Category: Blog (Page 15 of 101)

We both love people.
She loves hordes of them
especially they’re when gathered together.
I love them one or two at a time,
and I need space between them
because no matter how much I love them,
people make me tired.

She picks up the phone and calls.
I prefer texting.

She loves to cook.
I hate it.
(Though I do manage to kinda’ almost sorta’ like it
once or twice a year.)

She refuses to give up a single one
of her umpteen thousand plates.
I gave away all mine
when we moved to the mountain top 3 years ago
and haven’t looked back once.

She can grow anything.
I can kill a plastic rubber plant.

She has good taste.
I have taste buds.

She knows how to accessorize with lamps.
I know how to turn them off and on.

She keeps a teeny tiny little calendar,
the same kind every year.
Has for decades.
I spend the better part of four months delightedly
planning and conjuring and creating
what my next year’s planner will be like.
What size it’ll be.
What I’ll note and track.
What colors I’ll use.

I am a big noticer and lover of details.
She overlooks many things like
the difference in her panties and mine
when unloading the dryer.

I am on a first name basis with silence
adore it
crave it
don’t get to spend nearly enough time with it.
She never met 30 seconds of silence
she didn’t fill.

I take after my daddy.
Obviously.

Once upon a year, New Year’s Eve found us on a sailboat going snorkeling in Aruba. As we board, I can tell there won’t be seats for everyone, so I inform the fella in charge that my mother needs a place to sit. But he pays me no heed which requires a minor hissy fit on my part before we shove away, a hissy fit that results in the day’s bartender clearing my mother a space right beside him and the all-day free punch. With Mother taken care of and the rest of the famdamily comfortably reclining in the sun, I take my seat in the shade with my cup of ice water and commence to reading my book on curriculum theory.

Yes, curriculum theory.

We sail, we lunch, we snorkel . . . well, not “we” because I’m sure you remember that I have that engrossing book on curriculum theory. Around mid-afternoon, I hear much laughter and wooping and a few wolf calls for good measure with The Hokey Pokey playing rather loudly in the background. More annoyed than interested, I look up to find my mother standing in the middle of the crowded sailboat. Doing the hokey pokey. With the bartender.

I’m not kidding.

That’s also the day when my brother – who adores Hawaiian shirts – stops at a vendor and purchases a rather bright one on his way to the sailboat, and upon our return to the cruise ship (and while rather under the influence of hokey pokey joy juice), he stops by the exact same vendor and purchases the exact same shirt a second time.

I’m not kidding about that, either.

So if we’re ever together and my cell phone starts singing the Hokey Pokey, you’ll know it’s my mother calling. And when I bust out laughing, you’ll know I’m picturing my inebriated brother coming home with two – count them 2 – matching hot pink Hawaiian style shirts. I’m not sure there’s a ring tone out there that adequately sums that part of the day up.

~~~~~~~

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Maybe it was the rain that had been falling by the tubs full for going on seven weeks. Or maybe it was the season. She’d always felt revved up by the fall and its two big holidays, considering it a time of festive new beginnings. But her family was bad to die right around Christmas, and that’s why she got melancholy and pensive right around Thanksgiving.

Based on her calculations (that were based on her knowledge of her elders), she had approximately 26.25 more good years left, and she’d spent the better part of today wondering how to fill those years when she’d still be able to do things for and by herself. Not that she was one of those stubborn independents who would spend great sums of money to keep from being a burden to their children. She’d already had a couple of conversations with her son, telling him that he could live wherever in the world he wanted to, but when the time came that she needed help, he did not get to just phone his sister to tell her what she was doing wrong and feel like he’d done his part. No siree. He had to step up and show up, period. And she’d written it down in a letter, too, lest he convince himself he’d dreamt that conversation.

Never one to sit around waiting for life to knock on her door, she got out her pen and paper and tried to think of what she wanted to do next. Traveling was fine once she got there, but the getting ready to go was tiring and stressful, and she hated unpacking more than anything. Which is why she usually took all her oldest clothes and just left them in trashcans along the way.

Having been what they call a scanner, interested in a whole bunch of different things, she’d pursued those interests until they weren’t interesting any more. It had been fun while it lasted, but now she couldn’t think of a single thing she wanted to know more about.

She’d never been that nice kind of person who takes in orphans to raise, and she wasn’t about to start now that she finally had some time to call her own.

She already knew how to crochet and knit and quilt, and besides, her fingers were getting arthritic, so that was out.

She’d always loved to read, but her eyesight was failing, so mostly she listened to books now, but some days she couldn’t get the volume loud enough to catch more than every third sentence.

She’s long since been through her gardening phase. She didn’t play in the earth nearly as long as her friends did ’cause she never had – since she was a baby, I tell you – liked getting dirty.

Maybe she could right a regret or three, but she really didn’t have all that many, though she did wish she had spoken her mind more often so her part in the conversation would’ve been something more substantial instead of “I was just about to say that” or “That’s just what I was thinking.”

Yes, her own mortality was weighing heavy on her heart this day. This was a whole lot harder than she’d thought it would be, this planning the rest of your life, and for a minute she considered just going on and moving in with her children right now and calling it quits.

Or at least going on to bed.

But as she doodled, waiting for inspiration to light, she heard the radio man say that a bunch of European scientists had gotten together and decided that in 2033 there was gonna’ come another Ice Age, complete with glaciers and icecaps and everything. That got her thinking about how much she enjoyed those trips to Alaska and Iceland, so she turned to a clean page and used that pen to do some math. When she figured out that 2033 was only 15 years away, she smiled for the first time in I don’t know how long because by her calculations, not only would she be alive in 15 years and get to see the earth freeze over, but she’d have 11.25 years to enjoy the icebergs and blue ice . . . provided she had enough food and batteries and blankets and matches and wood stored up.

Turning to another blank page, she began making her lists, and as she wrote, she began to hum. Having something to look forward to made all the difference in the world.

Mark Twain, writing to a friend in 1874 about his new 19-room red brick Gothic mansion:

“To us, our house was not insentient matter – it had a heart and a soul, and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benedictions. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome – and we could not enter it unmoved.”

Long about fourth grade, we built a house in town, moving away from the family home place outside of town to live in Fayetteville proper so Daddy could be mayor. And while I have no such elegant story to tell you about how our house lit up upon our return, I can tell you that when Mr. Mac Bray’s bulldozer began to dig out the basement, the rather large family of snakes weren’t the only ones disturbed. The boy of the house across the street came galloping over with bucket in hand enthusiastically asking if he could take the snakes home. He collected them, he explained to the stunned speechless folks, and kept them as pets.

Now I’d spent my entire life – all 9 years of it – out on the family home place, and I didn’t care if Daddy wanted to be mayor or not, this had me more convinced than ever that it was not a good idea to move to town and live across the street from a bunch of snakes. (Dear Reader, that sentence is literal as written here, but it turned metaphorical after we’d been in the house a few months when Mother and her friends gathered at our front window every night to watch the drunken man of that house parade around the front yard wearing nothing but his BVD’s. Whether he was locked out by his wife or took a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom, we’ll never know, but he gave my mother and her friends something to look forward, that’s for sure, and the entertainment didn’t cost a dime.)

Our new house was on Kelley Drive. Newcomers – read: anybody not born in Fayette County – spell it “Kelly”, but Mother and Daddy knew Mr. Kelley for whom it was named, and it most definitely is supposed to have that extra “e” in the name. Mr. Mac Bray built our house according to the blueprints, and the excitement was palpable when Mother, Daddy, and Mr. Mac unfurled those drawings on makeshift table of plywood and sawhorses and huddled up to plan the particulars of our new home. Those thin white lines on that most marvelous shade of blue paper were an orderly, easy-to-follow roadmap to our future. All we had to do was follow those directions, and we’d have the shelter of our dreams that would take us right on into happily ever after.

It all seemed so easy then, with those blueprints in hand. Once we were happily nested, with our pink and white poodle bedspreads and real tile in the bathrooms laid down in the shape of flowers, I quietly fished the blueprints out of the trashcan and tucked them in my pajama drawer for safekeeping so I could easily put my hands on them when it was time for me to create a life of my own.

A lot of living happened in that house.
A lot of living happened on that street.

Pam, Steven, Doug, Dianna, Gordon, and I – we all walked home from school together, stopping by Dell’s for some fries and a Coke and to play “Build Me Up Buttercup” on the jukebox till our dimes ran out. The older kids in the neighborhood didn’t speak to us, and we didn’t bother ourselves with the younger kids unless we just had to.

Life on that street was the inspiration for my self-introduction when Mr. Baker, the new Georgia History teacher, came to town in the middle of seventh grade. When he asked us to stand up one at a time and tell him our name and a little something about ourselves, I kinda’ strayed from the blueprint, took a few liberties, and introduced myself as Jeanne Burdette (in my defense, Pam and I practically lived at each other’s house), then proceeded to tell him how I was a little down on my luck in the report card department this year on account of how hard it was to study or sleep what with all the yelling and parading around nekkid in the front yard and other miscellaneous carrying on happening across the road. All the adults on our street were bad to drink, I explained, but only that one particular neighbor chose to clean up after himself in the middle of the night. On a roll (and seeing no need to let details or truth slow me down), I told him that I didn’t know how in the world my mother could hold down a job (I saw no need to mention it was at the Central Office which is what everybody calls the Board of Education), but I sure was glad she did cause my daddy didn’t hit a lick. And for the big finale, I borrowed from history and mentioned how some days I went hungry when I couldn’t catch a fish with my hands on the way to school and that he’d have to pretty please excuse my occasional absences cause sometimes – especially after a pay day when the liquor flowed like a river in our neighborhood – I overslept and simply didn’t have time to walk the fifteen miles to get to school. Then I politely thanked him for his attention and sat down, demurely crossing my feet at the ankles.

Pam and Dianna picked up on my theme and added their own (made up) versions of life on Kelley Drive, Pam casting her parents in the role of The Drunks Across The Street, and Dianna telling a sad, sad, sad story about how hard it was to study with her daddy parading all kinds of honky-tonk women through the house day and night.

We can never be sure if our made-over selves had anything to do with it or not, but Mr. Baker turned out to be the toughest teacher we’d ever had, so I was button-busting proud to get a B+ on that first test. I ‘spect I’d’ve done a little better if it had been the English teacher had asked us to introduce ourselves.

One fine day, Mother left Grandmother and Granddaddy sitting with three-year-old me at our house while she went shopping. As it neared suppertime, Grandmother herded the troops into the kitchen to help get supper on the table. Not used to working in anybody else’s kitchen – and certainly not used to cooking on a gas stove – Grandmother wasn’t aware that it is standard protocol to turn up the gas with one hand while lighting the pilot light with the other. She opted to light the pilot light and worry about turning up the gas later once she had something ready to go on the stove.

Covered in ceiling from head to toe, an excited Little Jeanne met her mother at the door, explaining that the kitchen was rather a mess because Grandmother cooked too fast.

Big Jeanne has never cooked on a gas stove a day in her life, and she doesn’t see that changing. Ever.

The Engineer Dances with Aunt Rene

After moving to the assisted living facility, Aunt Rene began to collect empty boxes – and salt packets and bananas and empty envelopes and napkins, but I’m focusing on the boxes right now. A new resident would move in, and Aunt Rene would be a good neighbor and offer to take the empty boxes off their hands. Deliveries were made to the kitchen or housekeeping staff, and Aunt Rene happily took the boxes from the hall to her room.

I asked her once, “Aunt Rene, what do you need all these boxes for?”

“Well, Darlin’, you just never know when you’re going to need a good box,” was her answer.

Like most people who are moved to a nursing home or assisted living facility, Aunt Rene refused to believe it was unsafe for her to live alone. She never came right out and called us liars, but she never believed us when we told her about the stove catching on fire when she forgot to turn it off or how she took her morning tablets after waking up from every nap during the day. Every visit with Aunt Rene was filled with pleas for us to take her home . . . or at least to take her to the liquor store to get some “real good ‘n strong” boxes.

Some people have attics and garages and basements filled with boxes of unfulfilled dreams, unexpressed longings, undisclosed desires, and unresolved issues. Aunt Rene had a corner of her small assisted living apartment filled with empty boxes that weren’t really empty. Every box in her collection was filled with hope.

After beginning in June 2012, Nancy continues to draw.
and I continue to stitch,
though some of her more recent drawings are too line intensive.
But not to worry
cause I have ideas.
We brought home 470 more drawings
after an all too short visit with her last week.

Nancy makes this shape in many of her drawings:

I call it a vessel.

Sometimes she arranges them
in a specific way on the page.

Sometimes they are part of the overall design.

Sometimes she fills them.

And sometimes she spills them.

Most of the time, Nancy’s drawings are non-representational,
an expression of her emotional climate,
an expression of how she’s feeling
and her response to what’s happening around her.
But sometimes
people see shapes they recognize.
I always enjoy hearing what people see
or how Nancy’s drawings make them feel
or what they think about when they gaze upon her drawings.

Usually I like her drawings for the color choices she makes

or the intensity

or the movement.

But two of her most recent drawings made me wonder

if she was drawing a palm tree

perhaps the one that’s at the front door
of the ARC where she spends her days.

And a pumpkin
an artsy pumpkin.

And, well, this one tickles me
because I see an entire story.
Or at least a vignette.
Do you see it, too?

There she is, stalled at the top of the big falls,
relocated during a particularly rainy season
a couple of years ago.

The Engineer plots and plans
how he can cut it up so it will flow on down,
but I tell him No
and point out how she has become much to many:

Surprise plants and mosses now call her home in the summer.
Snowflakes gather on her back in the winter.
And best of all, she is the grand metaphor
for my writing life
as she sits perched, hovering on the edge.