their nephew, driving them home. what? they crashed into a utility pole, totaled their car. yet made it to their appointed destination. and then some.

again: she will be 82 next month. she lives alone. i'll be fine, she said to me on the phone.  it is amazing to find so many wonderful people in one place at the same time. everybody was just so nice.

well shouldn't everybody be?

i am not alone. and this day rattled me. all day i wanted to come home, take a rest. and she kept on with her day. i am sure you were scared, i said to her. well, yes, i was, she said. no inflection, no emotion just fact. yes it scared me. but we are fine.

up and away

a month ago, i was asked a question, and i answered just this way. when i look back at that list, i can see that i didn't do such a bad job on the little things, but on the big, not so much.

one of the little things, actually the first thing that came to my mind was "fly a kite." not rocket science, since it was the third day of the windiest month, and for some reason my first thought was of mrs. norfleet's 3rd grade classroom bulletin board, filled with kites, soaring in the wind.

as i moved through the month, more than once, i thought about the question, what if? what if, as i climb into my car to run to the grocery store or work or church, what if this is the day. what if, as i nod off to sleep, i would not wake up? and then, turns out it wasn't the last day, so i moved into another one, thankful that i had another chance to eat tomato sandwiches. to wear blue. to look for shooting stars.

and then, my friend kay, emailed. she was flying down to see her mother, and on her way back to va., she would be more than happy to pick me up, if i wanted to come for a visit.

well. i did want to visit, but when kay says flying, she means flying. in a plane. with four seats. and she's the pilot.

here's the thing. i don't mind flying, when i am up in the air and looking down at all those beautiful clouds and when i get close to home i can recognize the water tower near my house, the marina where my husband keeps his boat, love when all the world becomes a map. from up there, there is not one damn thing i can do about anything, so i read my book. and i am not sitting right next to the pilot. but during those take-offs and landings, well, that's when i know full well i could meet my end. so i pray a lot.

but that's in a big plane... a BIG plane... kay's is a jet, and she travels in it like i travel in my car. and she is good at it, zipping up and down the east coast, transporting dogs for rescue to their new forever homes.

still. as i accepted her kind invitation — because i really wanted to meet her husband and her dogs and see her in her office with the birds fluttering around outside — i thought: could this be the way? could that question about what would i do if i knew march would be my last month.. was it prophetic? would i go out doing something so not like me? something not on my list?

the morning of the flight, i tried to straighten up my closet. i paid some bills. sat a little longer with the dog. paced. and paced some more. on the way to the airport, i called my children. (i would wait to call my parents when i was safe in va.)  i didn't want to be scared. she wasn't scared to ride in the car with me when she came to visit. i wanted to be a new me. a brave one, the one on the charm my friend lee gave me for Christmas.

and so, i walked out on the tarmac with kay, and i climbed in. my husband took pictures. kay and i gave the thumbs up. i need to show you how to open the door, she said, in case something happens, and we need to get out, then added: on the ground.

yes. i would need to know that.

it'll be a little bumpy, she said as we taxied. i could not find a strap to hold onto. 

i prayed... no, don't let this be the day, the way...i really hadn't had a chance to clean out the fridge or my dresser drawers, and i didn't want my friend grace to have to come in and do all that for me...it would just be too embarrassing... and then, we were off, up (and down a few times... yes, it was bumpy.) and as i looked around, i could see the water tower, and in another 15 minutes there was the marina, the tiny speck of a boat down there that we sail from time to time.

i listened as kay talked to the air traffic controllers, a tag team of folks from the small airports between here and there connected by the radio. she turned a lot of nobs, calculated a lot of what might have been algorithms. i was thankful she was the smartest 10th grader i knew all those years ago.

when we were cleared for landing, the controller said: thank you for flying with us today. i hope you've enjoyed flight. "they know me, i fly so much," she said. 

landing was easy. by then i was a pro. we had a great visit. good food. friends. long walks. dogs. even a special visit with my friend mel's 94-year-old grandmother, who just so happens is a client of kay's. (that's a whole nother story.) we even met some cute little lambs. i talked kay into buying meal worms for her bluebirds, and moving their house. (they have since built a nest.)

while i was there, kay's friend left her a message saying there was a rumor on facebook that she had been flying on sunday and had disappeared. she laughed. i wasn't about to.

on monday morning, i woke to thunder at 5:30 a.m. thunder? couldn't be, i thought, then flashes and more thunder. in the dark i calculated where my husband might meet us on the ground, so we would not have to fly. by 7 i was up and dressed, ready to call him. surely we would not fly in this weather.

"oh, it's gonna blow through here by the time we take off," kay said. and thought as she pulled the plane from its hanger it was pouring, she was right. by liftoff, it was clear enough to see the mountains around us. the flight above the clouds was smooth, blissful. but coming back to rdu was more challenging on that monday morning. cloud cover, lots of traffic. we were rerouted a couple of times. i could not see the water tower. kay talked to the controllers, at one point saying: where the hell are we? i found a strap to hold onto. prayed. and then... land-ho! she landed, and it felt like we were skimming. she is that good.

"you were a great passenger," she said as we taxied to the terminal. "the first time i flew with lee (her husband), i was screaming."

what was i to say?

when i met my husband in the terminal, i saw him with new eyes. at home hugged the dog, called my parents (whom i knew had been worrying about me the whole weekend.) let my kids know i was back.

the next week i read about the air traffic controller in dc who fell asleep, causing two jumbo jets to have to land on their own... on their own...how in the world? the whole thing is computerized, but still.

a friend of mine said the other day that she thought i was growing, and she didn't mean growing sideways, but that when she met me over 10 years ago, no way that me would have flown on a tiny plane to visit a friend.

"i never thought you'd do it," my husband said, when i told him about her comment. "do what?"

"fly on that tiny plane." well, when i wrote fly a kite at the first of march i meant a kite. i never once thought: plane. that part was total improv. and i think kay for helping me be a little braver than i was.

today i called my parents, to check in. my dad said: you saw there were two plane crashes this week. (translation: please don't fly again like that, or wait til i won't know about it.) i had seen the news, said prayers for those lost souls, thinking that could have been me. and kay. 

since april has come, i have taken a new look at my march list. like i said, i've done a few things: fed my birds, said yes and, listened, sung too loudly, studied my orchids, filled a vase with hydrangeas, thanked God, worn blue, napped in the sun, added charms to my bracelet, made rolls, driven down a country road (it was too cold to put the windows down), helped a stranger, smelled puppy breath, stared at the sky, believed it's possible, opened the windows, captured the light, forgiven, taught someone, made much ado... i still have a lot on that list yet to do, but i have done so many other things that i never even thought of. I dusted off a children's goodnight book manuscript i wrote 30 years ago and wrote new verses. planted lettuce. hugged my sister (and my brother), played with with my four-year-old great nephew, took my son to lunch. celebrated birthdays and babies- and brides-to-be. not one day did i fly a kite.

mrs. norfleet's april bulletin board, way back in third grade, was covered with umbrellas. and raindrops. today, though the sun pours into my kitchen, i think of girls in yellow rain boots, umbrellas in hand, stomping at puddles. that's what i'm going to do this month. stomp at the puddles, to see how big a ripple i can make.