pulling out the stops

let me start off by saying i am not an overtly religious person. being a cradle Episcopalian, i am not at all comfortable talking about God to people i don't know. but i pray every day, i go to church every week, and i understand that God does work in my life all the time. even when i don't ask Him to. and even when i least deserve it.

i've said before on this blog that i work at my church. and i love my job. it allows me to do everything i have learned in 30 years as a writer and even to learn a few things i didn't know before. and i love the people i work with.

people who don't work for churches might think that in every day there are moments when God is just about everywhere as you work. that may be true for some, but a lot of the time, i've found a day's makeup to be much like i imagine that of the secular office world — things like yelling at the office copier for not printing things right (ours is apparently post-menopausal) or not understanding how the phone system works. or having people stop by asking you to do things that aren't in your job description or emails about all the typos you make during a given week. (that would be a lot).

sometimes, though, you do find God moments, and not necessarily when you're sitting in the pews on Sunday trying to listen really hard to the message and not think about the mess you left on your desk just down the hall or the work you have to get started on the next day when you come back to work.



one thing that probably doesn't happen much in the secular world is having organ music waft down the hallways. real live organ music, not some recorded stuff, emitting from thousands of pipes that are just getting used to their voices. and it's loud and sweet and moving and oh, so, like you think God's voice would sound like, if you could actually hear it.



a God moment happened this week, and it began with music. my boss heard it first and wandered down the hall toward the church as if drawn by the pied piper, and i followed. we've recently installed a new organ in our nave, (well, i lifted nary a pipe) and it is not unusual for us to hear our organist, Kevin, practicing for Sunday. but this, well, this was different.



once inside the almost empty church, i chuckled as the theme from Star Wars shouted from the pipes. then my eyes moved toward a small cluster of women gathered in the pews. one sat in a wheelchair, and as i drew closer, i recognized her as one of our parishioners whose body is waging a battle with Lou Gehrig's Disease. i last saw her two years ago when she came to have her picture taken for the church directory. dressed in a sweater as blue as a bachelor's button, she was beautiful, and i told so. she tried to speak, but had clearly lost her voice, and i asked if she had laryngitis. she wrote on a pad and handed it to me, explaining that the disease was talking now. 

today she can no longer walk, though she can grip the pad and as she sat next to the pew, she wrote down the music she wanted to hear Kevin play for her own private concert. 

i sat in a pew across the aisle and listened, as Kevin played 'Silent Night' and 'Amazing Grace' — in ways i'd never heard them in all my years of listening. i pulled out the prayer book and said a few silent prayers for another parishioner and friend in the hospital. (and a couple for myself.)

and then Kevin said: now i'm going to pull out all the stops.

from the moment he played the first notes of Bach's "Toccata in D minor"  (having no real classical music knowledge, i know it as the organ music from Phantom of the Opera) the change in the room was palpable.

i watched Kevin play, wishing i was sitting behind him so i could see the movement of his fingers and arms as he worked at the console, pulling out stops and playing keys and pedals, giving his new console a real workout. then suddenly i felt the music wrap itself around me, and i just closed my eyes, hearing each organ note, not only with my ears but within me, transported, as he played, to somewhere i had not visited before.

and he played on. and on, notes i had never heard, like a new parent coaxing this infant instrument to speak up, and clearly.

photo: graham rountree of rountreemedia

when i did open my eyes, they were drawn upward, toward the pipes themselves, their powerful notes blending as they shouted, whispered, shouted again. i have not yet found the adjectives to adequately describe what i heard. but it was beautiful.

finally i looked at the clutch of women gathered around their chair-bound friend, and they were weeping. 

Kevin played more softly then, and my boss and i slipped quietly out and back to the work at hand, but the moment hasn't left me. Kevin's playing was meant as a gift for a woman who can rarely, if she ever will again, hear music played in the church she loves. yes, the gift was hers, but all of us present received it, too.

for the past few years i have reported on the progress as our new organ was being built. and in august last year, when the first pipes began to arrive, i started taking pictures — hundreds of them — to record this historic moment in the life of our parish. i've climbed up in the pipe chamber, learned that pipes are made of wood and steel and range in size from the height and breadth of a fledgling oak to some the size of a golf pencil. they are round and square. and the keys that make them work are crafted of polished bone and rosewood. i've listened as the organ builders refined the voice of each of those thousands of pipes to fit our space. 

but in that moment, i came to understand just how an organ is so much more than a collection of pipes and wood. it's a breathing thing.

i've written and rewritten that last sentence a dozen times now. it just sounds so over-the-top, clichéd to call a musical instrument a living thing. well, it was an over-the-top moment for me. it felt to me like God's voice got down from the lofty place we often put it and sat in the pew with me. and with the woman in the wheelchair. i don't know how she feels about her disease, but i can imagine how i would feel. I would want to roar as loudly as those pipes, saying 'can't you hear me? i am angry!', and then i would probably cry softly for a little while.

if you think about it real hard, maybe what happened on monday of this week, was that our new organ gave God a voice to speak to a woman who won't ever have a voice again and He said i am angry too. and i am crying with you. but despite all, there is still great beauty in the world. and she — we — all understood what He was saying.

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

to my pea

it was the coldest night anybody in middle georgia could remember. our red geraniums the size of cantaloupes just that morning now bowing under the frost. i felt swollen the size of the world, my nine-month's pregnant body ricocheting emotion all over our tiny house.


it was just four days after Christmas. the tree had been up since Thanksgiving, and two days before we had stripped its almost bare limbs of our meager ornaments and tossed it out with the wrapping paper. the washer, housed in a shed attached to the house had frozen solid, so i hadn't been able to wash the sheets. and though i had hired a woman to clean our house because i could hardly bend, she didn't show that day, so i spent most of the day mopping and vacuuming, knowing my mother would be coming soon.


as i crawled into bed exhausted, i couldn't keep the tears from coming. i lay in the dark, unsure of why in the world the young man who snored softly beside me had even wanted to marry me in the first place. there were so many more beautiful women out there besides the beached ball of me. i woke him with my sobs, and i probably meant to. i missed my parents, having spent my first Christmas away from home. i missed the body i had known, however imperfect. and i was scared to pieces about what was to happen soon in my life and if i'd be able to step up for the first time in my life.


my husband is a wise man... even at 31 he was. he woke, hugging and assuring me through my sobs that nobody on the planet could capture his heart like i had done. he soothed me to sleep with his words. 


i don't know how long i slept. maybe an hour. and then i felt punched in the stomach, but from the inside.


i didn't want to wake him. surely this was not IT. i walked across our tiny hall to the bathroom, and as soon as i sat down, there it was. a gush.


it took two calls, about four minutes apart, to wake him. it's time. better get up. make yourself a sandwich. i wish i had chosen to make him something other than egg salad.


i showered, scratched the dog's ears, talking talking talking as i recall, and he (my husband) never once asked me to stop.


my coat wouldn't even fit around me, but he'd warmed up the car, and as we drove away in the dark, the dog stood on the sofa, looking out our picture window. we had never left him in the dark before, and my heart broke a little. i looked at the geraniums, so full and red just hours before, now limp and dark, sad. was this a sign?


it took 30 minutes to get to the hospital in our little ford escort which i never liked. a few months before we'd traded in the mustang my father had given me in college (not a '68, but still), for a more family-friendly ride. and now, we were about to be parents. parents?


the whole drive i talked and talked, though i can't remember about what, i am sure my words were full of dreams. and fear. and prayers.


within an hour, the nurses had laid me out on a gurney, measuring my swollen belly — which was wobbling and waving as if this baby i carried couldn't wait to get out.


my husband, ever the patient concerned spouse what seemed like minutes before, disappeared, as character ned allyen would later say in Shakespeare in Love, for 'the length of a Bible.'


indeed. good thing he took his egg salad sandwich with him.


if you are not a reader of this blog, you don't know that my husband was a reporter back then. i was not progressing fast enough for him apparently, so he wandered over to the newsroom to pick up a first run of the paper, and to tell everybody there that he, HE was having a baby. (why are you here? the crusty reporters working the overnight shift asked him... apparently even they thought he should be at the hospital with me.)


meanwhile back with my feet in the stirrups and my abdomen doing flip turns, i wondered if he had left me in mid-contraction for that attractive artist type he'd met at the mall while framing a picture for our house.


turns out, he hadn't. around daybreak he returned, (one of the nurses apparently had told him it would be awhile), newspaper in hand, and neither of us knowing how long this baby would take to arrive, he settled with me into the labor room to watch the Waltons. as i watched john boy and his siblings negotiate life with the Baldwin sisters and Ike and his store, i found myself wondering how in the world in just eight years, i had gone from playing mary ellen in the church Christmas play to having a baby, i mean, how did this happen?

finally, just before noon, in a frenzy that baby did come. a girl whose great blue eyes searched the florescent lights of her new world as the orderly led us out of the labor room and into recovery. it was as if she couldn't wait to get to know the great wide world she had just entered. i promised her a lifetime feltman brothers dresses as i remember, though at the time i wasn't thinking beyond the first year — and an education at Carolina (lord heaven not georgia), and because i was just a baby myself at the time, nothing else seemed to matter. 


(as i grew with my child, i would add that i wanted her to make a new friend every day, and to treat everyone in her class kindly, even if they weren't kind to her, and as far as i know, she has taken those instructions to heart.)

two days later we left the hospital on another frigid day, me wearing a maternity dress borrowed from my sister-in-law and a blouse from my wedding trousseau, greatly uncertain about how i would raise up this baby. but as she grew, i dressed her up in those dresses i'd promised — she was baptized in white organdy with tiny tucks at the sleeve  — and in ribboned bonnets and sailor dresses (prophetic, come to think of it). and we figured it out somehow, me making plenty of mistakes along the way.

she grew to have gigantic brown eyes (which turned when she was 2), and an absorbing spirit that is exactly the same as when she took in all the lights in her first few minutes of life. she never made it to Carolina as i had planned but she did one better, and i marvel on this, her 29th birthday, at what a remarkable young woman she has become despite this small shortcoming and my many, many mistakes.


we have spent the past few days together over Christmas, she and her husband an elegant pup. last year, when she left me for the lights that draw her back to the city, we stood in the driveway and wept, hugging just the way we always do. and i looked into the light of her now brown eyes and saw that she holds a little bit of me in there, too. this year, we parted ways in front of her in-laws, and i didn't want to embarrass her with my ritual weeping, so though the tears hung at the corners of my eyes, somehow i held them in.


another year gone by for my pea and me. and another birthday has rounded the corner for her. this morning i said prayers for her, that her life and her marriage continue to be strong, her smile bright and her ties to home unwavering. and i did also, selfishly, pray that this year might be the one when her little family moves a drive away instead of a plane ride.

just about now, on that cold day in 1983, the nurses brought my clean and bright-eyed baby to my husband and me, and we were frightened and in love and enchanted and wondering just how we might do right by her.

happy birthday, my pea. we didn't do so bad after all.




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

angels, angels everywhere

When I was a little girl, Miss Lucy Wells visited our public school classroom to teach Bible stories once a week. She traveled from class to class toting a large felt board, her gray hair coiled around her head like a braided rug. Miss Wells taught us our Biblical ABCs: All have sin. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. Christ died for our sins. Do all to the glory of God.

And she loved her felt board characters. Adam and Eve, cowering as they were banished from the Garden of Eden. Zaccheus looking down from his tree. Jesus praying in the garden. And angels. Angels everywhere.

Angels keeping watch by night in the lion’s den, sitting beside the open tomb, climbing up and down Jacob’s ladder in his dream. And of course, there was Gabriel, who with his elegant golden wings, shown the brightest of all.

I thought a lot about Gabriel as Christmas approached.  And not simply the glowing felt board figure kneeling by Mary’s side. The Gabriel of the Old Testament was the protector — of Moses and the Israelites as they made their way out of Egypt to the Promised Land. He (or she, as many think), was the interpreter for Daniel, the one who showed him the meaning of his dreamy visions. In the New Testament of course, Gabriel is perhaps at once protector and good news purveyor. Don’t be afraid, he tells Mary. Trust me. Believe me, he tells Zachariah, for your prayer has been heard.

One day recently my friend Nell stood in my office door and said: ‘I’ve been thinking about that Gabriel, but I don’t know much about him.’

So what could we do but Google him? 


Did you know that Gabriel has a blog? And he’s an angel of Hebrew, Christian and Muslim tradition? That in Islam, he was the medium through whom God revealed the Qur’an to Muhammad?

Gabriel’s Wikipedia entry refers to him as the spirit of truth. And though no reference to his horn can be found in the Bible, tradition holds that he will blow his trumpet on the last day to wake the dead. (If you’ve been hearing or using your car horn lately, that’s supposed to mean that Gabriel is trying to get your attention.) Some folks even think Gabriel invented coffee. I’d be willing to bet some kind of angel did.

And this: Gabriel is the patron saint of communicators.

I am a communicator. It’s in my official job title: “Director of Communications.” Though I am no Gabriel, maybe my job is similar to Gabriel’s in God’s corporate work chart. I have long known since I was a child that God gave me this talent to communicate. Through writing, by teaching high school students (and the writers in this book) to communicate a bit of themselves in essays, and through listening. To my friends and my children

and even, sometimes, my husband.

I even communicate in the car. I have, in fact, been using my car horn a lot lately.

Stuck behind drivers who would rather tweet than move through the green light has had me honking like a Manhattan cab driver on more than a few mornings, late on my way into work.

So is Gabriel trying to get my attention?

I wonder what it would be like to be one of God’s favored angels. To have God’s ear — and His message — tucked up inside you, a message that will change a life. Many lives,

in fact, thousands. Millions. It would be hard, it would seem, to stay humble.

And yet my picture of Gabriel is that of a quiet and patient purveyor, who knows the message is so much more powerful than the one who brings it. This Gabriel is not so worried as I am about descriptive phrases or the turn of the right verb. It’s the what of the message that matters more than intonation.

One of my favorite movie scenes comes from the film City of Angels. In the scene, an angel played by Nicholas Cage searches for Meg Ryan’s character in the public library. Angels in top coats line the halls and escalators, taking in the myriad voices of the patrons, each offering up prayers and worries to invisible ears, hoping somehow, someone will hear them — and the angels do.  It is a beautiful idea, each of us with our own private angel who hears our thoughts and prods our dreams. 

I have been a lifelong dreamer, both in my days and in my nights, and I can still remember one or two of my dreams from my Lucy Wells days. Lately, my nightly dreams have been littered with tornados and falling trees, of children lost and found again. And of skies opening up in the midst of chaos to a kaleidoscope of clarity. One treasured friend says these dreams mean I am on the cusp of great change. That has yet to be seen. If only Gabriel would come sit by me and say: I bring good news. Trust me. Don’t be afraid. Your prayer has been heard. Nothing is impossible with God.

— Susan Byrum Rountree


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

Christmas sentence

(with thanks to Sally B., after nikki giovanni)


at Christmas
we drive through the flat 
Carolina plain
turned blonde in winter,
trees scraping the 
naked sky,
to home,
so we can puff our cheeks with 
butter-dipped rolls,
soft as clouds
and pickled green beans and
my mother's cake, dripping with 
creamy caramel,
sitting at the table 
set with my mother's 
scrolled silver
that we used to use 
every day 
when i was a child,
and my father 
carefully annunciates 
each word
of the blessing
for the first time 
all year,
thanking God 
for gifts of grace
known, but mostly not
and for family,
past and absent,
present and 
even pending,
then once stuffed,
we fuss about who will 
clean the
stacks of dishes
piled at the sink, 
then we laugh over coffee
at how i never stayed at camp,
then we place bets on who is 
number one in 
grandmother
"B"'s eyes,
and as the sun sets,
hugs travel across
the room as fast as gossip
as we make our way
to leave,
and once outside
our breath
fills the 
crisp night
with clouds as soft 
as those rolls,
then we drive back through
the darkened plain
and over the river
and through the woods
to our other 
home,
the tastes of 
yeast and butter 
and caramel
and 
family
lingering 
on our tongues.


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

life's too short to be rude

it's been a busy day. carpet cleaner here at 9. wrapping presents til noon, making two batches of rolls, rolling them out, getting ready to bake them. (though there was a short time for 'reading' aka 'nap', this day has been spent on my feet or leaning over a giant box trying to get the paper corners square. 

then there was a trip to the store, to gather what i need for cookies for a swap next week, finish rolling out the rolls for a party tonight, start thinking about when the Princess and her Pea come in next week.

the greeting met me as i rolled my cart up to the checkout: "happy holidays to you!" said the jolly clerk. "are you ready for Christmas?" 

 you're awfully jolly tonight i told her as i checked off my list of what was yet to do. 

"life's too short to be rude," she said, and then her dialogue began. she was almost ready for Christmas, but didn't go to the mall — no parking spaces there — i listened, finding myself smiling as i put my bags in the cart.

how often have i walked into my neighborhood grocery store hoping i don't see anyone i know because i'm in a hurry. and i move the cart around, dropping what i need into it for supper, leave, rushing to the next thing and the next, face in full frown thinking of what i have yet to do.

too often i am rude to people around me. don't have time for their stories, think i am so busy, especially this time of year, that i forget that there are those out there in the world, like this clerk, who are not too busy for me.

tonight i left the store with a smile, i felt it growing where too lately a frown has become etched. i thought about the clerk: had she just begun her shift? (so she wasn't tired like me.) did she have shopping to do when she was off from work? would the world out there greet her as nicely as she had me? was her life at home as good as my own?

i thought about the people coming through the line behind me. would she shift their daily attitude as she had mine? will i pay her emotions forward as i meet my neighbors at the party later? at church tomorrow? i hope so.

at home, with rising rolls yet to be placed in the oven, i am thankful, that her good spirits spread over me like the hot butter melting into my rolls.

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

our light has come

ok, so i haven't written daily during december, at least not here at writemuch. but i have been writing a lot in my job and in my head. why just a few days ago, in the wee hours of the morning, i dreamed that i had found the characters and plot to the next harry potter (well, HP wannabe)... literally dreamed up the world and had actors taking parts in the screen version, even setting it up for the sequel.

if only i could remember it. in the middle of the dream i dreamed that i was thinking now this is a great story, so great in fact that it is unforgettable. apparently not so unforgettable that when i woke just minutes later, the whole thing had vanished more quickly than dear ol' harry under his invisible cloak.

and so i have vowed that i will wake myself up from a dream of this sort again and write the whole damn thing down (even if i can't read my own handwriting, which is hard to do in the middle of the day, much less in the wee hours with the lights off.)

sometimes, though, it's not about my writing at all. sometimes the joy of words comes through the people i love writing and reading their own stories — stories i admittedly helped pull out of them — but their words, their dreams, beautifully rendered on the page.

today was that kind of day.

each sunday during Advent, i've had the privilege to mentor a group of writers who share the pews with me at my church. we've been gathering for years, off and on, during sunday school, to put ourselves into the stories of the Bible and write our way out. i think we are in our 8th year, though we've departed the text and written about Lent from time to time.

it's been a remarkable journey. and i have grown to love and respect all the people who sit at the table with me, churning out their personal stories with great enthusiasm and humility. some of them have been with me for years, others new to the table, but all are searching for the role God plays in their daily life, in their struggles to be good people and parents, to work through their grief, to accept life when plans go awry. you can't know how much i admire how they put it right there on the table, when too often their instructor is not yet ready to do the same. they have written about their marriages, children and siblings they have lost, riffs in families and the struggles and joys that come with this busy season. they've written with humor and with grace, and we have made good use of the box of Kleenex that sits in the middle of our table.

and today, this group of writers shared their stories with the larger congregation. i felt like a mother watching her child perform, take her first steps or riding away from me with her back to me as she peddles away on her bike. in the words these dear friends read, i saw growth, too, as writers and as Christians who have come to understand that God is there, even in the middle of sadness.

it's funny. we set out each season with a set of readings and no idea what we will write about or if our stories will connect in any way to each other, as any good collection should. and every single year, as i begin placing the stories in our collection, it's a goosebump feeling, because stories set apart by circumstance, gender and generation are woven together as if from the same cloth.

this year's collection is all about light, the aha! kind of light that comes when we finally understand we are on the right road.

advent: noun. "coming into being or use."

i'd say that's what this year's collection is all about. but why don't you see for yourself? our light has come, and you can read all about it here.

but that's not all. this afternoon i sat in the audience to hear my mentor, poet Sally Buckner, read from her collection, Nineteen Visions of Christmas. i was sally's student almost 40 years ago at peace college, and one of the joys of the season throughout the years has been to receive a Christmas poem from her as her card. she has collected some familiar to me, and many not, and listening to the cadence and clarity of her words today reminded me of why i want to be a writer, and how much she has taught me about the craft. i can only hope i have taught my own students half as much.

what a joy, in the midst of this season, to be both teacher and student in one single day. but come to think of it, shouldn't every day be just like that?












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

may you write much

it wasn't supposed to be like this. i had been looking forward to dec. 1 because i knew REVERB would be back in action, and i would have something to write about. last year REVERB helped me launch my blog in earnest, giving me ideas each day (well, i didn't listen every day) to get my brain to thinking about the year 2010 and how i had lived it. so i was thinking just the other day, realizing that my blog posts had lagged for a few weeks, that REVERB was coming so i need not worry. i'd be back to writing in no time.

and then i get an email on wednesday saying REVERB is no more. the writers got tired. wanted to write different stuff. and just when i was getting started. and then this: what about doing your own REVERB?  what about inviting the writers (and the non-writers) out there who you know to join in the conversation? 

well, why not indeed?

so. since i had just a day's notice, and best intentions being what they are, i'm a day late.

but i can ask a question that has been noodling in my mind of late: what new did you do this year to challenge yourself? to shake up the mix that is you?

if i had been asked this question a few months ago, i would have found it challenging to answer. my life is pretty mundane. walk the dog, read the paper, pour coffee then the diet coke and head to work. upload and update, edit and remind, take a picture or two, have lunch a lot, pick up the dog, nuzzle, then figure out what to cook. cook. clean up. watch the Sing Off, Glee, The Middle, Modern Family, on down the line. then Sunday  church, lunch with friends (add in a couple of naps) and 60 Minutes, then Dexter and Homeland on Sunday, and that's pretty much my week. (there is a lot of reading in between the doing, books and blogs and newspapers and directions.) then we start all over again on Monday morning. every now and then an adult child will show up to brighten our spaces, or we will take an unexpected side trip, but for the most part — and especially in winter — life is snuggled up tight in the mundane.

and i love it all. love the ritual, the people i am with, the times when i'm alone. the dog. all of it.

but... i do wonder what it would be like to shake up the mix.

a few weeks ago, i did something new. i painted. not like a room or a piece of furniture or anything like that. i painted — a painting. my purple room friend Lee and i, challenged by a gift certificate to this new spot for my latest birthday, took up paints and brush and paper plate palette and painted something pretty. and pretty recognizable.

and this week we added a few more friends and did it again.

a year ago, i would never have considered such, content it appeared, i was in the comfort of what i could already create. what i was known for.

i can't give too much away! santa might just need it

then i picked up the paints and brushes and lost myself for a couple of hours. and it was fun.

i used to love to color, and the favorite day in school was the one when the teacher let us stir the tempera paint. when my kids were small, i'd sit with them while they painted with watercolor tablets or dipped their whole hands into finger paints, but i rarely picked up the brush myself. i wander through art galleries and wonder how in the world artists come up with just those color combinations, that texture on the page. and i have always envied my artist friends, whose work can be enjoyed in an instant. though art, surely, should be wandered through, writing has to be for the reader to appreciate the story in the words assembled there.  

so what does all this mean for you?

this month i want you to share with me. post a comment on my blog to answer my question of the day. or of you have a blog, post it there and send me the link. calling all writers i know out there, and even folks who don't think they can. each day i'll try to answer the question myself, to get you started. and we'll see where it goes.

consider this a gift to yourself. i know participating in REVERB last year was indeed a gift to me.

once again, here's the question: what new did you do this year to challenge yourself? to shake up the mix that is you?

may you write much!

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

about that middle name

my grandmother had arthritic hands and a fat billfold full of dollar bills and pictures of her grandchildren and people i didn't know. i sometimes thought she would never be able to open the billfold because of the knots in her fingers, but she always managed. when we went to the village store together — me staring at the gizzards and the pigs feet, hoping she would not bring those home for supper, her moving across the creaking floors to gather her provisions — she sometimes bought me Chicklets. and I would down half the pack before we made the short drive back to her house.


she was taken with saying things like "my lands i pray!" and "great garden peas!", a phrase that always stopped me because my grandmother knew her peas. field and blackeyed and green (not to mention butter beans, which are not peas but have never been limas) — she and my grandfather grew them all in the garden beside their house. she taught me to shuck them out of their shells on her front porch until my fingers bled green, sitting there in the glider on a quiet afternoon. all that shucking never made me like peas, no matter the color. but there were other things she cooked that i loved.


i am named for my grandmother but am nothing like her. my father's mother, she was stoic to a fault, laughed quietly but never really giggled, my lands i pray! and she didn't know what to do with me when i cried when i looked at my mother's wedding portrait hanging on her wall. my other grandmother, whom i saw far less often, used to dance in the family room so that we were embarrassed after awhile. but she and i were more kindred spirits.


my sister, though, looks as if my father's mother spit her out, as the saying goes. pictures of them at similar ages are downright scary they look so much alike, and they share a no nonsense get-on-with-it personality. it is what it is so you do your best, and for heaven's sake, don't wallow in self-pity. it is unbecoming. great garden peas!


today is my grandmother's birthday. and before the day ends on this first day of no daylight savings time, i want to celebrate the fact of her.


hazel estelle hooks. (i'm the estelle part.) though i always hated my middle name it's growing on me. i had a friend just after college named hazel, and she was a spitfire. i wanted to be hazel instead, the part of my grandmother that must be something like the hurricane, for surely that was me. but i was estelle. estelle? the boys in my class took hold of that one in junior high calling me "ass tail", —sorry mom & dad —  and so i wanted to drop it. estelle seemed like the kind of person who would swoon across chaise lounges in silken nightgowns in black and white movies.


my grandmother estelle never once swooned and only wore cotton, but her aprons were soft as butter. she kept a jar of jergens on her bedroom dresser, and sometimes when she wasn't looking, i would steal a smell. 

my grandfather called her ES-tell when he referred to her in the presence of others, but he often just called her "Doc", or "Dot" when he addressed her, (maybe my hearing was bad even then, so at least that's what it sounded like to me.)


she was born on this day in 1902, to barden vance hooks and ida estelle garris in fremont, north carolina, one of five children — three girls and two boys. i don't know her birth order but i suspect she was somewhere in the middle. i only knew beulah, the older sister closest in age to her. everybody always said my father is just like her brother frank. she called her father "poppa". 


my grandfather died in 1989, and a year later, knowing my grandmother's memory was leaving her, i gave her a grandmother memory book. on my infrequent visits we would sit with the book, and i learned some wonderful things about her that i never knew.


like her life's dream was to teach school. math. can you imagine? another reason we are not at all alike. that she got in trouble most for arguing with beulah (well, we are like in that way, as i used to argue with my sister.) that her mother was always worried, and that her father was happy-go-lucky (like my grandfather.) and what she loved most about her mother was "everything she did, except putting a switch to my legs."  well, i'm with her on that one. all this in her words, and in my handwriting, from the grandmother book.


her favorite season was spring, and she once rode a streetcar in Wrightsville Beach, even though her family never took a vacation. her best friend? mildred sammons, who lived a couple of blocks away. her first boyfriend's name? bernard pike.


she never rode a bicycle — a fact that still amazes me — but she played volleyball at salem college (was captain of the team, which would have been about 1924.) she was the only member of her family to graduate from college, and after graduation, she rode the train to Sunbury, the little village where she would teach math in high school.


she met my grandfather there, at a picnic at cannon ferry on the chowan river, a few miles south of town. there was probably a boat ride, and in the boat, she and my grandfather may have spoken the first words of the story that would one day lead to me.


(here, her memory was clear. she wore a white dress. they ate fried chicken. and when she told her father she wanted to marry william graham byrum of sunbury, n.c., he said: "i thought i educated you to teach school." (now that sounds a little bit like my own father, come to think of it.)


i picture them, my grandfather trying to make her giggle, she trying hard not to, but smiling. he playing the player piano that was in their front hall, she thinking all that was poppycock, but enjoying it as she went on with her work. the bed they shared sits upstairs in my house, in my son's room, and sometimes i go there and lie on it, just to be close to them. is that odd?


it is unimaginable to me that when my grandmother married in her navy blue dress in her parents' home, she could no longer be a teacher. only unmarried women in 1927 could be teachers. maybe she used her math to help him in his car business, but that is a fact i will never know.


after their wedding, she and my grandfather rode the train to Washington for their honeymoon, then settled into a house that was built for her, a house that her mother-in-law told her had too many windows.i remember as a child, french doors separated her living room and dining room and i loved that. the only time she visited me in the house i've lived in for 23 years, we had just installed the same to separate our living and family rooms. 


"i always thought they were a lot of trouble to wash," she told me then. of course now, i understand.


the grandmother book is filled with fill in the blanks, some of which involve my father. "I still smile when I think about the time...."  and grandmama completed the sentence: the day your daddy was born, the road to suffolk (va) was under construction, and Bigdaddy (my grandfather) told the watchman he was going through, because i was having a baby."


the last entry — and there is no date — is an answer to a question about what she was strict about with my dad. "i'm sure we didn't have any rules!" she recalled, which i am certain is not accurate.


in my memory, we visited with my grandparents just about every Sunday afternoon, either at our house or theirs. and at least once a summer, i would spend a week at her house, picking the peas and shelling them, shopping with her at the village store, trying to sit still in sunday school at the methodist church across the street. eating those chicklets. taking a bath in her footed bathtub. 

she died in the house she and my grandfather called home their entire married life — 62 years — surrounded by all those windows that looked out at the garden and the pecan tree in the back yard, the bluebirds and the pines in the front.


early on the september the morning we buried my grandmother, my husband drove my sister and me down country roads in the fall fog. i remember a small pond on the side of the road along our route, a lone fisherman drifting with his pole. we could see only his shadow in all that fog, but the image still sticks: my grandfather, drifting, waiting for her to get in the boat. for their own wonderful story to begin.






writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author. want to share something? all you have to do is ask me.

a poem as lovely as a tree

i grew up next door to a large house with a porch as wide as a hat's brim with a porch swing and as odd as it sounds, two large crouching stone lions flanking the front porch steps. i used to 'ride' those lions as a child, imagining myself in some great parade toward Noah's ark. two cast iron deer stood facing each other in the front yard (the lions and deer are still there), and according to historical documents, both lions and deer have been fixtures since before the Civil War. 

many years ago, when i was a child, trains traveled the tracks on the other side of the road from the house, and town legend always said that when a train blew its horn at midnight, the deer would run around the house. nobody mentioned the lions, who no doubt stood sentry as any proper lion should.

the yard surrounding this grand house was a child's playground. high in the branches of the giant magnolia — its branches reaching to the roof of the two-story house — provided the perfect lookout. on the ground, my friends and i swept the ground clean, then marked the walls of our houses with magnolia leaves and seed pods. when i think of it, it seems as if we played in this yard for hours, coming home only long enough to pee or to eat, then we were back at it again, our imaginations taking us far away from the limits of our tiny town.

but my favorite place in the yard was another tree — a sugar maple —and i most often went there alone. it was my all-season thinking tree — the mossy carpet beneath it in the spring providing a soft perch, the empty branches scraping the sky in winter the perfect pitch. but it was best in the fall.

as cool weather hit, i would watch for the leaves to change, from green to shades of yellow and green to one day suddenly, the whole tree caught fire, in reds and yellow and oranges of a particular beauty. i'd climb the tree then, caught up in that fire myself, listening to the wind whip the leaves and branches into a chatter, all the while knowing that because i lived next door to it, this was not exactly my tree. i was just borrowing it.

it belonged to hanna.

since i am the daughter of a particularly Southern woman, i was raised to call the elders in my life by proper salutations like miss or mrs... hanna, who was 16 years my mother's senior, didn't particularly like to be called "Mizz Kitchin," as my mother required.  that was her mother-in-law, after all. so through the years, she became "big hanna," her daughter "little hanna", though we would never have called the senior hanna that in greeting. she was just hanna, which always felt strange to me, but this is what she preferred.

(i admit to having been a little afraid of hanna as a child, though in her yard, she never gave me cause. not once do i recall her asking me to climb down from the mighty magnolia, or to pay heed to the camellias when i was playing hide and seek, or to take care with the lions or the deer because they were irreplaceable antiques. we played in the playhouse out back — filled with spiders and mice and the most wonderful old china tea sets that she never seemed to worry we would break.)

maybe my fear was that Hanna was a stickler for etiquette, and i was always worried that in her presence i would somehow not know how to do it right. a few times in my life i actually stayed with her in the big house, sleeping in antique twin beds in a room at the top of the stairs that felt much like stepping into a hollywood film set in the 1930s. with  beautiful beds and window seat, this room was not at all like the one i shared with my sister. when i went to bed, i sometimes tiptoed through the other upstairs rooms, imagining what it might be like to actually live there, imagining ghosts behind some of the doors i didn't dare open.

we ate supper at 5 in the afternoon (hanna's husband, buck, was a farmer), and hanna served crab au gratin in large scallop shells with so many pieces of silver on the table i didn't know what fork (or spoon) to use first.

years later, she hosted my bridesmaid's luncheon, the silver so polished and crisp linen so white i worried that i'd spill aspic on it and she'd never forgive me. (never mind that my sister and two sisters-in-law, all nursing newborns at the time, pronounced at one point that it was time for the cows to go home.)

hanna taught me to prepare the altar for communion, something that was center to her own heart. she would later become in the national Altar Guild of the Episcopal Church, which is no surprise to me. After her husband died, she became a leader among women in our small home church, serving as the first woman on the Vestry. again, no surprise.

and though i've never served them this way myself, no doubt if i owned egg cups i could serve the perfect soft boiled egg in one because of her.

she always acted as if she was slightly amused by this spit of a girl who lived next door and flitted from tree to lion to deer to playhouse (though as i recall i always asked for permission), and who was more comfortable outside her house than in. she had slight giggle whenever we talked, as if: I can't believe you don't know this as old as you are. didn't you learn anything from me? and she was likely right.

a few fall seasons after i married, hanna sent me note in her perfect pen, and she included a Polaroid of the maple i loved. "our tree is particularly beautiful this year," she wrote. our tree? until that moment i never imagined hanna might have been watching me out her window as i sat beneath her tree or climbed its branches. it was as if she knew how much it meant to me, and she was pleased to share it. (of course that meant that she had heard me singing from the swing on her porch, giving commands to the lions and deer. oh dear)

one grand lady, to be sure.

over the summer i learned hanna was dying, and a month ago on a short visit home, i peeked in to see her. she had moved from the big house years ago to a smaller one next door, and when i saw her sitting on the edge of her den, though her frame was somewhat diminished, her eyes told me she was still hanna. i reached to hold her hand, to kiss her forehead, and she seemed surprised, and only later i realized that in all the years i had known her, we had never actually touched.

some people are touch-ers, of hands, with hugs and kisses. hanna was not, at least to me, but i knew she cared for me. we both loved the same tree.

on that visit i learned that hanna and my mother had years before stripped the old dining room table so large it felt like it would seat two dozen (maybe it would), and how on those days that my mother sanded and stripped, she and hanna talked. she was sort of like an older sister to my mom, and i knew how much my mom would miss her.

and as the weeks passed i prayed that hanna would live to see our tree one more time.

the maples are turning now. when i drove into my parent's driveway on the day of hanna's funeral two weeks ago — she died a week shy of her 99th birthday — i looked at our tree. green still, but the tiniest tinges of orange forecast the fire that would soon catch.

the view from my lens

Permaquid Lighthouse, Permaquid, Maine

 Monhegan Island, Maine

On Monhegan Island

 Southport, Maine — sea grass

all images copyright susan byrum rountree 2011. may not be reprinted without permission.

My Books

I'm the author of several books of non-fiction.

Nags Headers, (Blair, 2001)

Nags Headers is the story of North Carolina’s first beach vacation settlement, whose roots extend to the Civil War. More particularly, it traces the multigenerational love affair between a group of families and a mile-long stretch of sand inhabited by a handful of cottages elegant in their simplicity—the famous Unpainted Aristocracy.

Readers will make the acquaintance of S. J. Twine, the wiry carpenter and self-taught architectural genius who designed structures that have withstood hurricanes and countless northeasters. They’ll meet Mary Frances Flowers, whose family hosted President Franklin Roosevelt for lunch on a hot August afternoon. They’ll hear the words of hurricane survivor Virginia Flora Hall, now a centenarian, and of Beulah Wadsworth, who summered at Nags Head for many years as a servant of the Drane family. They’ll feel what it was like to comb the beach for artifacts from the Wright brothers or wreckage from ships torpedoed by German submarines, to toast marshmallows atop Jockey’s Ridge, to dance at the Nags Head Casino to the music of headliners as diverse as Glen Miller and Bill Deal and the Rondells. They’ll learn of a time when children could roam endlessly and freely without danger, when a vacation at the beach meant an entire summer, not a stolen week.

Some of Nags Head’s old cottages are still occupied by descendants of their original owners. Author

Susan Byrum Rountree tells their stories with the help of oral histories from Nags Headers ages twelve to one hundred, who reveal what house and family mean to them. Of special interest are the dozens of photographs gathered from private collections, as well as the new images that capture this unique community as it survives today.

Note: Nags Headers was removed in 2011 from the publisher's back list. To order a signed copy, contact me $15, plus shipping.

In Mother Words, Chapel Hill Press, 2004

If you’ve ever held a fretful baby in your lap, watched a toddler struggle to learn a new skill, comforted a child who has lost a friend to tragedy, or stepped aside as your grown child becomes even more than the person you’d dreamed she’d be, then you’ll love this collection of twenty-two essays about the joys and struggles of being a mother. 

The perfect gift for Mother's Day, birthday, or for the new mother in your life.

$10 includes shipping. To order, contact me at susanbrountree@gmail.com. 

I am also the author of The Nags Head Walking Tour, available here.

the joy between the lines

Story sustains me. I used to comb my parents’ wedding album for some hint of who they were as young people, thinking somewhere hidden in my mother’s crinoline or my father’s slim smile was a clue to what I should expect of a marriage of my own. 

I once asked them to write their story, to recall what life was like when they were my age and busy parents of young children. I suppose I hoped their own love story held truths for me, too, and that my husband and I could sustain our marriage as long, though at times it didn't seem to me that ours was as as happy. 

Married 60 years next year, their sense of romance lingers, clear though those old photographs have faded a bit. They have yet to give me the written clues I need to ensure my own marriage will last. Maybe they are waiting until the 60th to reveal it, when they will gather with kids and grands and great-grands — so they will only have to say it once.

My kids, I vowed years ago, will know their story and our role in it even if they don’t want to. I kept my daughter’s early history in a journal, recording my dreams for her each year on her birthday.  I gave it to her at 18, and that summer decided that a pre-college mother-daughter adventure was a good idea, a way to give those old journal words life. Somehow we made it without too much argument the 500 miles from our home in North Carolina to Georgia, angling down wide strips of painted road with thousands of other summer travelers on their own pilgrimages, to Perry, where her story began.

When I moved to Georgia at 23,  I was single and knew just one person, a girl I'd gone to j-school with at Chapel Hill who worked for the paper there. It was the first real risk I’d ever taken in my life.

A year later and married three weeks, I moved to Perry with my new husband — whom I'd met on my first Georgia day — into a two-bedroom apartment with gold shag carpet and a landing where our collie could sit and look out the window. 

On our visit, the Pea and I drove past that apartment, where on move-in day, Rick and I picnicked with his parents on the carpet while we waited for the moving van; where the first bread I ever tried to make fell flat; where we staged our first Christmas photo as a married couple. There’s the dog’s window, the stoop where he used to sit.

A large willow oak stood at the foot of the sidewalk that day, but I didn't remember even a sapling there. Maybe that was where I tied the dog the day he ran away. It had been 20 years.

“It looks like the slums,” my child said, noticing, as I did, the chipping paint, the uneven blinds in the windows. Her idea of a first apartment even at that time was the New York City brownstone she now lives in with her husband, where her own marriage is just taking root.

Her father and I bought our first chair together with wedding money when we lived in that apartment, and an antique table from a flea market. We found an old chestnut jelly cupboard in a barn and refinished it, a cupboard that now holds all my wedding crystal.

 Living so far away from my family, my young husband was all I had then, he and our collie, Bogey. Without a job to occupy me at first, Bogey and I would wait for him by the window fan in the Indian summer heat.

In those early months I put into practice what I’d thought marriage meant. I set the table with our new everyday dishes on a tiny veneered table we borrowed from my mother-in-law. I used the matching placemats we’d been given, pulled out new pots and improved on my mother’s spaghetti sauce, made New England pot roasts from my new Betty Crocker Cookbook. We bought our first Christmas ornaments, hanging them on a tiny tree in the living room. They remain my favorites, even now.

Shortly before our first anniversary, we bought a house, setting up the tripod in the front yard to take the first picture of our anniversary album as the gnats swarmed around our eyes. My husband's father had been operated on with a brain tumor the day before, and in the picture, Rick holds tight to me as if he will never let me go.

+++++
Rick and I married 30 years ago today. We’d met on the evening of that first Georgia day a year and a day earlier. He'd hosted a party at his house for people at work, and call me crazy, but I knew I would marry him as he stood by the car door for me at the end of the evening and said his goodnights.

The writer attracted me at first, a man who could assemble words with grace and clarity and emotion. His genuine interest in my life and dreams kept me interested. In those early months he told me that he fell in love with me for the same reasons.
We said our vows in my hometown church in front of a small gathering of family and friends, he weeping as he said the words, me wondering if I could ever love this man as deeply as he deserved.

Only weeks after we met he had confessed to being in love with me, the kind of love that leaves you breathless; two months into our courtship he asked me to marry him. Ecstatic, I studied the pages of Bride’s magazines until they were dog-eared. But there was precious little in those magazines about anything but wedding. No advice, really, about how to live beyond that first beautiful fall day. Nothing at all about keeping what turned out to be a living breathing thing alive for years.

On our trip back to Perry, I wanted to tell the Pea something important, to give her the secret of how to build a long marriage. But why then? She didn't even have a boyfriend at the time, and to be honest, her dad and I were not in the best of places at that time, so I wasn't so sure I had any answer to share.

++++
Our mother/daughter team meandered through the streets of Perry that day in 2002 and she thought we were lost. 

“Why don’t we just forget it?” she said. I’m usually so good with directions but did feel lost, slowly creeping up a hill that looked vaguely familiar.

I will find the house if we have to stay until dark, I thought, but then there it was, the brick ranch with the planter out front where geranium blossoms as large as softballs froze red as a still life the day before the Pea was born. There is the picture window, trim still painted the beige I knew.

“We lived in that?” she asked, knowing nothing then of the blindness of new marriage. Suddenly I saw my husband in the back yard, spray-painting a $5 yard sale bassinette she would sleep in. There I sat in the corner chair of our bedroom, stitching his Christmas stocking: a Mother Goose house, the sleeping heads of children tucked and waiting for Santa to arrive. And there I sit at the living room desk writing a journal to my unborn child, reading Gone with the Wind for the first time, later bathing the baby on a sponge in the tiny bathroom sink. I couldn't imagine how I could have forgotten it all.

In that house, my husband and I began to bring real shape to our marriage, to establish routines we have kept all these long years. With no money for dates, we spent Saturday nights watching Sonia Henie skate across our tiny black and white television screen; played Scrabble until the tiles ran out. We pulled up the carpet to find polished wood floors, stripped the lilac wallpaper that covered the master bedroom walls.

The woman who lived in the house before us had made it her home for 30 years. She left us a note when she moved away, wishing us all the happiness that she and her husband had known in their life there.

Rick brings me coffee in bed on weekends, a ritual he began in that little house. If he came home during the day while I was at work, he would leave notes for me and the dog. I cherished them, though I often forgot to tell him so. And I'd almost forgotten about them until we visited that house. 
It was there we plotted our future together on weekend mornings with the dog at the foot of the bed. Babies, better jobs, books to write. And it was on one of those Sundays together that the Pea herself went from "a twinkle in God's eye" to real.

As I sat on the curb outside the house, it hit me: We had lived the life housed in the stitches of the Mother Goose stocking, right down to the daughter asleep in the attic. Our kids were almost grown, the business thrived. I had written books in the house with windows looking over an azalea-lined back yard, bluebirds flitting in and out. And I'd almost missed the dreams revealed in those stitches, for the fact of living them out.

I longed to linger there, to peek into the windows of our little house, to find a young man who once on a rainy winter Sunday evening combed the shops in town for a frozen chocolate pie to share with his expectant wife. I wanted to watch him mow the zoysia in the back yard, walk the dog, powder the baby, to drink him in again like I did when we were young.

Turns out, what I thought was my daughter's trip to find her story, was actually not hers at all. And I felt ashamed that far too many times I had not done my part to sustain the joy between the lines.

+++

What is it that happens in marriage, makes its inhabitants needle the warts instead of the wonder? Too often, we choose to overlook the wonder, when the warts are so much easier to see.  

A lasting marriage — 30 years, 50, or 60 like my parents — is two people, a life together dreamed about and lived out, shared and fought over, even when it is not always happy. The word, happy, seemed so easy to define when I stared in the bright faces of my parents captured in sepia on their wedding day. Arm in arm and smiling. Happy. But now with these 30 years of my own marriage behind me, I think I finally understand.

Though the margins of our life together have stretched well beyond our hopes — and too often to uncomfortable limits — the reasons that pulled us together in the first place are still recognizable at our core. 

++++
Oct. 10, 2011: As the Pea and her Prince stand at year 2.5 of their own happy start, here is what I will say to her now: Hold onto your hope, savor your story, or you might just lose it in the middle of living it out. 

We didn't, in the end, lose ours. Now I know that reality sometimes changes the shape of your hope, becomes your history and redefines your dreams as you are living them out. Though through the years it might have looked to us like we might unravel, we didn't, in the end, let go of that happy core. 

 

 

just a teaser

today i'm over on 3x3x365.blogspot.com as a guest blogger for Patti Digh, author of Life is a Verb. you can find some of the rest of the story here on writemuch later on today.

of spitfires and the written word

my friend nell, in her early 80s, and is a spitfire. widowed a few years ago — after having lived some 60 years with the love of her life — she's challenging herself to try new things. she's been to Russia, traveled the Seine and the Rhine rivers by boat, taken her turn at singing on the small stage, been in a mission trip.

and she is writing. i am teaching her how in a writer's group at my church, which is not altogether unlike other writing groups i have been part of in my career, except for the fact that most of the people in the group (including nell) proclaim quite loudly that they are NOT writers. i ignore them so we write anyway. and since we are a church class, we write about faith and doubt and just trying to be good Christians in a world that too often seems weary of the whole idea.

we've been on hiatus for the past year, and i have felt refreshed to see the regulars like nell take their seats on Sunday mornings along with a few new faces. among us are several professional writers like myself who nurture the newbies. nell is no newbie, but she is always reminding us that she is (this, having written poems and stories enough to fill a notebook.) our running joke is that the pros show up to class with no paper or pencil, while the newbies sit ever ready, a crisp clean sheet of white in front of them as we begin. (ever the school marm, i bring a box of no. 2s in case the muse should strike.)

in past years, our amoebic group produced books of meditations for the season —Advent or Lent — and have shared them with the congregation. few of the readers can know the work — and sometimes the boxes of Kleenex — it takes to complete each piece.

we've looked at Advent for what will be our fifth year now, and though we are all expectant and excited about Christmas, the work of the class includes coming up with something new to say that hasn't been said for a two thousand years already. so as we look look once again at Mary and Joseph, at Gabriel and the shepherds, each week we ask ourselves questions like: what would we do if an angel came to visit us and told us we would be the mother of God?

well. i for one would emphatically say that menopause means it's not possible, thank God, even by the power of the Holy Spirit. and if she insisted that nothing is impossible when the HS is involved, i would whine that i bet we put our heads together and come up with something else. (one year, melanie pondered not just the angel's words in her heart, but just how many 13-year-olds had to be asked before one of them said yes.)

on Sunday, the prompt was this: think about the path you imagined yourself traveling, but how God had a different idea.

Nell, it turns out, wanted to be a doctor. with an acumen for science and having had pneumonia half a dozen times in as many years, little Nell was sure of her path. though she didn't know any female doctors at the time, she was hopeful she would find the way toward her dream. and then she fell in love with the man she would care for years later as he faced Alzheimer's. and her course her new path was set. 

as she read — and later talked — about how women of her generation acquiesced to their men, i looked around the room at the other women present. melanie, who turned 40 this year, will run the Chicago marathon on Sunday and just completed a triatholon in the pouring rain. She is the mother of three girls under 8 and the wife of our priest and has never asked for permission to do anything. beth chose career over family years ago, and has discovered because of our writing exercise that she is really just fine with that choice, which was a surprise to discover.

nell is happy with her life, but she has always felt something was missing. and though she knows she'll never be a doctor now, she has used her resources to establish a scholarship for some young person who might well be. beth has never had to ask permission from anyone to accomplish what she has as a reporter and editor. and now she is moving forward on a new path, discerning what her role as a Christian might be.

it likely never occurred to melanie that she should ask anyone's permission. she just does it. what might her girls grow up to be like with a mother who takes charge of herself like that?

how different are these generations of women, and how rich it is that they share their stories and learn from each other. as i have learned from each of them.

i have always felt i was on the writing path. and though that path has meandered from newspaper photographer to feature writer to freelancer to teacher to volunteer editor to author, now all the tendrils seem to be gathered into one. and some days it feels as if that's God's doing.

there have been many times when i didn't think i was getting anywhere. but when it felt like i was trudging through the mud of it, my husband would do something really wonderful for me. like the Christmas, years ago, when he gave me a bright white filing cabinet — a place to keep my words in some sort of order. you'd have thought he'd built me an entire office from the way this small gift made me feel. and for a birthday some years later, he gave me a glitzy new IMac. then threw me a book party when i finally wrote that book. even tried to sell one of my books to a barber giving him a hair cut.

when he first started reading my stories and made comment, i would cry because i thought he was criticizing me. only later did i understand he was trying to make me a better writer. trying hard to toughen me up.

in truth, my own dream of being playwright or novelist or essayist has not been waylaid by God sending me off in a different direction so much as by my own sense of inadequacy — and maybe not listening to the voice whispering in my head.  sure there was that occasional editor who wouldn't return my calls, the project that fell flat, that great enemy of the written word —time (too much or too little.) but in the end, i'm the biggest unnudgeable boulder on this road of mine.

but i still have that filing cabinet. and writing friends who help lure the story out of me, even when i fight hard to keep it in. and the memory of my father's voice, telling me this is what i should be. and a class like the one that meets each Sunday morning, when i get to listen to the stories of other people's lives and in the process learn so much more about my own.

9/11/11

we sat in upholstered chairs this morning in a small Episcopal church in mid-coast Maine. no kneelers, just clear glass windows looking out over scrubby pines dotting the landscape. save for one small stained glass window above the altar depicting Jesus calming an angry sea, and these words: Fear not.

we shared our chair pew with four friends we have met in the past eight years. the six of us are in Boothbay Harbor taking in the crisp air and celebrating 80 years of marriage between us. at supper last night, we shared memories of our earliest years as married couples, laughed at our naiveté and marveled at our sticktuativeness if there is such a word. the oldest among us married at 22 and 23, will celebrate 40 years together on Sunday. the newlyweds have been married just 10, tying their knot tightly around each other and changing their world as a couple, just 10 days before our whole worlds changed — 10 years ago today.

the readings for today were about forgiveness, how when Peter asked Jesus how many times he was supposed to forgive someone who had wronged him, Jesus launched into hyperbole, saying seventy-seven (or seven times seven, depending on your translation.) and then He talked about the master whose slave owed him the equivalent of around a billion dollars in today's world. a price he could never pay back.

'we owe God everything,' the priest said. 'just because we opened our eyes this morning, we owe more than we can ever repay.'

i listened, waiting for the lesson about 9/11, and it was there, in the middle of all that need to forgive. how personal forgiveness, which is often the hardest, is based on the illusion that we might have had a better life if the person who had wronged us had not done so. and how as Americans living in a post-9/11 world, forgiveness is not so simple anymore. it was no accident, he said, that our lessons for today — of all days — were about this subject. chosen years in advance, this is just how God works.

++++

in the past week, my husband and i watched several specials about that Tuesday 10 years ago none of us will ever forget. it was harrowing to watch once again, as planes that seemed to come out of nowhere hit the Twin Towers and forever changed our lives as Americans. as i watched and listened to survivors and our nation's leaders tell their stories, i said a silent prayer that nothing like this would happen again.ever.

our daughter lives in NYC, and last week, she and her husband moved into a new apartment. her Upper West Side home is far away from Ground Zero, but as the anniversary of that day approached, i knew it is much on her mind. when i talked with her yesterday, they were staying home. traffic had been horrible since Friday, when the only news, it seemed was about a new, credible threat.


she was a senior in high school the morning of 9/11, and i was set to teach writing to members of her class later that morning. at home, preparing for the day, i saw the second plane hit in real time. then the Pentagon plane. it was almost impossible to pull myself from watching to get to my work. a little more than an hour later, after both towers had fallen, and as i walked up the steps to the high school, i listened to a silence so absolute I could not remember a time when my world had ever been so quiet. a man i didn't know came out of the building and we stared into each other's eyes for more than the split second strangers allow.

six months later my daughter and i visited Ground Zero ourselves with my best friend and her daughter. we stopped in at the office of one of my husband's colleagues, an Indian woman who told us the story of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge toward home and how it took hours to get to her little boy. 'the smell is gone,' she said as we stared into the canyon that still seemed to smolder. it was not gone. she was only used to it.


we were deeply moved awhile later by the thousands of fliers and bouquets of flowers posted on the fence that surrounded St. Paul's Chapel —the nation's oldest public building in continual use — which stands across the street from where the towers once stood. the minutia of the grieving, put there by families searching for loved ones missing when the towers fell. from September 2001 to May 2002, St. Paul’s opened its doors to firefighters, construction workers, police officers and others for meals, beds, counseling and prayer.

Doug Remer, a former associate rector at my church and a family friend of my friend Anne Boone,  was a relief worker at the chapel and invited us in. we knelt in pews where George Washington worshiped. we read some of the hundreds of letters lining every pew and wall, written by children from all over the world and sent to relief workers, thanking them for their service.

this is not something you ever forget.

+++++


the priest today said people have approached him in the years since 9/11 saying: where was God in this? why did God cause this to happen?  "i don't know what kind of God you believe in,' he said, 'if you think God caused it to happened." he did not believe in that kind of God. nor do i. i can tell you where God was. in every single fire fighter and police officer who entered that building. in the couple, as the priest reminded us, who jumped out of the burning buildings, holding hands, knowing this was something that could not be done alone.  there, in the community of strangers who huddled together for comfort, in elevators, in stair wells, on the top floors unable to get out, in those airplanes as their fuselages broke the windows of the towers, my God was there. 

i found myself weeping  — i can't remember a sermon in a long time that has made me weep — for the 3,000 souls gone, for the children of 9/11, for my daughter living in a city targeted yet again by terror. and closer to home, for the man sitting next to me, whom i have failed to forgive too many times, but who never fails to forgive me.

10 years ago, i had not yet met the friends that occupied my pew today. we were all in different places in our lives — Tim & Linda living in Birmingham, Lee and David living on base at Fort Bragg, NC. Lee had not even unpacked her belongings when David — who was supposed to be on vacation — came home to tell her he would be needed at work. (last week, as we recalled our 9/11 memories, several of us spoke of the quiet. Lee could not help thinking of how at Fort Bragg, there was no silence at all. just mayhem. 


within five years of 9/11, the six of us would be brought together by church, and as Tim said over dinner last night, our connection to each other has changed us all.

++++ 


after church we took a car ride to a beautiful little island and found a tiny church built in i think 1918, nestled in the pines and rocks, right by the sea. inside, i knelt, finally, and said my prayers, once again, for having safely arrived at this spot, on this day, with these people. for my children, husband, parents and siblings. for the world, and peace.

this afternoon, we sailed in 12-knot winds aboard a three-masted 60-foot schooner. i braced my feet against the side as we heeled, her rails almost into the chop, tried to take a few pictures. and i thought about how to connect all the moments of this day: the church, the priest's message, the friends, my marriage and this sail.

i thought about the small stained glass window of St. Columba's, depicting to me, Jesus calming the waters during the storm. "fear not' read the words in one corner of the small window.

i didn't know until just now this about the window: "the theme 'fear not'  was adopted  (by the church) soon after the tragedy which we now know as 9/11.  It also takes into account that we are a seafaring town. the touches of green signify the headlands of a safe harbor as the angel speaks peace from a bruised and stormy sky."

well. after 9/11, we are all bruised. thought it's a gift to be married so many years, sometimes it bruises use, too. as the priest said: God is in the midst of them. and us. in our lives and in our friendships, in our tragedies and our marriages. 

fear not. angels speak peace from a bruised and stormy sky.

we're not in disney anymore: 54

i wish sometimes i lived in a disney movie. not because i want the happy ending... though that would be nice, but in a disney world, i would have a feathered pencil writing in the air what i was thinking, while i was washing the dishes or driving to or from work (no, i won't text while driving.. well, not often.) or watching the winds whip around the house.

i have not posted in over a week, but it's not without thinking about it. in the past week i have thought about much, but without that feathered pen hovering in the air to take my mind dictation, much has been lost, i'm afraid.

if i had that pen, i'm sure she would scrawl across the page in nice neat letters that i have, in the past week:

turned 54, felt an earthquake for the first time, been whipped by a hurricane (my 3rd or 4th), watched on tv as tides cut swaths and culverts in fairly good but vulnerable roads i used to travel. watched as irene took various members of my family hostage on the east coast from north carolina to new york. in this same week have walked the dog and bought groceries and picked up sticks in the yard and made supper for my neighbor and read a few chapters in a good book and finished a mediocre one. eaten homemade ice cream and met a new neighbor. watched a 9/11 special on national geographic HD and cried about that for so many reasons i can't even write about them all.

watched antique road show and found a lady who owns a table worth more than my house. seen pictures of trees i knew as a child felled in the street and on houses, warned a friend of an approaching tornado because she still has no electricity, offered shelter that wasn't needed and cooked at least four meals for my husband and me and one for my son and his friend. made pimento cheese. cried a couple of times i am sure and have changed the channel more than once, have scratched the dog's stomach and his muzzle and have thrown the ball to him. have missed my daughter. shown my bad manners. interrupted, though i didn't mean to. celebrated and consoled as two friends left their youngest at college. and have not heard much of what my husband has said to me, despite my hearing aids. probably irritated a few people though they have not said so.

i have, tonight, shared our last tomato with the man i've shared a life with for 30 years, lamenting instead of celebrated the fact that the dozens of tomatoes (and years?) we were able to grow are actually now gone. i have in the past three days stripped the bed of sheets, washed and folded them and i have forgotten to pick up no less than five pairs of shoes from the family room floor. i have forgotten at least one load of laundry in the washer that i'll have to wash again. i have lost sleep and dreamed of the misunderstandable, the embarrassing and the possible and have forgotten more than i recall.  i have been to church, on sunday/monday/ tuesday/wednesday/thursday/sunday and monday again, not because i am am that devout but because my job is there. i have shut the door of my office (which i almost never do) and when i have sat in the pew on the past couple of sundays i have let my mind wander too long. i have hugged two of my favorite three year olds, thank goodness.

and:
waited too long at a restaurant and listened while my husband complained. had too much artificial  sweeter in my unsweet tea, thought about our 30 years together and wished i felt more passionate about that fact. had a few hot flashes despite my patch.  have eaten way too much.

watched iron chef and understood that i really don't want to cook that way, made ina garten's tomato and goat cheese tart my own way was glad i did. wished i didn't have to count the calories in the puff pastry, but i do. started (and just about abandoned) a new morning exercise routine, have gone into work a full hour early and stayed later than i wish because it is that time of year.

listened and counseled and complained and kicked the copier. i have snooped and sighed (too many times), answered the wrong number but not called it. thrown away mail and kept newspapers, still have not picked up my dining room of all the clutter left there for three weeks. i have seen hummingbirds in the yard and wondered where my bluebirds went. found a tiny frog in the hurricane debris and wondered where his mother was. listened to the cicadas. given bad advice.

remembered that i was born on a thursday in the middle of the night, and though my father is a doctor he missed my birth because he was tending to another patient, that's ok. have celebrated the fact of my life twice with friends and once with family and thanked my parents and God for giving it to me all those years ago. have tried to help my dad learn gmail and have worried about both my parents when they lost power during Irene.

and more than once thought that if only i had that feathered pencil in the air i could actually finish one of the books i'm writing and still get my day job done.

i have wished and wanted, lamented, worried and complained, have given and got and tried to smile in the pictures, though i am never happy with the end result. torn ribbons and paper and laughed at cards until i did in fact wet my pants.

if only the feathered pen could be there for me, ever hovering, i could write it all. 

susan hooks is here

my sister and i have never shared well. sleeping in the same room for forever, she inexplicably moved to the guest room when she turned teenager. and sometimes she would go into my closet and take a favorite t-shirt without my asking. (though younger, i was larger than she was so i couldn't steal her clothes without stretching them, and alas, getting caught.)

but then 30 years ago today, something changed.

i woke up to a phone call. 'hello susan!' pamula shouted. 'susan hooks is here!'

susan hooks. it took me awhile for this to sink in. my sister had just had a baby. a girl. and she had named the baby after me. (and my grandmother, but still.) wow. i called pamula daily after that, wanting to know who she looked like (her mom), did she cry (not much), how it felt to hold a baby in your arms that was your own. (one day I would learn myself.) in short order i was driving my mustang from augusta,ga to greensboro,nc, where my mother and my sister had spent the week babykeeping in a little house with kelly green carpet on the family room floor.  

the small bathroom in my sister's house had no vanity, as i recall. just a sink, and since there was no room to stretch out the giant baby bathing sponge, the first thing i saw on my arrival at the house was this: the two most important women my life dangling a tiny, wiry, slick-wet frame over the sink. and her eyes were WIDE open. freaked out, i would describe it. wet baby wet hands wet grandmother and mother... i was scared half to death that they would drop her. 

but they didn't. i am sure she was dry, dressed and fed by the time i got to hold her myself, looking into her large blue eyes, marveling at her chunky cheeks — she looked a little like Tweety Bird — counting her toes. a baby. a real baby. my sister's baby, and somehow — because she was named for me — by default my own. we were sharing at last. and something way more important than a t-shirt.

(my sister remembers this week not just because it marked the birth of her first child, but for the fact that beety jean, who thought that kelly green carpet could use a shampoo, sent my just-days-post-partum sister to the grocery story to rent a carpet cleaner — and didn't even help her get it out of the car. or clean the carpet. she probably did help clean it...that's our beety jean!)

being good Southern women, pamula and i started out calling our new baby susan hooks, but as she grew, just 'hooks' seemed to stick. two months later i got married. my sister moved our little baby to just outside St. Louis, but we talked every day about what raising her was like.

the next spring, i had become her godmother, and so i boarded a plane for illinois and her baptism. while i was there, we went to the zoo and the Arch, watched the roaring mississippi close up. and i took a lot of pictures.

on sunday, we dressed hooks up in her finest bonnet and headed to church. no other member of my family was there (another story: my brother's daughter was christened the same day, in a town much closer to my parents, so they were there.)

80s hair... what can i say?

i wish everyone had been with us, though. we stood in front of a congregation of strangers while the priest marked our baby as Christ's own. and then the choir turned to her and sang the most beautiful song i had ever heard, saying her name over and over, 'susan, susan...' as if she were the only one in the nave (and as if she understood). her wide eyes made us believe she did, for sure. I wish i could remember the other words, but pamula and i were both in tears and one thing you need to know about dear pamula is that she just does not cry.

i will spare you more of this story, which my sister describes as the happiest and saddest day of her life... how we drove all over Illinois look for a place for lunch and ended up in a dingy pizza parlor sitting all alone — pamula, her husband, hooks and me — celebrating the very fact of this baby.

when she was two, pamula called to say hooks had said the cutest thing. 'she asked me if a cloud sleeps. isn't that so cute?' that question led this writer on a dreamy literary journey that continues today. (to celebrate my tweety bird, i have been working on do clouds sleep, the bedtime book she inspired, much of the day). 

hooks grew older, gained a couple of brothers, and by then i had a baby of my own. 

hooks & her worm

she moved a couple more times until the fam finally settled in the Great State of Iowa. she came back to n.c. for school, where people just couldn't understand a name like hooks, so she started using susan. she met a tar heel boy (a demon deacon) who, oddly enough, had a nickname: worm. hooks & worm. there was nothing left to do but to marry him.

and now our little susan hooks is here and grown (though she is still little.) she looks like her mother and her great-grandmother (though she smiles much more than Hazel Estelle Hooks ever did.) and she is learning to make beety jean's caramel cake.

happy birthday, tweety bird. maybe by the time you have your own tweety bird i will finally be able to hand you your book.

can you tell they are kin?

wild about that harry

on wednesday my son and i had a date. we met at an italian restaurant downtown, shared a meal and conversation, then walked down the block and into a dark theatre, just for the chance to put on some silly glasses and say goodbye to an old friend.


we have been doing this for years. (well, not the saying goodbye part), but sharing in a story we both love. 


we first pulled up to number 4 privet drive the year he was 10. i had been scanning the bookshelves of a small independent shop near my house, looking for something that might interest a boy who was not much interested in books. the bookseller pointed me to an odd little paperback called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. 'it came out in england,' she said, 'and this is the British version.' the American title, HP and the Sorcerer's Stone wasn't due out until the next summer.


i picked it up and read a couple of pages, wondering if this might just be the thing to spark reading in my child. it sounded good. boy wizard. i had one of those at home.


in my memory — which has been known to fail miserably — my boy and i sat together and read a few pages about harry, just his age, who lives in a cupboard below the stairs and who learns in chapter 3 that he is no ordinary boy, no not at all. it would be nice if all of us, in chapter 3, learned that about ourselves. maybe some of us do.


it wasn't long before my own wizard took the book into himself (don't you love when that happens?) studying the nuances of the sorting hat and the rules of quidditch, the magic of giants in life and of weasel(lys). we bought the american edition that next summer and he read it again, just waiting for the promised second book. the summer of the third book i had pre-ordered a copy from my bookseller friend, and my then 13-year-old sat for two days reading almost non-stop during our vacation — despite the pleading of friends and sister to join them on boogie boards in the ocean. harry was that important.


as the years passed, some mornings when i went into his room to straighten it up, i'd find he had been re-reading one of the books. and that the harry books had led him to Tolkien, Lewis. 


harry taught him much. that a few things you truly need in life are these: a handful of loyal friends, a teacher or two who will go to bat for you, a sense of purpose and of wonder. and a belief that you can change your corner of the world if you have a mind to. 


when the order of the phoenix came out, mr. g was 16 and driving, but not after 9 p.m. (nc law). once again i'd ordered a copy for him through the bookseller who had first introduced us to this remarkable boy. no copy could be sold until midnight, and though we were strict about the 'after 9' rule, we gave him the keys to the car and said: be careful. my friend the bookseller met him at the back door with his book so he wouldn't have to stand in line with all the little kids. safely back at home, he read into the early morning, witnessing painfully as harry learns that even a teacher whom you are supposed to trust can turn her back on you.


as i think of this, i realize, too, that this was the summer after my daughter's freshman year in college. it had been a hard year for us and for our boy. we missed the princess pea so much. mr g saw friends make wrong choices. he struggled with a teacher who appeared to want him to fail. (he eventually stood up to her.) harry had all this and more. mr g  found in harry's story some sort of strength inside himself i think. there will always be delores umbridges in the world. but they won't win if you don't let them.


a few of harry's friends died. mr g: two by then time he was a sophomore in college. harry lost at love. ditto mr. g. both my boys learned that though friends can make you angry you keep loving them anyway. people (including parents or pseudo-parents) let both of them down. and this too: there will always be horcruxes in the world that can lead to your destruction. the secret is to get to them before they get to you. and as a matter of fact, the whole thing is a puzzle you have to solve all on your own. and sometimes, sadly, you don't.


by the time the last book came out, i bought two copies — one for each of us —  because honestly i didn't want to share. Once again, we read it at the beach, neither of us talking about it until we had read the final page. 


a few weeks ago we convened oceanfront once again. this time my son bent his head into Game of Thrones, the first of a new series — like harry potter for grown-ups, he said. he first saw it on hbo then bought the book. attaboy. see the movie and want to know what the real story is. (i never knew harry was not for adults, come to think of it.)


my son is grown, like harry. works at a good job, watches his investments, tries to grow a beard on vacation. hasn't yet decided to open up his heart again. 


we share a town but don't see him often, so when i get the chance to sit across from him all by myself, even if i do have to pay for the beer and the meal, it is a treat. i look into his face and see pieces of me — eyes, jaw, nose — though to my knowledge now we are only externally similar. but at least internally, we are both wild about that harry.


as we took our seats in the imax theatre, i checked my phone. he does not read my blog so i feel safe in saying he doesn't know i'm following is hilarious tweets. on wednesday mr g had tweeted: 'harry potter with mum.' a gift to me, surely, to let his world know we were together.


we have been doing this, too, watching harry grow on the big screen. mr g actually waits for me, sometimes weeks after it's come out. another gift he does not have to give.


as we sat together in the darkened theatre, i saw more than just a story about a boy banished to a cupboard who finds his way out. i saw my son sitting next to me and how much he was like the cupboard boy, scraggly beard and all. a boy searching for himself, being a friend, battling some, grown into a man, somehow suddenly. but inside him is that 10-year-old, still. 


and so we watch the story end. applaud as voldemort becomes flakes of ash that seem to float toward our faces (we agree the 3-d glasses are not necessary.) watch harry in middle age and i think: what will that be like for my mr g? 

say what you need to say

"I learned ... that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness." Brenda Ueland

from an email sent to me by Lynn Jones Ennis, Ph.D. Associate Director
Curator of the Collection, Gregg Museum of Art & Design, North Carolina State University

say what you need to say

my friend lynn had a way about her. loved soft hats, that girl did. and clothes with such texture you could almost see the voice of the maker in the stitches. diminutive hands. soft in voice and countenance. in her best eastern nc lilt she would often end our visits with: i can't wait to see you aGANE. (caps my emphasis, pronunciation hers.) aGANE, like gain, as if every single time i saw her was her gain. i know it was mine. she used words like SWELL and sent us SMOOCHES by email. things like that.

every so often, an email would show up in my inbox from her, as she hoped to gather three of our friends and me for a seasonal meet up. and somehow we would merge five schedules into one night just long enough to share our stories and our dreams.

i don't remember exactly when we met, but yoga had something to do with it. my friend miriam had met lynn through yoga and introduced us, and somehow lynn talked this muffin top into participating. she assured me that the creativity would just pour out of me if i gave my mind an hour to settle into the ommms. my neighbor candy and i bit, but pretty much everything but creativity poured out of me after my yoga sessions. at home, after,  i poured my well-plied body into a soft chair and promptly fell asleep.

lynn and miriam and i, all writers, found other ways to gather, and in time, candy and diane — writers,too — joined us. we met for energy and support, not so much to share our work but to celebrate the fact that we had our work and our links to each other. lynn, an expert in creativity, softly encouraged us, aGANE and aGANE, and we encouraged her, too.

whenever we met, she would turn to us one by one and say: now, what's going on with you? 

when last we met, we talked about her work at the museum where she was curator, about diane's recent breast cancer and surgery, about miriam's plans to teach a seminar on cooking, writing, painting and eating. candy had finally landed an agent for her middle grades historical novel. all good. all hopeful. so good to see you aGANE, said lynn as we parted in the parking lot.

only i wouldn't. never again. no gain. only loss.

yesterday lynn died. all of a sudden, maybe as she stood at her kitchen sink and told her husband that the headache that had been plaguing her for the past few days had worsened. died. right there. in an instant. in the house she loved, with her tea cups and her plants and the pictures of her granddaughter nearby. 

it does not seem real to me. though i work at my church, i avoided going into the nave for prayer because it would become truth, then. i thought about lynn, who had come to my church in february for a gathering of creative women like herself, sitting not far from where i took my seat yesterday in the pew, there alone I prayed for her family, and for the gift of her life on this earthly walk.

the four of us left in our circle have talked on the phone, wept, wondered. two in our group have lost family members in the past two weeks. we are not in that closest of family friend circles, but we are connected, and so we hurt. 

last night i called my friend grace and said: you mean to world to me. i emailed barbara and my sister, said the same. and instead of television, i asked my husband to hold me while i cried. 

today i got my hair cut (too short) but... my hairdresser is an effusive Christian who wears his faith right out there, joyously, sometimes a little uncomfortable for me. as i told him about lynn, he said this: the Lord does not guarantee us a tomorrow. no. indeed.

after that, as i headed into work, john mayer came on the radio urging me to 'say what you need to say...say what you need to say."

You better know that in the end/It's better to say too much/Than to never to say what you need to say again/Even if your hands are shakin'/And your faith is broken/Even as the eyes are closin'/Do it with a heart wide open/A wide heart

Say what you need to say

say what you need to say. 

my faith is not broken, but i know i need to say what i need to say.

i love you. you mean everything to me. you did a wonderful job. thank you. thank God. i'm sorry. i should have done a better job. i will change. i hope.

 and thank you, lynn ennis, for being a part of my life.

i'm a PEACE girl

On the eve of my 18th birthday, my parents and i turned the corner of New Bern Ave. and Wilmington Street. we sped past the n.c. legislature building and the museum of history i had visited in 7th grade, there she was. just over the horizon stood a great lady, her large white arms and red brick skirt drawing me like a mother welcoming her child home. though she stood at the end of this very old street, seeing her there meant a beginning for me.

hours later my parents would leave me in the lap of this great lady, and i would live with her for two years. she would nurture me and scold me, challenge and celebrate me, teaching me a lot about the world, about God, and about myself.

that afternoon i became a Peace Girl, with most of my belongings housed in a room with polished wood floors and orange and green plaid bedspread to match my roommate's, and a window that looked out over a green lawn and at its center a fountain that in those two years would take on great meaning for me. i'd packed a trunk with shampoo and toothpaste, my raggedy andy, yellow and green towels that coordinated with my bedspread, tucked in a bright green laundry basket i use to this day — and with it all a nutty unspoken dream of being a writer. and i was hoping this grand old lady would help me figure out how.

i live in the same city now, and every time i turn that same street corner and see those arms, though it's been 36 years, i feel the flutter of promise. 

i suppose every girl feels that way about her college, but i can only speak for myself. i chose Peace not only because my sister had graduated from there that spring, but because it was what back then was called a 'girl's school'. i'd spent 12 years in classrooms where boys pulled rank, scolded and ridiculed, teased and cajoled and frankly, i welcomed some time to see what we girls could do without them.

within weeks i was sipping coffee with my new friends in the crowded cafeteria and writing about that dream of mine in my journal. "i'd bet on that dream," my professor wrote on that entry. she actually thought i could do it? i still have the journal, and though the writing is pretty abysmal, it represents something crucial to me: my attempts to find my voice. like learning to ride a bicycle, the entries were my first real effort to do something i had long wished for.

on april 12 of my freshman year — my mother's birthday — just a few weeks before i would leave the grand lady's skirts and head for a summer at home, the editor of the literary magazine tapped me to take her place the next year. i had never even taken a creative writing class.

i have said before that when i did enroll in that first writing class the next fall, it was as if God had taken a can opener to my head, allowing all those things i had been keeping inside it OUT and into the world. i couldn't stop myself. i wrote on everything i could find — notebooks and napkins and the edges of the newspaper, event my textbooks — stories and poems i couldn't believe i was inventing — sharing them at a table of other student writers. in that class, i learned that not everyone had felt the love i felt growing up, and that it was ok to put it on paper and share it with the world. i learned that i had a few stories to tell myself, and though i was not the best writer at all, knowing there were others better than me made me a better writer. (though in tennis class i was always paired with a member of the tennis team, it never made me better at tennis.)

in that room i also learned how to encourage other writers, how to pull the story out of myself and others in surprising ways. it is a skill i use still, and often.

outside of class i watched my fellow Peace girls find their voices, too. in student government (one would later be leader of the grand old lady herself). in art. in fashion. doctor, lawyer, indian chieftress, you name it. they started to become their best selves because of these two years. i watched them speak up in class without fear of ridicule from a boy, watched them break the rules sometimes (well, often), watched them challenge each other at backgammon and basketball and politics.

and i learned a lot about God. and not because on my Old Testament exam i had to list all the kings of Israel in the little blue book, but from a wise man who spoke to us each week in chapel. (yes, back then, we actually went, pretty much every week)... it's there, in my journal, how on one of those Wednesdays, he talked about the three most important decisions we would make in life, and not necessarily while in the gathers of the grand old lady's skirts: our life's passion, who we would spend the rest of our lives loving, and what our concept of who God was to us. i thought about these three things a lot after that day. still do.

on the day of our final exam in New Testament, we gathered in the auditorium with our blue books in hand. our professor sat on stage seated on the stool in front of a grand piano, and when we had all settled into our seats, he began to play "Once I had a Secret Love,"

'Once I had a secret love
That lived within the heart of me
All too soon my secret love
Became impatient to be free'

and turns out, he was talking about God. our exam was to listen to him. that was all. to listen to his voice. and to continue once we left him and our lady, to keep trying to listen to our own. which of course was connect to that secret love of his.

not every day was grand in those two years. i was picked for the honors English program, but the thesis i wrote (i think it was on Faulkner... whom i still can't understand) was not up to honors quality. i will never forget how i disappointed my professor the day she told me i hadn't done good work. and how i had short changed myself. the grand old lady had believed in me, and somehow i had not believed in me. but this was something important to her, that i learn that i don't always make the cut.

and i also learned this: all those women together in one place sometimes can end up not being a good thing. i was sometimes not a good friend to my Peace sisters. not at all. and i am ashamed of that. sometimes they weren't so good to me, and there have been days in the last 35 years when both still cause ache.

but mostly those two years were ones of good and plenty, and when we gather every so often at reunions i am reminded of how much joy just being with them brings me.

at graduation, we gathered around the fountain in white dresses, carrying bouquets of red roses and sang our alma mater together and threw one of our roses in the fountain. it was a poignant moment for us all, because we would be leaving each other, most of us transferring to a four-year college or university to earn a degree. others married, got jobs. i was terrified to leave the lady who had been my mother mentor. (i recall when i approached the steps of the journalism school building at Chapel Hill for the first time thinking how unwelcoming those tall steps seemed to me.) 

in my two years away from Peace i floundered, losing my voice for awhile, except in one lone feature writing class. i longed to hide myself in those mighty skirts again, but there was no doing that. years later, when my classmate came to lead her, Peace became a baccalaureate program. and thrived. this fall, the daughter of my friend and classmate will be president of the student body.

several years ago i came back to the grand old lady, for a writing residency program where i was once again the student. we met in a classroom that had not been built when i was there, and among the dozen or so students in my class, i was the only alum. but surrounded by those welcoming skirts again, my voice came through more loudly than i had dreamed it could when i was 20. and though i had been a professional writer for over 20 years by that time, this time i was writing fiction, and i was surprised — my heart filled once again with promise — when the professor liked my work. my undergraduate professor was there, and in a moment i will never forget, she told me that the novelist teaching me that week said of me: "she is better than she thinks."

last year a new leader came to Peace. in the past few months, there have been a lot of changes. faculty and staff fired. programs erased. more makeover for our grand old lady, who some think was too out of date.

and yesterday i learned online that the leader of the our lady has decided to change her name  — after 152 years of creating strong women — and open her skirts to men. MEN! the letter even referred to this: Alumnae(i) ... we have always been the feminine. it is a bit hard to take.


 a FB Peace Girls group has shown outrage, and though the majority of the posts point their rage toward the end of the tradition we knew as students, (a very few) others say it's change or die. both i think have a point.

i don't know, honestly, how i feel. i mourn the future chance for a girl like me who won't have the experience of a woman's college like my Peace. no longer is she just a 'girl's school', but she is a college educating young women to be thinkers, dreamers, leaders. but it is a different time now, and young women have changed much since 1975. i know because i have raised one. still, i know having the choice of an all-female college should be there for those young women who want it. now, i fear, fewer of them will choose Peace. 

but this is what i know for sure: once i had a secret love. several in fact that lived in the heart of me. and Peace is one of them. i do wonder, what does this grand old lady want? has she, too, become impatient to be free? and free from what? i can't imagine it is from her feminine voice. no Peace girl would ever want to lose that. my prayer is that those who are listening most carefully will hear just want she means.

susan byrum rountree, class of '77