Memories

I don't know why I remember those baby birds lying twisted and dead upon the cement floor of the garage of the second house I lived in. The front of the garage had a set of tall built-in shelves, more than likely constructed by my father. Likely, too, given his affinity for the color, they were painted grey. Or perhaps white.

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Hay Season

Three sisters, our mom, and our baby brother waited in the rickety red wagon, our job to stack the hay as it was baled. Dad positioned the tractor over a row of alfalfa and started the baler, filling the field with a deafening roar.  The baler devoured the hay, sending it into a rectangular  chute where it was compacted and tied into a fifty-pound bale before being shot into the wagon.

It took some time for Dad to perfect his technique.  The bales were too loose and fell apart.  They became tight and heavy as Dad overcorrected his mistake.  And sometimes, if rain threatened, the hay came too fast to stack.

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Parade

On Memorial Day, we would gather at the high school early in the morning and grab our instruments from the band room.  Likely we were indignant about having to rouse ourselves at such an early hour on our day off from school.  We groused.  We rubbed sleep from our eyes.  We fretted over final exams.  We filed into the waiting school busses.

 Every year we had three or four Memorial Day parades, but the one that always stood out for me was the one that took place in the village one mile from my home: The busses would drive down Ryder, known locally as Cemetery Road due to its proximity to the village cemetery.  We would disembark; brush off our uniforms; put on our horrible fuzzy white hats.  We arranged ourselves by instrument and casually walked down Main Street to the parade’s starting point.  We lined up behind the mayor and local dignitaries; behind our local veterans; behind the local Brownie troop.  And then, with a quiet tap of a drumstick against the rim of a snare drum, the parade would begin. 

Here and there, local kids would join the parade, streaming in from the sidewalk on bikes decorated in red, white and blue.  Villagers would line Main Street, standing and cheering and sometimes saluting or sitting in lawn chairs, holding babies in their laps, pointing.  The majorettes, dressed in red sequined bodysuits threw candy at hopeful kids who scampered after it.  Little girls marched along the parade route in imitation of the majorettes, broken sticks serving as batons.  There was a festive air, despite the solemnity of the occasion. 

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Winter, 1978

Snow angled itself in the corners of each window.  Frost crept across the panes.  The driveway filled with drifts three or four feet high.  The doors were nearly frozen shut.

We dressed in layers and hurried to the barn.    

We rushed from stall to stall, using screwdrivers to chip away the layer of ice in the red water buckets hanging inside the cows’ stalls.  The horses stamped their feet and blew frosty breath through their noses.  The chickens huddled up close.  There was no time to scratch the back of the pigs; no time to pet the cats.  We were cold.  We hurried back inside.

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Whisked Away

We had our first pickup at our local CSA the other day: Dandelion greens, lettuce, collards, arugula, bok choy.   And we got to pick a pint of strawberries which we ate—still warm—right in the field.

In my own garden, my peas are up; several varieties of beans and cucumbers, too.  The carrots are just starting to put in an appearance and yesterday, I planted an Egyptian Walking onion my friend brought me from her garden. 

My strawberries are ripening, but, despite the fence I’ve got around the garden, the rabbits have found a way to reach them, to steal the succulent red berries and leave the empty stem dangling from the vine.

It looks as though strawberries won’t be available—to my family at least—from our backyard garden this year.  

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Dive

 The dog put his paw on my knee.  He looked soulfully into my eyes.  Raised his ears a fraction. 

“You need a walk?” I asked.  I rose and grabbed his leash.

He jumped up.  He spun circles around me.  He gave a little bark of joy.

He dragged me through the door, nosing through the tall grass, reading the clues of the neighborhood happenings.  He watered here.  He watered there, marking his territory every couple of minutes before moving on, pausing now and again to sample a dandelion in seed.

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Smoked

My sister and I were talking about our kids the other day and I told her that some days, I just want to curl up in a cave and hide for awhile.

Because recently my daughters told me that living with me is like living in the military.

I admit that I want the house somewhat picked up: While I’m not into decorating the house with fancy-schmancy things, book bags and shoes and textbooks strewn all over the house aren’t quite the look I’m going for.  And, yes, perhaps I do get a bit cranky when I wait ten minutes for them in the school parking lot.  

And, well, yeah, I do get grumpy when I’m asked to drive too much. 

I mean, isn’t that what stay-at-home moms are supposed to do?  Stay at home?

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Driving Lessons

A sunny day. High forties. Fluffy white clouds streaked across the sky.

A man stands outside with his young daughters. There are two bikes out in the driveway: A two-wheeler with training wheels. And one of those newfangled bikes, bright red seat a couple of inches off the ground. Pedals in front. A giant red handle in the back so that the child can be pushed along the sidewalk.

* * *

“Watch the curb! Watch the curb!”

Filbuster gets too close and scrapes the front tire on concrete.
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Hands Slipping Apart

On a particularly cold day last week, Squints and I went for a walk.  He didn’t bother with gloves.  And his baseball hat did little to protect him from the wind that bit at his ears.  He hunched into himself, balled up his hands and drew them into the sleeves of his coat.  “It’s cold, Mom.” 

I took his left hand in my right.  Rubbed the back of it with my gloved thumb to warm him a bit.

And we along walked in silence, hand in hand.

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Christmas Past

Yesterday, our recently-adopted kitten officially became an outdoor cat.  There were a number of factors leading us to this decision: The stash of pooh I found two nights ago beneath the basement stairs two feet from the litter box; the copious amounts of cat urine on V’s mattress; Squint’s allergy flare up; the stealth attacks on the other unsuspecting cat; the jumping on the counters; the stealing of food from dinner plates.  Sometimes I get the feeling that this cat is Destructo back from the dead. 

Squints took him outside and re-introduced him to the great outdoors: He was a wild cat, born in the wild likely to a feral mother.  He took to being outside immediately.  He ran here then there.  He sniffed. 

He chased. 

He meowed. 

He ran away.

“Mom!”  Squints said.

“He’ll be back.”

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Gold Stars and Wooly Bears

I see there’s a moth clinging to the screen, on this, the first day of winter.  And it’s a gloomy day; a rainy day.  Squints and I set out to run our errands.

A man jogs.  In his left hand, he holds a newspaper folded back, which he reads as he runs down the sidewalk, right hand pumping furiously.  Another man walks, face tilted towards the sky, his blue and white golf umbrella serving as a walking stick. 

The clouds press in dark and thick and at the corner the crossing guard waits.  She wears a bright yellow vest with an orange belt and her stop sign lies upside down against a gnarled tree.  She picks it up suddenly, steps into the street and holds it aloft while the high school students roll their eyes and meander across the street in great bunches, enjoying the first day of their holiday break. 

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Regrets

Well, I’m in the process of putting everything back in order in the basement now that the tile is in.  I’m organizing and giving things away—lessening the load the shelves must hold.  Pens and crayons and paints and paint brushes—all in their proper spot.  Notebooks half full of paper have been recycled.   Toys the kids have outgrown have been given away.  Old books, too.  And it’s a liberating feeling, this giving away of things; this lightening of the baggage we carry.

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Halloween Costumes

“Mom,” I said, when I was in second grade, “I have a Halloween parade at school tomorrow.  I don’t know what to be.”

Mom looked at me.  She put a hand over her mouth and tilted her head, thinking.  She glanced at the bowl of plastic fruit on the dining room table: shiny red apples, perfect pears, and clusters of grapes, purple and green.   A smile crossed her lips.  “Hang on.”  She went to her sewing room and returned with a piece of green felt and her scissors.  “Here.”  She folded the felt in half, cut a V into its center, and threw it over my head.  She knelt and cut a line of similar V’s into the bottom of the fabric, giving it a jagged Fred-Flintstone look.  She grabbed the grapes from the bowl and began safety-pinning them to the felt, which sagged in response.  She found a pair of green tights and pinned a cluster of grapes in my hair.

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Remnants

I cut out fabric to make pajamas for the kids this morning: flannels so soft I wished I’d bought a few yards for myself and two cotton prints Filibuster had conned me into buying.  One was bright red with the word Republican printed upon it in a variety of fonts.  Occasionally, a red and blue elephant bearing three white stars upon its rounded back walked across.  And there were several white circles with a red R stamped in the centers.  This fabric was to be the right leg. 

The other fabric, of course, was its opposite; the word Democrat written all over it; a donkey, also with three stars, a blue D stamped upon white circles.  The left leg. 

By the time I’d finished, the dining room floor was littered with balled-up tissue and thin strips of fabric.  I folded the big scraps and put them in a bag in the garage, intending to give them to a local thrift shop next time I was out that way.

I am not a saver.

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The Great Brain Robbery

Growing up, one of my all-time favorite books was The Great Brain.  The book’s cover featured the novel’s protagonist, The Great Brain, a smug-looking boy of about eleven, arms crossed one over the other, assuming the expression of one well-familiar with his uncanny intelligence.

Though the book was written by John D. Fitzgerald, I was under the impression that the author was F. Scott Fitzgerald; that I was reading a book by the author of The Great Gatsby.  Soon enough, I knew, I would graduate to bigger, thicker tomes while my classmates were left behind with Nancy Drew and the Trixie Belden Mysteries.

In The Great Brain, I thought I had found myself.

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Lesson Learned

This post was written in response to a prompt from The Red Dress Club: Write a post that either starts or ends with the words "Lesson learned." Word limit: 400 words. 

“Pig’s out!” Someone hollered and we all jumped into action.

Now, escaped animals weren’t a routine occurrence in my family’s history of farming, but it happened often enough to lend a bit of suspense to our daily lives.  Once or twice, my mother looked up from the kitchen sink to see cows in the back field, lazily grazing on the rich alfalfa crop intended to feed them through winter.  Another time, there came a midnight knock upon the front door.  Two men stood on the porch, inquiring whether the cows in the middle of the state highway belonged to us.

But a loose pig?  This was new.

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The Permanence of Elephants--The End

The bathroom was at the top of the stairs and, of course, each week, I would have to use it—if only to break up the monotony of waiting for my piano lesson.  I would climb the wooden staircase, stepping lightly, hoping to have a peek into the room to the right.

This room belonged to the piano teacher’s mother, Mrs. T and, invariably, the door would be open.  The room was dominated by a massive bed—a bed so high, a stepping stool stood sentry at its side.  The bedspread was white as snow.  The bed itself was of a dark ancient wood. It looked so inviting in its size and softness, it was all I could do to keep myself from entering the room; from climbing that stool and sitting upon the bed.

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The Permanence of Elephants--III

Our first piano was a basement piano: an ugly old upright painted thick with orange.  Many of its teeth were chipped; some were missing their enamel altogether, and on these keys, someone had penciled in their names: C..D…E

Once a day, I’d go down the basement steps, gray with black stick-on treads and cross the orange tiled floor and seat myself at that old piano, fully intending to practice.  But instead, I’d find myself pretending I was the piano player at the Silver Dollar Saloon in Bonanza—banging the keys on that upright mercilessly without regard for sound or rhythm.  I’d end my performance in a magnificent glissando covering the entire span of white keys before spinning around on my bench to face my invisible audience—the ping pong table, too—for the thunderous applause that only I could hear. 

And then my mother’s voice would float down the stairs.  “Is that your lesson?”

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The Permanence of Elephants--II

Winters, we took refuge on the red velvet loveseat that was pressed against the windows of the front room of the piano teacher’s house.   I would run my thumbnail against the grain of the fabric, drawing pictures in velvet, listening to the warm-up scales of my sister.  On the table to the right there was a wooden box, which I felt entitled to open.  Inside there were dried rose petals—yellow—that must have held some great significance for the piano teacher.  But I considered them only for their entertainment value as I opened the box, inhaled the memory of scent and thoughtlessly poked a tiny index finger into fragile recollections.

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The Permanence of Elephants

Like everything else of importance, the piano teacher’s home was on Main Street.  The house was small and painted a light gray and full of mystery and contradiction.  A huge magnolia tree shaded the path from the sidewalk to the three concrete steps leading to the porch.  Formed into the risers of the first step and the third were identical images of a fat elephant in profile.  I never knew how those elephants got there and never thought to ask.  My six year old self imagined that the elephants had been chiseled out by some former teenaged occupant of the house.  But my older self—my adult self—eventually realized that was unlikely: The images were too perfect; too uniform; too deep.  Perhaps a form was pressed into the concrete before it dried.  Perhaps the images were carved into wet cement the way my children would—years later—use a nail to carve their initials into the new concrete floor in my father’s equipment barn.  I will never know the story of how they got there, but those elephants were as much a part of the piano teacher’s house as the piano teacher’s house was a part of Main Street.

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