Snow

2000 December

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, the Dauphin County Sheriff and his Deputy knock on our front door.

“I’m sorry to bother you ma’am,” the Sheriff begins, “but I’m here to tag your assets for sale to resolve a lien against your property.”

The smell of a pork loin wafts from the kitchen and out through the open front door.  It is the first meal we have prepared in months.  My husband has brought home a paycheck from a new job in Philadelphia, where he has also been living.  The pay rewards us with a holiday meal.

The Sheriff starts tagging items in the entryway of our home. He moves his way through the downstairs, into the kitchen, counting pieces of silverware, tea towels, spices in the cabinet, serving plates, the Crock Pot, the Krups espresso maker, the pasta maker, the bread maker, the dry goods in the pantry.  He empties the toy box, the hutch, the cedar chest, and moves into the garage where he tags Mema’s handmade quilts, boxes of my childhood keepsakes, a collection of record albums, the stereo I listened to in college, boxes of old clothing, winter jackets, snow sleds, boots, ice skates, and two field hockey sticks.

In the bedrooms, he tags articles of clothing, a desktop computer, décor, my children’s beds and their bedding, more toys, and then, with his Deputy scribbling every last detail into his notebook with diligent dollar figures attached to the material objects within the walls of my home, the Sheriff enters the master bedroom walk-in closet.  He opens the door, switches on the light, and upon sliding my husband’s million-dollar suits from one end of the hanging rail to the other, the Sheriff reveals Santa’s lot.  There, behind the hanging clothing in our bedroom closet, I had delicately wrapped and hidden my children’s Christmas presents.  

The Sheriff sucks air into his lungs.  The Deputy lowers his notebook and pushes his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose.  

“I’m really sorry about this ma’am,” the Sheriff whispers.  “This never gets easy for me.  Especially on a day like today.”  He shakes his head in dismay.  “If you had just paid up on your debts…” he began, but his voice fades into the place where I had been living for months.  It’s the place where there is no air, no oxygen to fill the lungs.  The place of empty gazes and unfinished sentences, where everything is left unsaid.

The Sheriff and Deputy kneel onto the floor of the walk-in closet, and one by one, they unwrap and tag every single one of my children’s Christmas gifts for public sale.  Nothing beneath the wrapping paper that the Sheriff removes is new.  Nothing bears an original label.  Piece by piece, the Sheriff unwraps used toys that I had purchased for pennies from thrift shops, yard sales, and flea markets.  The unwrapping reveals battery-operated crawling doll with marks of wear and tear, a used table and chair set, a box of second-hand toy kitchen utensils, used wooden puzzles, a pile of dress-up clothing with torn fabric that I was able to mend, and a number of odds and ends that would pass as presents beneath a tree for little girls to unwrap on Christmas day.  For a fleeting moment, I think that the Sheriff is fighting back tears.  

After the Sheriff and is Deputy leave, I quickly rewrap the second-hand gifts and neatly pile them back into the secret hide-out.  I return to the kitchen where I put the final touches on the most magnificent Christmas cake.  It was truly a masterpiece.  Earlier that day, I had carved the sheet cake into the silhouette of the gingerbread man and covered him in brown fondant.  I decorated him with traditional gingerbread man trimmings, but left half of his garnishes unfinished.  I molded tiny circus clowns from fondant and tube icing and positioned the clowns in action poses to reflect one pouring paint onto the gingerbread man from a can simulated by a marshmallow.  Another clown was placing the buttons down the center of the body, and a few others were working on the finishing touches of perimeter icing, the smile on the gingerbread man’s face, and the trim around his hands and feet.  Tiny clowns orchestrating the magic of a giant gingerbread man in their care.

I smile broadly when the girls ramble into the kitchen with their rosy red cheeks.

“Who’s ready for a Christmas Eve feast?” I say, puffing out my chest with my hands on my hips.

“We are!” Zoey hollers lifting her arms into the air.  Claire claps her hands together and jumps for joy.

“Well then!” I exclaim, “Let’s get you up to the table for the feast of a lifetime!” 

I kneel and pull the both of them into an embrace, one girl in each arm, close to me, and warm.  I bury my face into their winter-scented hair.  I close my eyes and I hold onto everything that has been left for me to keep; the things that cannot be lost.

The week after Christmas, my husband returns to Philadelphia. The gas is turned off. The water is shut off. The car is repossessed and I have to chase the tow truck at two in the morning so I can make him stop and give me my babies’ safety cars eats from the backseat of the car he is towing away. I remove notices of a property sale from the front door of our home every morning. I buy milk and bread with change I find from between the sofa cushions. I sell hand-me-downs, then books, then jewelry, furniture, coats, bedding, my children’s crib. I sell their bikes, what toys we have left, and every other material object that we can live without. Every second of every day takes years from the life expectancy with which I had been born. 

In the evening, I take the girls for a sunset walk.  I bathe them.  I read them a story.  Then another.  Then I tell a story.  I sing a lullaby.  I trace Claire’s face with my index finger.  I press my cheek to Zoey’s in remembrance of the day she was born.  I hold them both in my arms, on my lap, in the rocker, and there, we are pulled together close in the darkness of the place we began.  We are safe.  There are no bad things happening to us in the nursery, in the night, while we sleep.  Nothing bad can happen in those sweet and silent dreams.

When my girls are tucked into their beds, I roam the house and toil over the wreckage that has become our life.  No one sees it, as if I wake to the nightmare of losing our home, our family car, the loss of our assets, the sale of almost every material object we own. I am living an invisible horror that only I can see.

At eleven o’clock I go outside to sneak a cigarette, but I let the cigarette remain unlit.  Quick, I think to myself.  Quick.  Before it is gone.

I dash inside and grab the folded afghan.  It is the one I crocheted for my husband as a gift for the holiday; a Christmas that seems to belong to someone else now.  I skip every other step on my ascent to Zoey’s bedroom.

“Wake up!” I say in a hoarse whisper.  I shake Zoey’s shoulder.  “Zoey!  Wake up!  I have something to show you!”  A mix of laughter and tears presses against the back of my throat.  I scoop her from the bed.  “I want to show you something,” I tell her. I wrap her in the afghan and I carry her down the stairs.  She is getting big.  Heavy.  My girls are growing.  I manage the front door and swing it open.  I grab Zoey with all my might and I press her face against mine, as though I may never do this again.  As though we may never hold something so dear, so sacred, ever again.  I do this, because I do not know, and yet I do. 

“Open your eyes!  Do you see it?”  I say. We are in the front yard like we are the only two people left desolate on a planet long evacuated by its inhabitants; the only two people alive.  I turn us in circles, looking up, watching snow spiral from its world into ours.  I let out a roaring laugh like white water rapids, releasing fear and unrest into the night sky.  I fall to my knees, dropping both of us onto the cold earth, frozen blades of grass erect against my bare ankles.  Zoey’s feet are bare.  She pulls them in so that they are covered by the afghan.  I am holding her like an infant, rocking her back and forth even though she is four now.

“What is it?” she finally speaks. Her hair is speckled in white with frozen flakes of condensation. 

“It’s the first snowfall of the year,” I say.  “The very first snowfall.  It’s all yours.  No one can take it from you. It cannot be lost.  You can keep this forever, for as long as you want.”

It is now that the answer arrives to the place where we are seated.  It is now, in this moment, beneath the first snowfall of the season in the center of a frozen yard that is no longer ours, that a fifteen-year-old question is answered.  I know now how it happens.  I know how those people on the 1986 cover of LIFE Magazine are living in their car.  I know now how homelessness happens.  

The story had broken in the spring of my junior year in high school.  I had been standing in the checkout line at the Weis Market with my father.  LIFE Magazine was featured as a top-shelf periodical.  The cover photo locked my gaze; a man, his wife, his children, and his dog, all situated in a car in a sepia tone filter.

“I need this,” I told my father, placing a copy of LIFE on the conveyor belt.  

“What for?” my father asked.  “It’s expensive.”

“I just need it,” I answered.  “Please, just let me have it.  I’ll pay you back when we get home.”  I was sixteen and had babysitting cash stashed away in my bedroom.  But I didn’t have to use it.  The urgency in my voice sold my father and he bought me the magazine with no strings attached.

For weeks, months, for almost a year, I studied the article.  I searched the photos for answers.  There were bits and pieces of the puzzle that I could merge into some semblance of an answer, but I couldn’t get my head around the final, single act or lack there of that had landed these people into living in their car.  How does a family wake up one day and say, “Today is the day, kiddos!  Today is the day we move into our car!   Someone grab Fido!  We don’t want him to get left behind!”

I never saw it in motion.  I never heard the mechanisms, the machine in the works.  I only ever saw ways out.  Possibilities.  Hope climbing toward an imaginary horizon that I would never crest.  My husband had lost his job. I dusted the furniture. I nursed a runny a nose in a toddler. He had said not worry. I cooked meals. I washed the dished. Bills traversed into the hands of collectors. I weeded the flower garden. I took the girls to the park on sunny days. It happens in the midst of the survival.  While we hustle and we bustle in the name of keeping our heads above the water, the ship has long been sinking.  Homelessness happens beyond the reach of consciousness.  It had happened to that family long before the day they had moved into their car.  The mystery of that 1986 cover story is solved in the snow of a yard that had long been lost to the reckless mismanagement of a capitalist dream.

The snow thickens.   Zoey’s eyes close.  She is smiling.  She curls her body to contour herself into mine. I wonder if she can feel the ache in my heart.  I sit in the yard long enough for her to fall back to sleep in my arms.  I sit long enough not to feel the cold.  I don’t know where we are going, but I know that this is the end. And so I sit in the cold night air long enough to muster the courage it takes to whisper, Goodbye.

A Story of Easter Past

In 2010, just like every Easter that had come before it, I spent Easter weekend with Spanky and the family.  It was difficult to peel myself from the clutches of Philadelphia, but by Thursday of Easter week, the city had me by the throat.  I packed up the kids and we left for Newport that morning.

The drive to Newport was a trek we made all too often and not often enough.  Visiting home renewed me, refilled my tank, grounded me, and left me feeling like I was missing out on the final years of my parents’ lives, the formal years of my nieces and nephews, and all of the rest of my adult years that I had projected as taking place in my hometown.  It didn’t matter how many holidays, weekends, County Fairs, Turkey Trots, hockey games, festivals, and Friday Night Lights for which I was present. I had gone from being a renegade member of the Newport High School Class of ’89 to something that had faded into a bare threaded tapestry of people who used to live in Newport.  Like my Papaw always said, “Used To is dead,” or at least my father says that is what he used to say.  

I was five when Papaw died.  My only encounter with him was a visit to see him in the Pennsylvania State Hospital. He was wearing a diaper and had no teeth. He mashed words around between his bare gums, and thrashed his free flowing limbs in detest of something.  I was enamored by the man, and later grateful that my Mema had thought enough to take me to see him within the framework of his dying dies. And even later, when my father told me about Used To among other things that constructed my grandfather into a functional human being for me, I grew even more grateful to have come from a man who took zero shit from life.  Before losing his mind to Alzheimer’s. my Papaw had gobbled up almost a collective thousands acres across eight farms, having established himself as owner and operator of the largest turkey farm in the State of Pennsylvania.  I am that descendant.  Unfortunately, I keep Used To’s fire burning, much to my Papaw’s detest.  Maybe that’s why he mashed and thrashed in those dying days.  He knew that I was about to encroach on a life of Used To.   

Shortly after arriving to Newport that Maundy Thursday in 2010, I was back in the car and heading into town with my sister Spanky where we attended my nephew Max’s basketball tournament.  The game was held at my old high school, which is now a newly constructed high school. Spanky and I chain smoked in the car on the way into town, which resulted in us reeking in the stands of the unrecognizable gymnasium, which resulted in me wanting crawl back into bed for the rest of my life.  We smelled like wet ashtrays sitting at a youth athletic event with an audience of ghosts from my past. 

 “I can’t do this,” I whispered to Spank.

“Do what?” she asked.

“Be here,” I said.  “I can’t be here right now.  Let’s go.”

“That’s my son on the floor,” Spank said, pointing at Max guarding an opponent.  “We are not leaving.”

“We smell bad,” I said.

“Life smells bad,” Spank replied.  “Are you going to leave life?”

After Max’s game, we chain smoked on the way home, and then for a while on my mother’s back porch, which is also Spank’s back porch because that is the circumstance of their lives.  Then I went out back, to where the jungle gym stood in the yard, still erect in 2010, and I laid down on the bottom of the board where the slide levels out parallel to the ground.  Spank followed me into the yard.  She stood over me for a minute, blocking the sun, then sidled over to a swing upon which she took a seat. 

“I’ve been reading Mitch Albom,”  I said, my eyes closed with sun-induced psychedelic features exploding behind closed lids.  It was a lie. I had finished the book days prior. I dog-eared a dozen pages and memorized the lines that struck me as life-altering.  “You are not your past,” I boasted to Spank.  She left the quote hanging in silence with the smell of wild garlic and overgrown yard grass.  I let out a sigh because Spanky has never let me be profound outside of the one time she took my advise on putting her infant twins on a bedtime schedule. 

“I’m stuck,” I finally said, not sure that she was still there, sitting stationary on the swing.

“You’re afraid,” she replied from the swing.

I didn’t respond.

“I need you to know,” Spanky continued, “that I’ve been sitting in this house for ten years making the same devastating decisions over and over again, expecting my life to change on its own.”

I considered the quantity of ten years.

“I loved that white house you lived in on Jamestown Avenue,” Spanky said.

“It wasn’t my house,” I replied.

“Exactly,” she agreed.  “You made a decision to leave based on ownership.”

“It was a good house,” I said, side-stepping her psychoanalysis of how I left a perfectly good rental dwelling for one that I could hold in my hands in the form of a deed.

“That white house was your home,” Spanky continued, side-stepping my side-step.  “But take a look at why you left.  Look at why you’ve done everything you done over the past ten years.  You keep making decisions based on a single notion of what you think you’re supposed to be doing with your life, and look at where you are.”

“On a sliding board,” I attested.

“At the bottom,” she corrected.  “Lying down to boot.”

“I’m reading Mitch Albom,” I said trying to salvage my dignity from the prone position.  “You should read it.”

“I don’t need Mitch Albom to tell me that I need to change,” Spank said.

“I think the book changed me,” I said.

“No it didn’t,” she said through the veil of a sigh.  “You’re incapacitated with fear.”

“Fear of what?” I asked.

“You’re afraid of not getting the life you’re expecting,” she explained.  “Just like all those houses you’ve lived in, all of the cars you’ve driven, all of the schools you’ve put your kids in.  All of it represents what you think you should be doing.  You keep hopping from stone to stone thinking that the next one is going to be the one.  The next one will take you there, to that great place of expectation.  What about the stone you’re standing on now?  What about the great expectation of this minute right here?”

“I don’t know what I’m expecting anymore,” I admitted.

“Exactly,” Spanky repeated.  “Because you have spent ten years dwindling on something that has long since past.  You keep reaching behind your back, expecting it to be there, within an arm’s length away.  But it’s gone, Sissy.  That old life you keep trying to resurrect is over.  That ship has sailed and the sooner you stop trying to recreate a life that is written down in the history books, the sooner you’ll get off the bottom of that slide.”

Oh those dreaded things of my past. The the tragedy of a fallen suburbanite stay-at-home queen and the demise of her king.  How the kids would be damaged for life.  How I could never show my face again in public.  How I would never again be able to go home.  And yet, there I was, sunning myself at the bottom of a children’s sliding board in the backyard of my childhood.  Defeated.  Deflated.  Still trying to find that unnamed destination.  Still trying to revive the long-dead past.  Digging deep to revive royalty and redeem the house, the Jag, the jewelry, the stature, the dance school, the Montessori school, the luncheons, the salons, the spas, and all of the other piles of bullshit that were lost in what seemed like a single day over a collapsed business structure that crumbled from beneath and caved in over the rim.  Ten years later, we lived a fine life.  One that afforded me to chase the next best thing.  But I still couldn’t let go of chasing what I had considered to be the life I had meant to live.  I wanted the life I Used To live.

“I’m not reaching for anything,” I lied.

“Then how much longer are you going to keep catching your chin in the zipper?” Spanky asked me.  “Because you must know that every time you pull on the zipper, your chin is going to get in the way.”

I laughed.  My chin was zipper shredded.  Gnarled by the act of reaching backward for the house I Used To have, the car I Used To drive.  I was stuck on going from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next, insisting that I had the authority to dig up the bones of Used To, as my Papaw would have seen it. 

“I don’t why it happened,” Spanky continued.  “It just did. I woke up one day and declared that I absolutely could not live this life anymore.  I needed to lose weight, I needed to be a better parent, I needed a better job.”

And I needed to let go of the past.  I was afraid of living outside of the life plan that had failed.  I was afraid of moving on.  I held the past so close to me, so tight, that my knuckles turned white in the clutch.  

“It will happen to you too,” Spanky said.  “Maybe you’ll stumble onto an photograph, or hear a song on the radio, or see something in the eyes of your children reflecting who you’ve become in contrast to who you meant to be.  I took back the night. I made a conscious decision that my life was not be surrendered to a decade of poor decisions. I took the reins. And I decided that I would not give up. Not after one day.  Not after two weeks. Not after another ten years.”

Spanky got up from her perch.

“It’s times like these when I like crawl under the covers and hide from the world,” she said standing over me.

“I usually curl up in laundry baskets,” I confessed.

“Well,” she said.  “You’re not getting into mine.  Let’s go eat the kids’ Easter candy.”

And so we did.

Over the course of the ten years that have followed the conversation from the bottom of the slide, a lot of scary stuff has come my way.  My kids got hurt, my husband lost jobs, loved ones fell sick, bikes were stolen, our kitchen window was shot out, kids rioted on our street, my oldest daughters went to college, I taught in the School District of Philadelphia.  But my greatest fear, the fear of moving on, the one of which Spanky spoke of ten years ago, that is a fear with which I continue to grapple. 

There’s a stump in my forest from which grows a sapling.  I walk past it almost every day.  And every day, I stop at that place along my path, I say my prayers, and then I whisper to the stump, “From death, comes life.  For every end, there is a beginning.”

Happy Easter to those who celebrate it.  And to all, I wish you Happy Beginnings.

 

The Query that Failed

Lorin Stein, Editor

The Paris Review

62 White Street

New York, New York 10013

Re: “Unspeakable”

Dear Mr. Stein:

Once, I lived so normal that it made my throat hurt in a way that I was unable to take in the kind of air that feeds the parts of me that medical science cannot see.  It was a pain that distracted me from reaching the segments of the world that have stories that need to be told.  Those are the stories I write; the ones that otherwise cannot be heard, or read, or started, or finished.  Or, mostly, understood.  That’s what it is for me.  I write about the things that I need to better understand.  The news media helps.  Like, when a father kills his four children before the mother can wake to save them.

I am well-versed on the definition and format of an industry-standard cover letter.  I know all about current trends in querying editorial decision-makers, or more accurately, editorial interns who flush the piles.  Unfortunate for those who insist upon such formalities, and as I previously stated, normal almost killed me once.  I will not let it take me on a second occasion. 

So rather than hook and capture you with attention-grabbing action verbs and extravagant adjectives that illustrate my unending fortitude and passionate tenacity, certain to prompt you to turn this page and engage in intricate language that portraits sociopathic tendencies and a woman’s inability to suffer, I simply ask that you read the enclosed short-fiction piece.  And then publish it. 

Thank you, Mr. Stein, for getting this far.

Sincerely,

  

Saranne Fosselman

Enclosure: “Unspeakable”

The Problem

I am too easily distracted. I will engage in anything, anything at all, in the name of avoiding the task at hand.

I used to think that I was going to change the world. We all do, right? Like, in kindergarten when I convinced myself that if I stood at the top of the jungle gym and jumped to the ground in a spiraling motion, I would metamorphose into Wonder Woman. Who wouldn’t, right? I mean, that’s how she did it. She spun. And then she was AMAZING.

So, I spent the entire year on the slide during recess as to not let the other kids know that if I accidentally spiraled myself off the jungle gym, I would most certainly turn into Wonder Woman. Not until May.

It was an overcast day. A slight breeze. Just enough chill for me to keep my sweater buttoned. Jonathan Spearl, or whatever his name was, was the only thing that stood between me and my climb to the top of that jungle gym where I was about to reveal my power from within.

He missed a toss of the Nerf and had to jog to the left. I ducked to the right and took hold of those metal bars, then an ascension up the wooden steps, around the tower, over the bridge, and finally…finally, I was standing on the highest platform of the structure. I immediately noted that I should have not chosen my first day on the jungle gym as my Reveal Day. It was high and kind of slippery beneath my Keds. The bars were cold and too big for me to wrap my hands around. The ground was so far away.

But this was it, right? My big day. My Debut. Dayyyyyy-Bewwwwww!

This was the moment for which I had waited my whole life. Brother John was all grown up enough in seventh grade to ride his bike all by himself without our parents trotting behind him on the sidewalk barking at him to stop at every corner until they caught up to cross him through the intersection. Even after he came home with a rock in his head, they let him out. Even after he caught his friend on fire down at the empty lot at the end of our street, they let him out.

And then there was baby Jessica. Who cried. All. The. Time. She cried colic all over that house from floors to ceilings and it ricocheted off walls and draperies and berber carpeting that my mom insisted was genius on which to raise her children. It was pea green. We spilled everything on it. All the time.

But this day, the one that happened at the top of the jungle gym, this day was mine. Carpe Diem. Yadda, yadda. Blah, blah, blah.

“Are you going to jump or what?”

It was Jonathan Swirl, or whatever his name was. He was standing behind me, sort of hanging from the tower rods, smirking, making fun of the little kid with her Keds getting ready to turn into Wonder Woman so that the world would finally understand her outward strangeness that attracted kids like Jonathan to, well, pick on her. And now I am talking about myself in third-person, which brings me to the point at hand.

I couldn’t talk myself into jumping that day. Nope. Not on that day. And I never turned into Wonder Woman. In fact, I wasn’t even permitted to watch her show on television. My mother thought she was sleazy. So while all the little girls who populated my neighborhood that summer wore snazzy Wonder Woman tank bathing suits, I adorned a fluorescent pink tank bathing suit with a gray elephant embroidered on the belly. There are photographs of those little girls in their Wonder Woman bathing suits in my mother’s photo albums.

I am in the albums, too. Strange. Awkward. Unusual. You can pick me out of all the group shots. But not because I turned into Wonder Woman during kindergarten recess. And not because I am running through my father’s sprinkler in a fluorescent pink tank bathing suit with an elephant embroidered on the front. But because I have always been different.

I still climb to great heights. I still try to jump. And then I find something else to do. Before the leap comes to fruition.

Eulogy

My grandmother passed in 2005. I was summoned to author and present a eulogy at her funeral service held at the site of the former Wila Methodist Church. The following is what I delivered to the congregation on that day. I post the passage annually on May 14th; Violet’s birthday. She would have been one-hundred-and-three-years-old today.

Eulogy

Violet Wilhemina Tressler Fosselman

May 14, 1909 – July 3, 2005

Growing up, I didn’t have a grandmother, or a grandma or a mum-mum. I had a Mema. A woman who, in my early years, was defined by a drawer of junk food she kept for me in her kitchen and the toothbrush, just for me, that dangled in a dispenser on her bathroom sink. By the time I was eight, and living only a mile from her house, my every weekend and holiday was spent with Mema in what seemed to me a land of magic and wonder that never tired no matter the number of minutes, hours, or days I spent with her.

When my Aunt Sandra asked me to say a few words regarding the life of Violet Fosselman, a million stories came to mind. I remembered the sealed jars of her homemade grape juice she stored in her basement where cousin Katie and I used to make inventions with in intention of changing the way the world interpreted technology.

I remembered Jiffy Pop on Friday nights and Violet’s rice pudding that made my insides melt. I remembered the smell of Violet’s attic; a treasure trove that provided afternoons of investigative rooting through boxes and bags of life manifested long before my time. Our parents scolded us for dragging Violet’s ancient ruins from the attic collection into the family room. We took the reprimand in exchange for stories that Violet shared for every item; stories delivered in an elaborate tapestry of the olden days.

I remembered Violet dousing my every boo-boo with Solarcaine, her cure-all for wounds ranging from skinned knees to bee stings. I remembered her patience, her tolerance and her tenacity. I remembered old five-eyes that hung on the wall above her range. A wooden paddle with five holes drilled through the center. She never used the paddle on the grandchildren. The threat alone was enough to keep us well-behaved.

I remembered Christmastime and Halloween at the Wila Church. And fausnaught day! That special Tuesday in February when I’d come home from school to find a box of homemade doughnuts made at the grange hall. Catholics call it Fat Tuesday, but Mema was a faithful German Protestant. I was the only one of Violet’s grandchildren confirmed in both churches.

I recalled sitting in Violet’s rocking chair on a lazy summer afternoon with my arms hanging limp over the sides of the chair. My mind drifting and my hands in the wrong place at the wrong time, I managed to rock the chair over my fingers. With a shriek that must have echoed all the way to the T. Luke Toomey Bridge, I leaped from the chair and fell into a fetal position on Violet’s back porch. Traumatized by the pain, I clutched my hand to my chest and rolled around calling for help. My sister, Jessica, was the first to arrive on the scene to immediately assess that I was having a heart attack.

“Mema!” she called through the screen door into the house. “Mema! Get out here! Come quick! Sara’s having a heart attack! Mema! We need you!”

In a flash, Violet was standing over me, her face white as a ghost. For an instant, I think she might have believed that maybe I was in cardiac arrest.

“I rocked over my fingers, Mema!” I shouted.

Violet smiled, and then chuckled. She ushered me into the house and sprayed my swollen fingers with Solarcaine.

And then, quietly, almost still like an ocean tide before a wave rears its foamy head, I remembered a walk I took with Violet on a warm summer evening.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she had suggested. I was about 14-years-old.

We crested the hill behind her house and stopped to survey the valley below. The creek. The church. Lib Lyons’ General Store.

“I’m going to build a house here someday, Mema,” I confided in Violet.

A moment passed before she spoke. And I wonder now if maybe, standing on the fringes of her empire, Violet considered life and how it tosses us like dried leaves in the wind. How misdirected motives influence and lead us down paths we never imagined to exist. And most certainly, I wondered if Violet considered at that moment how the passage of time casts life into faded memory and we forget the things we once promised to do.

“That would be a nice thing to do,” she answered and as we walked down the hill, back to her house, a deer leapt from the brush and onto our path. I easily startled and Violet took my hand. The deer stood like a statue on the path, staring at us in alarm.

“Scat!” Violet said to the animal and the deer disappeared into the green of the summertime hillside. Violet gave my hand a squeeze and let go.

Mema taught me how to sew, but never on Sundays. The seventh day was reserved for rest, she warned me. This made little sense to me as a child. It contradicted the fact that every Sunday morning Mema came into my room, the blue room, the one in which I always chose to sleep. It was my father’s old bedroom, the one with Little Boy Blue on the wall and the teddies on a chair in the corner and the giant headboard on the bed that me feel safe, protected. At the crack of dawn, on the day left for rest, Mema woke me, religiously. I whined and moaned and insisted that I would not be getting out of bed. By the arm, Mema would drag me into the bathroom where I was ordered to splash cold water in my face and brush my teeth. It was time to go to church. This was the thing, Mema said, that God kept for the seventh day. A day of rest, she told me.

What is the worth of a life lived so long that you don’t know in which direction to look when it has ceased?

Ninety-six years this woman lived. I was blessed with knowing her for 34. Yet in all the stories and memories I could recount in the wake of my Mema’s death, it will be the final segments of her life that I will hold dear to my heart. The days I spent with her in a nursing home in Monmouth, New Jersey.

I know by now that the most amazing things in life come packaged in small whispers and quiet kisses. And although we have ninty-six years by which to remember Mema, what I will take with me from her life is the grace that was granted to me in her final years.

My two-year-old daughter, Hazel, too young to be afraid of old age, liked to sit on Mema’s lap when we visited the home. The old woman’s hands wrapped around my daughter in contrast to new and unclaimed flesh. A kiss on Hazel’s cheek. A squeeze. Hazel would find the spot just beneath my Mema’s chin where she’d gently lay her head. Mema would press her face into Hazel’s hair and breathe in life renewed.

“Do you have a boyfriend, little girl?” Mema asked Hazel one day. “I bet you do. I bet all the little boys are chasing you.”

Mema laughed at her own silliness.

During another visit, Mema sang Hazel a song and told my oldest daughter, Zoey, about the turkeys and how proud she was that Zoey did well in school.

One day, in the middle of singing Hazel a song, Mema bent her head toward Hazel’s ear.

“Let me tell you something, little one,” Mema whispered to Hazel. “They will never know how much they mean to us until we are gone. You need to know that. You need to remember that one.”

She gently patted Hazel’s leg and continued to hum a lullaby.

I said goodbye to Mema seven days before she died. I held her hand and helped Sandra give her some fruit punch. The outside world fell away from me in my final hour with Mema. Nothing seemed more important than watching an old woman die. But Sandra said it was time to go. She was right. How long can we hold on to the dying? How long we can ask that they extend their stay? That request is for us, and not them.

“I have to go now Mema,” I said into the woman’s ear. “I want to see you again. You hang in there, okay?”

“O….K….,” she answered, her voice dry and raspy, her eyes closed.

“Mema,” I said, my lips almost touching her ear. “Mema, open your eyes, I want to tell you something…” my voice caught in a lump that knotted in my throat.

“O….K….,” she answered, her eyes open, but not searching for sight.

I swallowed hard and called upon the words I could not leave unsaid. I pressed my cheek against hers and squeezed tears from the corners of my eyes. I pulled back to look into her eyes, to make her see me, hear me.

“Thank you, Mema,” I cried. “Thank you for everything. You did good.”

Mema started to cry. Sandra went to her side. Still holding my Mema’s hand, I was sure I’d never be able to let that woman go. Claire, my middle child, began to cry in the corner of Mema’s room. Sandra offered her a tissue. How long could I stand there? And what power greater than myself would pull me away from a woman who made all the difference in the world to me? A woman who taught me everything I ever needed to know. One who never faultered. Never failed. At every turn, she was always there for me. Without question. Without a doubt.

“I love you, Mema,” my final words falling like echoes from mouth.

Mema stretched her neck, lifted her chin and took a labored breath.

“I love you, too,” she said. Her final words to me.

 

Things I Did When I Was A Kid….That My Children Never Will

1. I walked with my parents down a dirt road on election day where they entered a shed-like structure in the middle of a corn field and casted votes for our U.S. President.
2. I laid on my back in the middle of the Big Buffalo Creek and felt the wing feathers of a heron brush over me as he swooped for a landing in the shallow water.
3. I committed up to twelve hours a day to riding dirt bikes and four wheelers across the coutryside, which served as the four corners of my world.
4. I attended Friday night lights like a Catholic attends weekly Mass without fail.
5. I fed the cows every morning before school and every night after dinner.
6. I square danced on Saturday nights in real barns with livestock in the stalls and to the tune of live banjo bands.
7. I played basketball with my friends in my own barn.
8. Everything I ate came from our land or our barn or the pig pen or the chicken coop or the sheep pen.
9. I climbed silos to feed my need for a thrill.
10. I skated on a frozen creek from December to February against a bon fire built along the water’s edge.
11. I climbed a mountain to feel God’s grace.
12. I stopped to watch the sun set into the adjacent mountain crest.
13. Trick or treating was my dad driving me farm to farm for apples and bags of freashly popped corn.
14. I snowmobiled into late night hours on snow that stayed white on the ground all winter.
15. I climbed trees and imaged the world view from a high-rise apartment building in New York City, which was where I assumed Sesame Street was filmed.
16. I watched “The Waltons” every week night at seven.
17. I learned to drive with a manual clutch on my father’s tractor.
18. I met my friends on horses at a clearing along the creek on lazy afternoons.
19. I invested a critical pride in attending mt great-great-great grandfather’s alma mater, shared by generations across more than 200 years.
20. I gathered as a teenager with my friends at a pizza shop on the town square where football players wore varsity jackets, and cheerleaders mingled with field hockey palyers, and everyone knew everyone because this was our hometown, 36 miles from the nearest hospital, shopping mall, and movie theater, and 200 miles from where I now live.

Don’t Call Me White

Last year, flash mobs were booming in Philadelphia. They gathered, collected, rallied, and attacked, breeding superior rule over commoners who are plainly shopping, socializing, generally milling around city streets on otherwise innocent Saturday evenings. That is how I interpreted the news reports. I had not put a color on the skin of flash mobsters. If a photo is included with an article, I had not taken notice. Not until The Philadelphia Inquirer published a story on flash mob victims in the B section of Sunday’s edition sometime last year.

The Inquirer article, written by Monica Yant Kinney, states, “…the galling fact that the perpetrators of these violent attacks are black and the victims, nonblack.”

But what does that mean? Nonblack. And black. And what difference does it make to flash mobs? What button is she pressing here?

I learned about being black in 1976, in a kindergarten class at Hampton Elementary School located in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. I was five.

I didn’t enjoy my peers back then. And the jury presently remains out on that issue. Regardless, in kindergarten, I flew solo. I painted at the easel, I perfected my handwriting in meticulously kept copybooks, and I played quietly during outdoor recess on the monkey bars until other children wanted to do the same. At which point I found pleasing solitude on the slide. I could climb high, sit at the top, and survey the ant-like creatures that ran in circles below me. When all of the above failed to provide me solitude, I chose jigsaw puzzles. I constructed the puzzles on the carpeted floor area near the bookshelves which no kid chose to occupy during free time. Reading wasn’t pleasure for those kids. It was a chore. All the better for me.

I liked new kids, though. Kids who were brought into class mid-year, presented to us in front of the blackboard, nervous and anonymous. I liked those kids for their potential to be my twin.

I believed that there was someone out there in the world like me. A twin, I called it. I told my mother about it at Roy Rogers in the Capital City Mall one day. We were having lunch together because my sister had just been born and my mother told my pediatrician that I was having issues with the baby in the house. Dr. Forti articulated to my mother that I was suffering an identity crisis and that she was to take me to lunch on Saturdays. Her favorite place to eat was Roy Rogers.

I told my mother about my belief in having a twin because I wanted her to know that I felt different from the other kids at school, but I hadn’t lost hope in finding one like me. At the age five, I didn’t have the words that matched what was going on inside of me. So I told her I was looking for my twin and that I thought the twin might be living in China. I knew, even then, that China was a far cry from Pennsylvania, but I believed that the twin could find her way to me. I wasn’t concerned about the distance between us, nor was I concerned about the chance of finding one kid in this world who was compatible enough to be my friend. I was certain that fate would overrule logistics and on one unexpected day my twin would show up in my kindergarten classroom in the form of a new kid.

At the time, I was also very concerned as to whether or not I would have long hair to my waistline by the time I was in college. I asked my mother about this at Roy Rogers as well. She assured me that my hair could easily grow to my waistline by the time I was in college. She expressed, however, uncertainty regarding the aspect of me finding my twin. Especially if my twin indeed lived in China.

The new girl’s name was Shannon Johnson. She showed up in April. She had white stuff on her skin.

“What’s that on your arm?” I asked her on her first day at Hampton Elementary School, after Miss Stoup had introduced her from the front of the classroom. I figured that if Shannon was going to be my twin, I might as well cut right to the chase in finding things out about her. I started with the white residue on her arms.

“My mom puts that on me,” Shannon replied.

“I don’t have it on my arms,” I said, revealing my arms sans white stuff. “Can I touch it? Maybe I can rub it off.”

Shannon shrugged her shoulders. I grabbed her wrist in one of my hands and rubbed the areas of her arm covered in white with my other hand. The residue came right off.

“See?” I said. “It comes off. I knew it would. It looked like it would come off.”

Shannon looked upset. “But my mom likes it there,” she explained. Her eyes looked wet.

“She won’t care,” I said. “It doesn’t look right on you anyway.”

I took Shannon’s wrist in my hand again and rolled her arm around to the underside.

“Look,” I urged her. “I didn’t even get it all off. There’s still some on you, right there on the underside.”

I continued scanning her appendage for further white stuff, but stopped, my eyes caught in the palm of her hand.

I rubbed my fingers across her palm, peach-colored with brown creases running like streams through her flesh.

I wanted to tell Shannon that her hand looked funny, but her eyes were already wet and even at the age of five, I knew that some things were better left unsaid.

I dropped Shannon’s arm like a hot coal and returned to my prerogative of doing things in the classroom by myself. I hadn’t completely struck Shannon from the potential twin opportunity, but something wriggled in the back of my mind whispering that she was not the one.

Leaving Shannon with wet eyes at her desk, I scanned the classroom. I pulled a puzzle from the shelf and toted it to the carpeted book-reading area. It was a good puzzle. Butterflies in the Amazon.

“Can I help?” Shannon asked, squatting beside me.

I was alarmed. Had she not been notified that the carpeted book-reading area was my domain?

“No,” I replied with bold authority. And without making eye contact.

“This one goes here,” she said, touching a puzzle piece.

“Stop it,” I said quickly, implementing a get-out-of-my-space tone of voice.

“And this one goes…”, Shannon started. But she didn’t finish because I slapped the puzzle piece right out of her hand and pushed her to her back where I hovered over her and uttered through my teeth, “I don’t want your help.”

My words were clear and concise as to ensure the avoidance of further misunderstanding.

Incidentally, Shannon was not my twin.

Principal Masterson was a large, bald man who hollered messages of discipline and reprimand like a barbarous Viking throughout the school. I felt small sitting in the chair opposite his large, chunky wooden desk. He tapped his fingers against the blotter that covered the top of his desk. He twiddled a pen in the other hand. Then he ceased both activities and rubbed a palm across the top of his shiny, bald head.

I took a deep breath and released an exaggerated sigh into space between us. The pending doom was inevitable. I would be punished with recess at my desk for a week. Miss Stoup would call my mother. I would be without TV for another week. Blah, blah, blah. I knew I shouldn’t hit other kids. But damn, if they’d just leave me alone, no one would get hurt. And that’s when I decided to take the upper hand.

“Mr. Masterson,” I began. “I don’t want other people touching my things. I do things by myself. I like it that way. They are my things and I know Miss Stoup says that they are really her things or the school’s things, but when I’m doing a puzzle, it’s mine and I don’t want other people touching my puzzle when I’m doing it by myself.”

There was a silence.

I didn’t know if I should keep talking or go back to wondering if Mr. Masterson was born bald and stayed that way for the rest of his life, or if bald is something that happens to people when they grow up. Like a sickness. I knew about sicknesses. By kindergarten, I had already lost two grandparents. I made a mental note to ask my mother at Roy Rogers on Saturday why some people are bald.

“Saranne,” Mr. Masterson said, breaking my train of thought on baldness. “Shannon is a very special little girl in this school. Her family is a very good family. They are special people. I have spoken with her mother and her father and they are very kind, good people who are very special to us.”

What. The. Hell. Is wrong. With this guy. I wanted to say it out loud. Just like that. With the “hell” and all. But I didn’t. I was curious to know where Mr. Masterson was going with this one. Me cursing in his office ran a tremendous risk of him losing his own train of thought.

“Okay,” I said in response to the special people in our lives at Hampton Elementary School. Maybe Shannon lived in that development across the creek with the big houses being built up in the woods that my dad says costs an arm and a leg, which apparently is far more than we can afford with three kids at the dinner table. Or maybe Shannon’s mom worked a fancy job in an office in the city. Or maybe Shannon’s dad was the President of the United States. That surely constitutes being special.

Mr. Masterson developed himself a grin that stretched from one ear to the other. He leaned back in his puffy swivel chair and told me that he knew I would understand.

“Shannon needs good friends like you, Saranne,” he added. “We need to be extra nice to Shannon and her family.”

Then he dismissed me from his office. No indoor recess at my desk. No telephone call to my mother. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

Instead, I was simply returned to my kindergarten classroom. Shannon was standing by the bookshelf. I approached her with caution. When I was close enough to her, I gently took hold of her arm, like I had done before, and lifted it so that I could see the remaining white residue, the powder that I hadn’t wiped off the first time. I brushed the patch of white from her skin with my free hand.

“It’s baby powder,” I whispered. “I can see it on you because your skin is brown.”

Shannon pulled her arm from my grasp. She took a few steps backward, away from me.

“Is that what makes you special?” I asked. “You being brown?”

I didn’t get an answer because Shannon started to cry and I was removed from the classroom – again – and sent home for the day.

Last year, in her Inquirer article, Kinney referred to flash mob victims as “nonblack.” And then wrote the following statement in parentheses:

“(And no, I’m not avoiding white. One innocent was a Cambodian shopkeeper.)”

In parentheses. Like she had to whisper the line into the facade of reporting on flash mobs in Philadelphia. Let’s face it. Kinney’s story wasn’t about flash mobs. It was about black kids breaking the law and ruining Philadelphia. No different from NPR’s Morning Edition report on the difference in income between black and white families. The story aired around the same time that the mobs were a popular past time for teens. One study, the NPR report indicated, has extended beyond 30 years of research and data collection. To the naked ear, a listener may have heard a report on economic quantification. But listen a little more carefully. The story included the voiceover of the female reporter, voices of the black family, and voices from the white household. The black family chosen was homeless just a few years ago, lived in a shelter for a while, reaped the benefits of welfare stipends, and currently does not own a home, “…not uncommon among black and Hispanic families,” the reporter added. While the white family voiceover included a six-year-old child reading Dr. Seuss out loud as her father droned on about acquiring Aunt Lucy’s family inheritance with which he will be building a multi-million dollar home on the family estate property.

It was a fight over a puzzle.

They are kids gathering in mobs and reeking havoc.

Our economy is failing.

Some people have wealthy relatives.

They are not special. They are not black. They are not white. These are elements of our lives that should not be defined by hue.

Rather than teach me to share my toys that day in kindergarten, I was taught to see the color of someone’s skin for the first time in my life.

And rather than report that today’s youth needs constructive evening activities and an upgrade in influential parenting, the Inquirer blamed violence on the color of children’s skin.

Rather than speak of social class, NPR relied upon stereotypical (and somewhat historical) portrayals that were rich enough in color to stand as cover art for The Saturday Evening Post.

I have spent most of my life trying to figure out the rules to this game, the guidelines. I have tried resolving why the color of someone’s skin constitutes being special, and later researched why that color might mean something bad. I have aced African-American History courses, devoured Black Women’s Literature curriculum. I have studied Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, all of Toni Morrison, and Alexander McCall Smith among others. I have read The Help and cringed, then celebrated something I saw in the beauty and love and unity among a segregated race.

As far as Kinney, Masterson, and NPR are concerned, I don’t belong to a race of color. Don’t call me black, and sure as hell do not call me white. Both terms serve as vessels through which news media and racists choose to paint us. Sound juvenile? Then so does every ignorant fool who believes that color plays a role in who we are. I was almost homeless a little more than ten years ago. And I do not have an Aunt Lucy. Nor a family estate property.

 

Essence

I am certain that I have written once or twice, or maybe a thousand times that I am lost. I think I wrote it when my oldest was born, and then again when number two took her first breath. I wrote it when our lives had crashed and burned and sent us hurling into the world seeking foundation. Solidarity. I wrote it again when the entrance of a third-born child into our lives ruffled the feathers of a thinned family structure. I wrote it from the desk of a news room and from a third-floor bedroom on Sumac Street. I wrote it through loss, suffering, and most of the sadness with which I’ve been stricken. Not the unique kind of sadness that one is stamped with upon the altar of losing a child or parent. I’m referencing ordinary sadness. The kind we cultivate when there is nothing else to feel. Nothing else to indicate a pulse.

When I look over my shoulder, which I do all too often, I don’t see the lost component in those thousand and maybe one entries that litter my journals and are threaded throughout every story I have authored. What I see from where I am standing is that my children grounded me on the three days that they were born. And the city has never been less than an adventure. I harbored Sumac Street as a mile-marker to the end of something fantastic, yet what a fantastic and exciting new life that had begun right there in that very stone house with the blue trim. And who would I be if it were not for news rooms? Because I know no other way of life beyond pecking at the keys or scratching a pen against the surface of the pages in a sketchbook. I don’t sketch, of course. But I don’t like writing on lined paper.  To avoid the lines, I write in sketchbooks. For spacial reasons.

Then sometimes I blame being lost on the city. Always somewhere to go and someone’s voice to hear. The clatter of this town swells my brain. There are days when I wake without a sense of direction. Without a map or a timeline. On those days, I float. Downstream. Hoping to catch a rapid. Or drown. Either way.

Most recently, I’ve blamed being lost on the house in which I now live, which is not the one on Sumac or Jamestown. Jamestown was good. I loved those bones. I laid my hands on them, smoothed my palm across the surface of its moldings, grazed my fingers along the walls. I’d tell it so. I’d whisper, “What a good house you are. I feel myself here. I am alive and vibrant here.” So many things poured from me onto pages and screens on Jamestown. Three screens, to be exact. Two PCs and a laptop served tenure in that house.

But this house, this house is different with its sterile surfaces, straight edges, and clean lines.  I’ve tried lying on the sofa in the middle of the day after the girls are off to school and only the fish tank has something to say. It gurgles regardless of the term Whisper written on the side of its filter pump. I let the algae grow because that’s how I think the fish want to live. I think they like the green and sometimes they eat it off the sides. But usually only when I go days forgetting to feed them. I do that. Forget them. Sometimes the gurgle from the tank falls on deaf ears. Unless I try to lay on the sofa in search of myself; then I hear it. So loud it crashes against my raw and irritated mind. Like a blister. My brain. Not the fish tank. The tank is not like a blister.

I beg for the quiet when the sofa doesn’t work. I request it. To myself, to God, to the Universe. To anyone who is listening. I say things like, “Do you realize that there is still this dream?” It’s the one I fashioned as a child from the surface of my bedroom window sill that faced east so that I could watch the sun rise in the morning and watch the fields turn orange against the sunset’s glow just before supper was ready. It was there where I thought about it.  It was there where I fashioned my first book. I called it, My Book. It was about me. And the very first line reads something to the extent of, “I want the world to read what I have to say.” Something along those lines. I could get it out of the closet in this house and quote the line. It’s fifteen feet from where I sit now. But I am far too lost for that kind of business. Rummaging through crap that reminds me of how much crap the world has yet to read.

I asked him today if maybe I wasn’t good at this. Maybe, for my whole entire long-lived life, I had chosen a dream that didn’t match even a small part of me or my capacity to fulfill. I tried to find the roots. I vaguely recalled winning contests, writing for the local newspaper as an adolescent. Then I remembered the sixth grade autobiography. Her note beautifully written next to the A+. “You should be a writer.”

That’s all it took. In fact, I was a little irritated that someone hadn’t mentioned it earlier because I had just devoured two weeks of my life preparing a report on practicing medicine for the career segment in my language arts class. Of course I would be writer. And not a pediatrician.

I do not practice medicine. Following the receipt of my sixth-grade teacher’s note, I practiced writing. I thought briefly about medicine in 1999, following the birth of my second child. I researched schools, programs, financial aid. I hadn’t written since the babies had made themselves comfortable in my life and consumed my every waking and sleeping hour. I acknowledged it as a sign to become a doctor. Who wouldn’t think that, right? It seemed like a perfectly natural process to me.

I targeted a start date on my higher education. I had essays to write, of course. Letters to the officials who rule the kingdom of that caliber of education. I logged onto my PC, circa 1985. One of the original McIntoshes. And thought it wise to clean out the plethora of documents and files that had collected for more than a decade. I wasn’t a writer. I no longer needed the stories. Clean house, ducks in a row, all was good. Except when I stumbled upon that one story. The one that was inspired by the dream I had had with the orphans in Guatemala. I couldn’t pull myself away. I printed all 347 pages of the manuscript and crumpled it into a folder that I tucked into the outside pocket of the diaper bag. I never completed a medical school admissions package.

I don’t have an end to this. Other than to say that lying on the sofa in the middle of the afternoon, listening to water gurgle from a tank that is green from the inside out does not make me feel that inner self. It reminds me of the wooden swing my father installed on a branch of the maple tree at the corner of the house in which I grew up. The hours, the days, I sat on that swing and gazed at the landscape that neither moved nor transformed other than the occasional tractor that interrupted it seasonally. It was the same view from my bedroom window sill, the one facing east. Because the swing was below the window, to the left a little. I inserted the landscape and tree swing into the Guatemalan story.  But in the story, the view becomes exhausting for the character and forces her to retreat from a place she once held dear.  I take photographs of the field and the hillside when I go home now and again. I stand in the spot where the swing once hung. It’s no longer there. But that’s where I stand to snap the shudder.

Actually, I have a digital Polaroid that cost me seventy bucks at Target. I don’t think it has a shudder. I don’t know anything about digital photography other than to say that it captures what I see when I press the button on the top.

Regardless, the view from my sofa is now exhausting. The yellow walls smother me. The sound of the fish tank is deafening. I like the green, though. In the tank. I don’t believe that the average keeper of fish can hone the talent of nurturing green algae like I do. It’s a delicate situation. That requires patience. And tenacity. Sunlight helps, too.

I assume, much like the former one thousand and one times I have issued a notice on being lost, I will look over my shoulder after having passed this way, and realize that the content upon which I base my negativity, is the very essence of my life. Not the sofa. Or the yellow. But the rest.

Times Like These

As a child, Saturday afternoons in my home were not free. My parents chose Saturdays to accomplish what seemed like an endless list of to-do’s. There was cleaning, cooking, mowing, cutting wood, hauling wood, stacking wood, feeding livestock, cleaning animal stalls, gutting sheds, washing cars, repairing farm equipment, washing laundry, dusting, changing the bedding, scrubbing floors, and so forth.

Every Saturday morning, I woke by nine and left the house by nine-thirty for gymnastics practice. I returned home at one to the crack of my parents’ work whip. I begrudgingly cleaned the bathroom with one eye out the window; I could hear the muffled grind of my friends’ dirt bikes grazing the terrain. But upon bathroom-cleaning inspection, my mother would scowl that I had missed the base of the toilet or that I had left hair in the bathtub drain. I hadn’t cleaned to the level of her expectation.

 Next was the kitchen floor. I sloshed soapy water from one end of my mother’s industrial-sized kitchen to the next. Missing patches here and there, hurrying to finish, wanting to have been at the creek by then to spy on the boys’ newly constructed hideout that perched on a nearby rock ledge. But again, upon inspection, my work did not make the cut. My mother would stand over me, pointing out those missed patches of dirty flooring. I hadn’t achieved what she was expecting.

From the kitchen floor, I was ushered outside where my father methodologically split thick chunks of wood that he and my brother had hauled from the hollow. “Get the wheelbarrow, Sissy,” he’d say. “This wood needs stacked beneath the porch.” On my fourth trip, the sun would begin to set, casting splintered orange rays through the branches of the walnut trees. I couldn’t see that the stacks were not straight. I was blinded by the silent alarm of the day coming to a premature end for me. My father, disappointed in my ill-shaped wood pile, scolded me for my shoddy workmanship and shooed me away with his gloved hand.

I still had time. It wasn’t yet dark. I ran to the barn for my bike. I could still make it to the creek. My friends still might be down there. But lo-and-behold, my mother would call for me through the kitchen window, waving a wicker basket in her hand. She needed blueberries from the orchard. Wouldn’t it be nice to have muffins after supper? I would pick the berries, but eat most of them. And then take the verbal lashing from my mother in the kitchen when I would return her basket with no more than a few handfuls of berries rolling around at the bottom. Not enough for her anticipated muffins. “But I mixed the batter while you were picking!” she’d say to me, her voice shrill and crammed with utter frustration.

The sky would be dark by then.  Saturday would officially come to an end.

I’m certainly not scarred by my childhood Saturdays. I don’t often think of those days in the perspective in which I just described. Growing up on my parents’ farm has blessed me with endless stories of old that fill me with warmth and a longing to return.

But today I recalled those Saturday afternoons under a cloak of failure. It’s the same cloak I’m wearing right now.

I slipped it on this morning in BJ’s just after turning into the new produce section of the store. Because I am in one of those mind-sets in which I am unable to execute anything to the fullest extent. Nothing ends in proper completion, nothing turns out as expected, and everything involves an intense and internal frustration that randomly erupts from me without prior notice. A quality cloak of failure is required for times like these. It enhances the degree of self-loathing necessary in walking that jagged line of martyrdom. Not everyone can take failing to such great heights.

But we all go through it. I hope. Times when it feels like everything we have tried has ended in failure. And then there are those really special times in life when we keep trying, and we try so hard, and for so long that resources become exhausted. Innovation dissipates. Strategies fade. Passion ceases to thrive. Emptiness consumes. At which point I pull my cloak of failure over my head and mope. Sometimes I cry.

Hence, the explosive success of the anti-depressant niche.

I don’t take the pills. I was asked to take a prescription twelve years ago by my doctor. Knowing better, I declined.

If I didn’t smudge my way through these standard life-lesson pitfalls, against what would have to measure the joy when it comes? Don’t we need the bad parts of life to cultivate the good parts into something beyond our wildest dreams?

Sometimes I fail because I’m distracted; I’d rather be doing other things, like being a kid and wanting to play rather than work. Sometimes I fail because I lack interest in the things I’m doing. But most of the time I fail because I have no patience, tolerance, or acceptance for the circumstances with which I am dealing. I have destroyed more than I’d like to admit merely because I did not have the patience to wait for the miracle to happen on its own.

I know that I fail not because of the heaping pile of failure at my feet, but because I am informed of my failure by those whom I have failed.

When my mother yelled at me for not cleaning properly, I remember thinking, “But you asked me to clean, and I cleaned. You never told me how you wanted me to clean. You just told me to do it. So I did it my way.”

Or when my father muttered words of distaste over my inability to properly stack wood, I remember thinking, “You never said the piles had to be formed in even rows. You only said it went under the porch. And that’s where I put your wood.”

As an adult, I whisper similar statements in my mind when under fire. Sometimes I want to ask people if they’d like to have my job? Or if I’m doing such a terrible job, why are you still here?

But rule #1 in the Guide to Becoming a Martyr states, “Martyrs do not question verbal abuse. They take it as it comes and politely smile in response. In some cases a Martyr may inquire if he or she can offer any further services to the abuser at hand; however, getting a word in edgewise may be impossible depending upon the circumstances and the decibel level at which the abuser is offering criticism.”

So I smile. I crack a joke. I well up in BJ’s. I argue with people in my head. And I eventually find the way out of my self-obsessed maze. I fold the cloak and place at the back of the closet until next time.

I am convinced that Blue Cross should issue me a stipend for the amount of cash I am saving them on monthly prescription refills.

Sometimes I Have to be Told

I have been waiting to re-post this story for two years. The following is in its original form, right down to the final line. But today this story is not for me. I am posting it for my friend Stacey who needs to be reminded that she is strong, courageous, and loved by many. This is the story of how that kind of love can carry us through to the other side of devastation.

 

Sometimes I Have to be Told

by Saranne Fosselman-Miller

“Are you relieved?” a friend asked.

“Are you excited?” another inquired.

“This is wonderful!” another acquaintance offered.

Relieved. Excited. Wonderful.

Based on the circumstances, I was supposed to be feeling the above mentioned descriptive terms because, after seven weeks of living emersed in uncertain limbo, my husband drove from indefinite unemployment to a new job on Monday. Who wouldn’t be elated?

But when I measured my emotions upon seeing my husband off to work Monday morning, none of the above came to mind as new items on the list of feelings I had harbored across seven weeks. They existed, and remained present, but relief, excitement, and wonderment were not spawned by a job offer, but rather evolved on the day he lost his job.

Ten years ago, my husband, Andy, stood before me in our newly custom-constructed house nestled in the suburbs of Central Pennsylvania with my hunter-green Jaguar parked in the black-top driveway.  I had been in the middle of folding laundry when he approached me in our bedroom to articulate that, after months of driving new market opportunities, strategizing, reducing overhead, and cutting staff, his business had officially gone under. We were weeks away from having just returned from a vacation in Paris. I didn’t take the news well. And the events of the year that followed, I didn’t take those well either.

Having left the house and the Jaguar and further anticipated European vacations, we migrated to Philadelphia in 2001 where Andy matched a marketing manager job post. I waved him off to his new job and felt with anticipated excitement that  I was standing on the threshold of something new, and back then, that day was wonderful.

Andy was granted a grand office in a Center City high-rise structure with a bay window that overlooked Love Park. He was blessed with quality office furniture, solid initiatives, and reasonable senior leaders. But I watched him whither behind the chunky desk. Within months, the view from that bay window molded into a two-dimensional backdrop. By 2002, I recommended he move on to a more challenging position, and so he did. Another new threshold awaited and once again, Andy left on a Monday morning to tackle a new professional opportunity.

One year later, in 2003, while the U.S. was unpacking debris left behind by 911, Andy called home from his year-old desk. I was just getting out of the shower. I wrapped myself in a towel and scuttled to the ringing telephone. Andy had lost his job. Shower water ran down my shins and pooled on the hardwood floor at my feet. Our six-week-old daughter squawked from her crib. Nap time was over. I communicated my condolences to Andy on the phone. “We’ve been here before,” I expressed. “We’ll be fine.”

But that phone call, stacked upon the years that had collected beneath me, took on the effects of the sun, so that I didn’t feel the burn right then, standing wet on my kitchen floor. It would take hours, days, and weeks before emotional blisters festered into boils of fear, insecurity, anger, and eventually rage that seeped from my pours into all facets of my daily life. I didn’t take it well. I wanted that house in Harrisburg back. I wanted my Jag. I wanted white plush carpet and mommy groups and playgrounds exempt of graffiti. I didn’t want this city. I didn’t want what had been given to me.

The months following melted into a blur of panic-stricken distress. We had an infant and two preschoolers under our roof. My fear drove me into isolation. Rather than reaching out to family and friends, I convinced myself that I was too far from home to call upon family, and that, having only lived in the city for two years, I did not have friends close enough with whom to share my distress. Both of which were lies.

Within a year, Andy found a new job and contributed to the growth of small empire over the next six years. Life was basic. I did what was in front of me, he did the same, and our children flourished. Over the course of this time period, I cultivated and fostered wonderful friendships and came to accept that I would probably always live far from home. This enabled me to plant my roots, enhance relationships here in Philadelphia, and nurture the relationships with my family with whom I only shared company a few times throughout the year.

In May 2009, Andy came home from work without a job again. The company had gone in over its head, and Andy was one of the first to go. Every drop of rage and fury that had seared its ugly head in 2001 and 2003, greeted Andy at the door. “This can never happen to us again,” I demanded of him in 2009. But in 2010, just seven weeks ago, it did.

We can blame it on lack of market demand, a diminished economy, poorly administered operations, but the bottom line is that I got that call again on March 9, 2010 at 2:45 p.m. Andy’s employer had turned the building over to the bank. He would be home by four with his box of belongings.

Different from years past, the call that came just seven weeks ago did not have the effect of a bad sunburn. It was more like a tsunami. Unsuspecting, silent upon approach, and devastating upon contact. I cried.

First, I emailed my sister, Jessica, at work. Within minutes she had managed to slip away from her desk and placed a renegade call to me on her cell from a public restroom. Her voice echoed against tile walls through the phone.

“You aren’t going to be homeless,” Jess rebutted to my fear of losing our house. “I will make the parlor into a master bedroom. The girls can have Sophie’s room and the spare room. You will come live with us. It will be the greatest thing that ever happened.”

Really?

I hung up the phone, tears still streaming down my cheeks, and called my mother-in-law, Joan.

“You are not alone, Sara,” Joan encouraged me. “We are a family and we are in this together. When you struggle, we all struggle together. We will get through this as a family.”

Really?

The girls came through the door from getting off the school bus. They read my face. The asked their questions. And disbursed throughout the house to process, in the minds of children, what it meant for daddy to lose his job.

By 3:30, I had achieved a zombie-state-of-mind. My insides burned. My legs were the consistency of Jell-O. My breathing was shallow. I climbed into a laundry basket on my kitchen floor and sat with my knees pulled up to my chest. I took out my cell and called my friend, Maureen.

“You are good people,” Maureen responded to my weeping. “Remember that. You are good, hard-working people and you will be fine. You have a good marriage, good kids. You will get through this.”

Really?

I climbed out of the laundry basket and texted my friend, Barb.

“You are the strongest person I know,” Barb replied to my news.

Really?

And that is when I let it go. Before Andy even reached the front door to a house I was not certain we could keep, I felt relief. It washed down over me like a bucket of warm bath water. I considered what might be out there for us, as a family. Where would this predicament take us? Excitement bubbled and jump-started my zombie heart back to standardized blood-pumping through my veins. I sat on my sofa, in the still wake of my children still trying to figure out the meaning of the day’s events. I pondered those four people; Jess, Joan, Maureen, and Barb. They made me feel wonderful.

My children would not be homeless.

We were not alone.

We were good people.

I was strong enough to take this on.

Really.

I stood from my seat on the sofa, seven weeks ago, and did not look back or return to retrieve the pile of distress my friends and family had shed for me. Breathing came easy. I smiled. I enjoyed every last morsel of life that surrounded me. Because it was a job that got lost in a fire. A job. We still had each other. We had good friends. We wouldn’t go without a roof over our heads. We’d be taken care of.

That day, and every day that has followed, opened my eyes to components of daily life that had gone unnoticed in the rustle of raising children, running programs, and meeting deadlines. I didn’t cry for a newly built house in a town that wasn’t meant for us ten years ago. I didn’t ask God if could have the hunter-green Jag back. I didn’t curse the city. I didn’t curse my husband. Instead, I wrapped myself comfortably around everything with which I’ve been blessed. The bounty was limitless.

Andy and I did chores together, we ate together, we walked together, we sat on our front porch together and sipped on freshly brewed iced tea. We strategized finances to keep the boat afloat. We laughed at daily humor that otherwise goes unnoticed. We planned TV nights, movie nights, evenings in the park with the girls.

Over the past twelve years of parenthood, I have often remarked to Andy, “Remember when we were in our twenties and we’d spend entire weekends just being together doing nothing important but enjoying each other’s company?” Andy nods when I broach this topic, not feeling quite as romantically hopeless as I. But I continue, “I guess we have to wait until we’re old and the kids are gone to have that back again.” Andy rolls his eyes at this part and reminds me that our grandchildren will run us ragged. “There will always be something, Sissy,” he says.

Except for the past seven weeks, there wasn’t. For seven weeks, I basked in the glory of feeling twenty again. I spent forty-nine days enjoying lazy afternoons and peaceful evenings with the very best friend I’ll ever know, and feeling like the luckiest woman alive. Go figure.

I answered, “Yes”, to my friends’ Monday morning inquiries on Andy’s new job, not totally lying. I let them believe that the new job brought on relief, excitement, and wonderment. What I neglected to tell them is that it was they who had delivered those gifts to me, curled in a laundry basket, choking on my tears. It was the special group of people in my life, including those not mentioned here, that enabled me to wake every uncertain day of Andy’s unemployment knowing that I have a home. I am not alone. I am a good person. I am strong.

I look forward to the day I have the opportunity to re-gift.