Before I met my mother and her cousin, they worked at the phone company. Just out of school, they were best of friends. All giggles and lipstick. Ruffles and elbows. Every ring was filled with possibility.
Lapped and fascinated, I told my mother to tell it again. Having since met her cousin, it just didn’t seem possible. Hadn’t Janet just come from the potato pit? Hadn’t she just saved her husband Joey after being kicked by the cow? I couldn’t imagine her all dressed up under the fluorescent lights of Alexandria’s Telephone Company on Broadway.
“Oh, she was a beauty,” my mother said. “Just like you,” I said. My mother smiled. “I looked up to her,” she continued. I imagined Janet, now 10’ deep in the summer crop chilling for winter and it just seemed so unlikely. My mouth open in wonder, she told me what has remained, “People aren’t just one thing.”
The thing is, we think we know. We think because we see people for ten minutes that we understand their lives. Why they do the things we do. We have to go from potato pit to coffee break. We have to see the full picture. Even then, we can’t be entirely sure. We have to leave room for change. Room for growth. Room for the rings of possibility.
I like to think of them mid-giggle. Nothing lights a person better than joy. I have to allow myself the same grace. We all do. Good morning, my friends! Welcome to the phone company!
I don’t remember the first thing I put into the drawer. For the longest time, I thought it was just a facade. It was stuck, so I never forced it after trying once. I sat in front of it. One day I think it moved with my knee, so I tried again. Et voila! I laugh when I open it now. It’s completely full — I suppose the saying is true, it goes little by little, then all at once.
I suppose it’s true for everything. Life and love. I don’t remember getting older. I write every day about my “little by little”s, but I don’t recall a time when my heart wasn’t full.
It’s so delightful. When people get into your “all at once.” You can’t remember not loving them. I know you’ve felt it — people with whom you are ever in mid-conversation. No matter the time or distance. No matter the rise and fall of life’s breath. They are ever with you. Ever filling you.
My knee brushes against the drawer that I didn’t know I had, and I smile. Love will always find a way in, and stay.
It wasn’t long after I realized that everyone didn’t have them, these Tech-ers in the basement, that they were gone. It’s clear now that we needed the money more than the space. We went through at least three cycles of young men from the law enforcement class. I only remember one’s name – Terry Eilers. Maybe because he was also our bus driver, but mostly I think because he was nice to me. And wasn’t that everything? —when there was just one unlocked door at the bottom of the stairs that separated them from our laundry.
Before lessons were learned, I race from upstairs to downstairs without a glance. It was one of the men from the first group of three. (Everyone over 17 seems like a man when you are six.) He was building a canoe in the driveway to our basement. Fascinated by anything being built, I was probably annoying. Watchful. Eager to know the bend of wood. And what was that green stuff? What was he putting on the shell? Certainly he must have my best interests at heart, I thought, he lived with us after all. He was going to enforce the law. He told me to touch the canoe. I poked one hesitant finger out of my sleeve and touched it as if it were a hot pan on the stove. No, really get in there, he said. Rub your arm across it. I don’t why I did. Just like the heat from a hot pan, it took a minute for the tiny shards of glass, the insulation, to reach my brain. And it took longer, I suppose, wondering not why the pain, but more, why did he want to inflict it?
I wasn’t going to let him see me cry. I ran up the browning hill of fall grass. Through the garage door. Down the stairs to the laundry room in the basement. Took off the painful sweater and placed it in a basket. It was the first time I noticed there was no lock on that door. It was the first time I needed one.
I stayed upstairs for the rest of their time. The next group came. They called one “Buzz” I think because of his hair, but I remained at a distance.
When Terry Eilers came the next year, slightly overweight in his tan shirt and brown pants, the new uniform of the students, he smiled at me from behind the big bus wheel. I don’t know how many rides it took before I trusted him, but I did.
It’s no longer a technical school, but a college. They have their own housing now, I guess. Call it whatever you want, I hope we’ve all learned along the way. Kindness is memorable.
Some will try to take it away. Innocence. Curiosity. Joy. Others still will pick you up when you need it most. It only takes one Terry.
It was always so surprising to me — how much people loved picnics or potlucks. In my head, I called them the “p” words, as cursed as any of the other bad names we cut down to one letter in hopes of diffusing. But they remained, and my “p” word turned to panic.
My mother, knowing me, having talked me through all of the other significant choices in my life — books on library day, candy from Ben Franklin — knew how to calm me as I stood dripping of lake water, shouldered in a colorful towel, hair clinging to my face, knees shaking, wishing the “hour after swimming, before eating,” could be extended just a little further. “Focus on what you like,” she said. I had heard it before, so many times, but standing in the warmth of her hands on my shoulders, I could see it more clearly. In this sea of tabled panic, there were good things, still, and I focused on them.
I was struggling on what to say for America’s birthday. Near panic I stand before this spread. So much hatred and fear and unkindness tabled before us, it’s hard to see anything at all. But even still, I am steadied by the hands of love on my shoulders, as she tells me to focus on the good. Be it tear or lake water that drips from my face, I still see the ones I love. The people who sparkle without noise. Who shine a light beyond table and holiday. Who keep gathering in with steady hands and hearts. Who still find a way to giggle and scoot, barefooted in the hour before the feast. Is it the American dream, or the dream inside youth of every age and place, wobbling in knees, not at the expense of choice or of others, but among them, beside them, still waiting, in the dampened hope — toweled on sun burned shoulders… I hear the waves lap against the shore, in time with my heart, and the whispered sounds of someone singing Happy Birthday.
Most of us cried when we lost the last game of season. I can’t say what all the tears were for — but I know for me it wasn’t about winning or losing. It was the ending. Every day for three months I sat in front row of Mrs. McCarty’s English class, watching the last few ticks of the clock that hung just above the door. My toe tapping in time with the second hand. My arms clutched around my books just before the bell rang — the bell that released us into the after school special that no one would film.
I raced down the hall. Past the locker that I never used. Down the stairs. Past the front doors. Waved at my mom at her front desk in the Superintendent’s office. Down another half flight of stairs. A quick drink at the fountain. Into the girls’ locker room. Changed into my shorts and t-shirt. Hiked up the knee pads. Joining Mrs. Anderson and all of my teammates for volleyball practice.
This is why I cried that last game. In slow motion, the last ball hit the floor on our side, and with that one splat, I had nowhere to go. No clock to watch. No hall to race. Nothing.
Not to be all dramatic…of course it wasn’t true. I still had the books to read from the English class that I adored. I had a mother who loved me. All the friends I had from the day before. And a permanent gym locker that Mrs. Anderson let me use throughout the school year. We sang on the bus ride home from the game. Everything was beginning.
Each year for a minute on the 26th of December, I can feel that “ending.” That hollow. And then I go through my list. I smile. I have everything I need. And just enough to wish for. No tears. I’m ready to get on that bus! To take the next ride! Let the adventure begin!
I suppose it was at my grandparent’s house that I first learned to come in clean. Winter snow or summer dirt was wiped from shoes in the entryway before climbing the couple of steps into the kitchen where grandma wiped her floured hands inside of her apron pockets and brought you in for a loving belly hug. After the apron imprinted your cheek, there was nothing to do but come directly with the truth. The truth of what you had been doing outside. What you touched that maybe you were told not to touch, like the electric fence, or a baby bird from a fallen nest. Maybe it felt safe, because it had been proven safe, time and time again, with wiped shoes and warmed cheeks…so we told all, and she loved us still.
If I come to you with that same truth today, I will tell you that I have battled it throughout the years — love and trust. Maybe we all do. But it has yet to change. The only way any of it seems to work is when I come in clean. When I come clean. When I tell you my truth, and accept the same from you. It’s not as complicated as I, we, often like to make it.
I grab the straw broom from the corner and smile. It has never needed instructions. Nor does my heart — its screen door swings open, and I dare it all again. Safe. Welcomed in the loving arms of home.
I have know idea how they got them in the house. It never occurred to me to think of those things — the logistics of moving an organ, a clock. And just as I assumed this clock that coo-cooed on the hour was called a Grandfather clock because it was his, I thought it was a Grandma organ, because it was hers.
But it must have been fairly spectacular – this finding of an organ mover, a clock mover, to a farm house just outside of Alexandria, Minnesota. And they must have come through the front door – a door we never used, never even considered. And even if they came through this front door, there would have been a stoop to be navigated. A tiny hall before reaching the living room. But as I said, I didn’t think of it, how they got there. But I did count on it, them being there.
And that was the gift, I suppose. It was all an assurance. One I didn’t ask for, or prayed to keep, I just had it. I knew, without a doubt, what would be found in this house. Coats and overalls hanging in the entry. A kitchen table with uneven legs. Candy in the corner cupboard on the lazy-susan. Sugared cereal beneath the silverware drawer beside the kitchen sink, a kitchen sink that was forever filled with dishes. Something on the stove. Publisher’s Clearing house magazines on the dining room table. The hint of pipe tobacco and baked goods. Television on. A ticking clock. The hum of the organ at the ready. And a love, no matter how many doors or windows were left open, would never leave.
So it continues to be spectacular — this never knowing how it all got in — mostly the love. I just remember always having it. I still have it. And what a thing to move! To carry throughout a lifetime! Enough to make a heart ever coo-coo and hum.
My brother had already left home by the time I was in the fifth grade, but there was a part of me still trying to get his attention.
They passed out the forms at Washington Elementary to sign up for the Punt, Pass and Kick competition. I can’t say that I was a football fan, but I folded up the paper and put it in the pocket of my no-brand jeans. I had no real intention of asking my mother to sign it. That would be admitting something to her that I wasn’t ready to admit to myself.
I found his old football in the garage. What it had gathered in dust, it had lost in air. I licked the needle of the pump for my bicycle tires (I don’t know why, but I had seen him do that) and tried to squeeze it into the ball. I placed the small kickstand under my feet and I pumped and pumped and pumped some more! The needle popped out. The ball was still deflated. And I was on my way to be.
Ever hopeful, I decided to still give it a try. I couldn’t quite reach the regulation laces with my fingers. I cocked back my elbow and gave more of a push than a throw. It didn’t spiral. It tumbled. I had no tee to attempt an actual kick of the ball, so I decided to punt (no pun intended). I tossed the ball slightly in the air and swung desperately with my right foot. It felt like a brick as I hit my shin against the flattened leather. I tore the sign-up sheet into tiny bits and through them in the burning barrel by the driveway.
It’s a difficult lesson, one that I’m still learning. People can only love you for who you are. You can’t force it. Or even win it. You just have to be yourself. And that’s still no guarantee that they will love you. But if they do, love you for who you are, how glorious! How beyond punt, pass and kick fantastic!
And never is it more true, than with yourself. The thing is, there’s no permission slip for that. You have to find your own way to selfcare, to self love.
A few summers ago, here in France, my brother-in-law found an old American football. With his son, he was playing catch in our backyard. He threw it to me. Without thinking, I placed my long fingers on the laces, and threw a perfect spiral back to him. “Where did you learn to do that?” he asked in surprise. I smiled and said, “I guess I just found a way.”
It’s unlikely they are Laura Ingalls Wilder fans, but she is my first thought as I pass the sign each day on my walk. It points and reads, “La Petite Maison” — the little house. Surrounded by trees on the gravel path, I am transported from the south of France to the northwest of Minnesota, crouched in the corner of our living room, reading “Little House in the Big Woods,” by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I read all of her books. Each one a safe haven to dream. Moving me forward from place to place. Opening doors. Revealing the possibilities of words, of stories, of living. They were the cars of my underground railroad.
With each gift comes a responsibility. I, we, were given so much. So easily. And I don’t think it’s enough to just give thanks — thanks for the path. We need to keep digging. Keep paving. Putting up the signs, as small as they may be. Because someone will see them. Will feel them. These small acts of kindness. These words of hope. These gravel roads to possibility.
I continuously have a rock in my shoe. I think that’s the wink of the universe. A reminder of where I’ve been. A reminder to keep going. That my tiny life, as petite as it may be in this “Big Woods,” has to matter. Has to mean something. So I gather the words and the pebbles and make paths. Walking ahead. Walking behind. Walking beside. Always with you.
The light bouncing off of the freshly fallen snow was so bright. It seemed to go straight to our legs as we waited to go out for recess at Washington Elementary. We bundled. We ran, like baby Michelin men, in the snow. Rolling. Tumbling. No fear of falling. It was beautiful.
When the bell rang, we dripped into the hallway. Hung our soggy clothing on wall hooks and slumped into our desks. The teacher put on all the lights, but we still couldn’t see anything. Blinded, I suppose, by the light of all that fun.
I think maybe that’s the way of grief. Trying to adapt in this newly dimmed room. They say you will adjust. I’m still waiting. But not really — most of me doesn’t want to adjust. I want to keep that bright light within – that glorious light of my mother. The damp smell of tender tears hangs in the coat room of my heart. I sit up a little straighter, look out the window and smile. Oh what a time we had! What rolling, tumbling joy!
“All my heart ever wanted was just to come in from the cold.”
