A Home

There was a time that I felt as if I would never leave home. The farthest I had been was to the downtown shopping center. The bakery, the bank, and the bars. And the clothing and shoe shops the salons and the courthouse with a bronze statue pointing skyward at salvation, a salutary boast for our town. Boys and girls running and riding passed fast, and I lumbered even then on thick though movable legs that bore my weight. But I smiled too. I met one of those boys some time later, a year younger though in the same grade and from a different town. He was riding in a car with my friend Sue. He had the blondest hair that shone silver in the sun at the right angle. I was reticent and taciturn toward his slight posturing and his need to shyly rub his shoulder against mine. He pretended not to notice and I pretended harder not to like him. We later traveled west and south and finally home again because of a protesting mother and a protective father. I remember thinking I was sure they wouldn’t like him because of the black eye he wore and the shoes that he didn’t. Or it could have been that he stole a kiss at the window that I sit at now and watch the flowers bloom and the sun shine and the leaves fall and the snow drift, an end that begins and a beginning that does not ever cease. A zero becomes a zero, a one a one and the numbers in between never fail to show their buxom curves and their constricted lines in black and white.  Outside of my life things molted and shed due their course but here things paced like molasses: time, people, my thoughts, the things I love and the things I don’t or stopped loving. Time doesn’t seem to change. People do not see to change. A home only changes for those that belong in its fragile frame.

She leaned forward and looked with care at the sill and the frame of the window. The mark from the rust-speckled pocketknife still flashed its sentiment under layers of white and yellow and sky blue against what was now. “KR+ DJ.” In all of that time she would have had cut her bones out of her skin to leave she couldn’t or wouldn’t. She was back where she was born. Familiar faces make a home and a job at the grocery and a note begging to stay. A room that was your room as a child holds fast to fond farewells and hellos.  For her familiarity does not comfort nor do ancient hieroglyphs carved in a 50-year-old window frame. There was always a hope that they could have made a home in a place as unfamiliar as they were to each other now. That silly saying of “Home is Where the Heart Is” is only true for those that still have hearts she thought. 

My 60th Autumn

I saw a boy raking leaves today. He was outside my window in the next yard raking the silver maple and the elm and the pine needles pushed themselves up against the straight and bent metal of the rake tearing the brittled, mottled leaves. I watched him there a long time. Once he looked up and saw me watching him. The boy waved and I waved back but I don’t think he could tell.  The wind nestled itself against the house, pushed and pulled the leaves from the tidy piles the boy raked. I tried to open the window with my right arm to smell the damp and dead summer but I couldn’t do it. I tried to move my chair closer to the wall but the length of the chrome arm kept me from the leverage I needed. I called to my husband. He was in the kitchen I think because he didn’t respond. I tried the window again and it gave just enough. My long unused aluminum cane was in arm’s reach.  I wedged the rubbered end of it between the sill and the bottom of the window. I pushed down and the 45-degree angle eased the window up and open.  My nostrils pulsed. I breathed long and deep.

I wondered what the boy would think if he could see through the wall.  If he wondered why I didn’t rake my own leaves. If he wondered why he rarely saw me except through my window. He would walk and run and skip and jump up the back walkway Monday through Friday after school ended. A polite boy. A caring boy. He always waved and I did too. My eyesight hadn’t failed and I could always see him glance to the left at the wooden planks that anchored themselves at varying angles up to the back door.  A child would fancy a sleek chromed chair with two large wheels on either side, a thing for adventure, for daring. I imagined he saw himself racing in my chair down the two-tired ramp a smile crowing his achievement, an imaginary trophy in his empty hand.  Aren’t all achievements forgotten? Don’t we just relish those that happen in the moment? An ephemeral victory.  The boy couldn’t know and will never know my achievement was opening my window today.

I closed my eyes and could still see his small frame moving like a miniature grandfather clock. How did God figure into making things move? The boy, the leaves, the air we breathe? The muscle to move the rake, the smile that begged for something, a hand thrust upward moving back and forth, back and forth… An ache in the throat, a tear in the ear, a sound through an empty house to an empty kitchen. He made these things move and he made things unmovable. Legs. Arms. Hearts. Movement is sacred, and I have sinned.

Birds

I have a picture of my parents when they were nineteen.  They’ve migrated a great distance since that has grounded them.  

My mom’s ankles were as large as small tree trunks.  And as immobile.  My dad pushed her around the small patio that acted as their only thruway to the outside world spring through autumn.  They were a spectacle as curtains moved in each window that faced them.  Sometimes one of my mom’s feet would ride underneath the toe plate, scraping the walkway.  She didn’t know it because she couldn’t feel it.  It was only after feeling as if the chair was skidding on a caught stick or rock that my dad paused and readjusted her toe-worn shoe.  I looked at anything that drew my attention from it.  I listened for anything that would block the biting drag of her shoe.  It reminded me of gnashing teeth.  Riding in the county van for those with disabilities wasn’t an option considering the jolting, and my parent’s hoist-less vehicle provided no respite.  Even if they had had a hoist, she dreamt herself in small crane, it moving a body that wanted to move but cemented itself from the embarrassment and the disease.  How dare these metallic wheels imagine themselves as her legs on occasion.  

Inside was a small apartment meant for the old and infirmed, for those that had perhaps lost touch with the physicality of life, with the beautiful things that life can bear.  My sister was visiting that day too with my twin nieces, one of few memories I have left of all of us together. 

My mother suffered a fall about five years ago.  Long-suffering from degenerative disc disease before the fall, although capable in many ways.  Her broken arm complicated the already complex routine that my dad and she followed.  My dad was forced to quit work and care for my mother every minute of every hour of every day.  I’m still angry with them for their lack of foresight about their lives.

Five years later, they are worse for wear and no closer to a life in which they used to play and pretend.  My mom is at once lethargic and lucid, aware and atrophied.  She has since lost her tree trunk-like ankles and has replaced them with twigs.  Her slippers look like two weighty perched birds.  I spoke with my dad the other day.  He told me in a quiet way that he was having some problems of his own.  He mentioned that he wished the same thing for himself as he wished for my mother.  I chose not to read into that.  It’s the time between yesterday and today that crushes them in such an absolute way.  I try to drive north to see them and bring my own family.  It’s an intimate thing to be touched and to lose that sense over and over.  To be noticed and talked about again. 

They are a beautiful half of a whole that diminishes with time.  I look at them and wonder.   I wonder how their intimacy forges and re-forges itself each day, my dad’s devotion branded and seared by moving my mother from her bed to her chair and back.  I wait for the day that a stranger calls to tell me they have both finally flown away.

Flying

The sheets wrinkled against her skin.   She tried to flatten them out with her right hand but realized the paperweight deadness of her left arm was stuck against the sheet and the bed and her progress.  The boots that the nurse had velcroed around her feet reminded her of some futuristic rocket boot though she knew she would hardly move again.  She had drop foot and looked like an injured pigeon laying flat on its gray feathered back.  The boots only reminded her of what she could not do.  Only in her mind.  She pinched her eyes and reopened them.  She looked out the window at the rose bush and the peonies, the lamb's ear and the columbine.  She saw herself flying high and low and high again.  If the choice was offered she would choose to remain flat on her back in her rocket boots flying through the sky but not too high and not too low for eternity instead of stagnant and low to her bed. The air and sun breathing life into a lifeless form revealing a smile long gone.  She would fly where she used to play and run and swim and hide.  The space between her now cold bed and the warm sun excited her to a place that had died when she realized she would never walk again.  She circled and did figure-eights over her elementary school.  She moved so close to the rusty merry-go-round that it moved with the force of her flight but only slightly.  She flew face down through the swings swinging them to and fro and she flew through again face up to the sky.  She flew the length of the slide five whole times almost touching the rough pavement.    She played hopscotch between its faded form and four square and funnel-ball.  She imagined herself playing kickball kicking a home run and flew the length of the bases cork-screwing her way to home plate.  She took a last look and flew away.


The rip of the velcro ended her flight and she fell back to the ground back to the bed where she felt the weight of what had been what was and what will be.  Her feet both turned inward making a triangle of bone and flesh that heeded her command no longer.  While her husband was charged with removing the boots she never turned from the windows and her reimagined life.


If presented with the option of losing everyone from her husband to her sons and daughter to her seven grandchildren and the days of birth and the days of death or walk again independent and free from medical tape and drugs and dependence on someone who needed someone to depend on she would choose the latter.  It would be bittersweet and selfish but now she only felt bitter.  The choice she offered herself in her mind didn't allow for her to forget her memories or their faces.  But the pain of remembering a life once loved and hated with her family compared nothing to laying immobile and only looking up and side-to-side.  The absolute layers of swelling lassitude and desolation that she was born in day after day.  To finally leave that wretched place at the expense of her family lent itself to a kind of sweetness that she so longed for but knew deep in her soul she would never taste again.  At least she could walk with a smile on her face instead of laying flat and faking an old life.  Where the power comes from to fool oneself day after day?

Those days when my

persistence got the better

of me.  And you, kind

enough to send me to my room.

Gentle words, though harsh

enough for a boy of nine, or

was it ten?

But ever-loving of a blonde

boy, and yes, blue eyes...

How changes were complicated

though needed, and now we

have an understanding that

reflects ourselves those days,

Mother and son.  

Tying Knots

The rain made its way on the leaves.  It dripped to the dry ground underneath and stained the raw dirt patches throughout the yard.  The samara on the ground lay brittle and torn.   He smoothed out a blade of grass between his finger and thumb.  He stood, tying knots.  Are you ready? he asked.   She shook her head but he rolled toward the house.  Too much chill in the air for a body so frail she thought but ached to stay outside. Making their way to the door was a chore.  As they approached the door, the bump of the wheel on the lip of the doorway jarred her pain awake and moved her spine.  The living nerves seared; the dead ones lay dormant.  He angled her chair back toward his front and hoisted with enough reserve to muster a final push.  For him, of course, inside out of the rain.  Never about me she thought.

No, never about me.  But I’ll have him.  I’ll have him move me and halt me; dirty me and bathe me; feed me and wipe me; love me and hate me.  When I sleep and when his touch chisels the shale of a frayed life.  I’ll have him.

She pulled the only living arm up out of its place atop the vinyl right hand rail.  She stroked her thanks on his arm but he did not notice.  The left arm twitched its approval but could do no more.  Its only salvation an exercise of right angle pushes and pulls to keep its memories of movement living.

She rested her arm back in its place.  A samara stuck in the tread of her wheel caught her attention.  She removed it and put it in her left hand almost sensing the wetness of its mark. If only to remember this day.  She looked out a level window to where she had just resigned herself to him.  The wheels marked tracks in the wet grass and trailed their leaving for the watching birds.  

Washing Hands

He cracked the thin sheet of ice atop the garbage can and washed his hands with the snow that remained underneath. The grease from the headlamp well had dirtied his hands.  He was thrilled it washed off without much effort.  Did you get those wipers on already?  the clerk asked as he snapped in place another man’s wipers.  No, they’re not for me.  They’re for my wife.  He asked Can I attach them for you?  Asking a man to attach his wipers for him is rather emasculating he thought.  He couldn’t bear to witness it, and for others to see.  Other men like himself wincing through their car’s windows, the store windows.  He would rather drive wiper less, the metal of the arm scraping a wide, perfect arc on his windshield.  He could hardly buy toilet paper.  It was a sign that people knew he actually shit.  It was the same with the diapers.  No, he wasn’t so concerned about having a child, but that people knew how that child came to be.  What they must be thinking. It was too much pressure to bear sometimes.  He was an awkward person but liked to believe he was a private person.  When he talked it was to divert attention away from what mattered, though he never said much.  And for better or worse he was often witty.  Grounded with a sense of humor that was a gift.  He had lost it. 

He drove out of the gray auto parts store lot and onto the main thoroughfare.  My God he thought.  He imagined himself driving west on the outer-belt, circling once or twice around the city.  He would simply exit, just exit on the nearest west highway.  The city would reflect itself in his rearview mirror, yellow and gold, a treasure unfound.  The note he left wouldn’t say much—“Getting a new headlamp and wipers to replace the worn wipers on your car.  Dinner?” 

He drove too close to the berm.  The rough-cut pavement chewed his tires shaking him out of his half-sleep.  He woke thinking about the note he had left.  He imagined himself rather polite for leaving a note at all. 

It’s a God damn shame that what brought him back was a pair of $20 windshield wipers.  His hands were still cold from the snow.