Jeanne Hewell-Chambers

+ Her Barefoot Heart

Tag: family (Page 3 of 7)

The “Re” Nobody Tells You About

July 31, 2014 / / 3 Comments

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I married a man
who developed a strong, solid good
reputation in his career field
for being a man
of integrity,
a man who keeps his word,
a man who is patient
a man who understands that
everybody at the table needs to make money.

I married a man
who, despite building an impressive career,
never missed a soccer game
or a stage performance
or a parents’ night.

I married a man
who enjoys cooking
(and not just on the grill)
and grocery shopping
(except during The Season)
and tending a garden
(when the crows leave him enough to tend).

I married a man
who literally swept me into his arms
and carried me out of the church
because the car that hit me six weeks before
broke my knee.
A man continues to
sweep me off my feet
in ways large
and small.

In in the past 41 years,
I’ve married this man many times over,
only once
when we stood in front of a group of people,
repeating the words of a preacher I never particularly liked.
Every other time
the vows have been quiet, private vows
of laughter
of hand-holding
of listening
of sharing a look
of sharing the look
of being quiet
of staying.
Because in 41 years of togetherness,
you learn that
marriage is a series of re-marriages.

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tears (as in drops from the eyes) and tears (as in rips of the heart)

May 11, 2014 / / 3 Comments

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you met my mother here and here and here, now i know good and well that it’s mother’s day, but it’s not my mother i want to tell you about today.

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and it’s not my niece who had her baby boy last night at 10:49, even though you can bet your sweet patootie you’ll be hearing about him soon. isn’t he a beautiful baby?

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today it’s my cousin mary (the one who always makes sure we take plenty of pictures at every family gathering) i want to tell you about. that’s her there on the left. (then there’s my mother in the center. then there’s me on the right.)

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if you pay attention to my facebook feed, you know that 14 months ago mary’s oldest boy (that’s him – billy – there with the blue oval around his handsome face and that’s mary there on the left with the pink oval around her) was diagnosed with cancer. you know that he endured everything science has in its arsenal to throw at cancer, and you know that it wasn’t enough. mary buried her oldest son today – on mother’s day.

at first i thought that was an awful, horrendous, unimaginable thing to do – i initially felt physically sick for mary. but as i talked with her over the past few days, i tell you what: i’ve never loved her more or been more proud of her. that cousin o’mine really knows how to throw a good funeral.

she didn’t opt to have billy’s funeral on mother’s day to cast herself as a martyr. she didn’t want pity or attention or people fawning over her. you see, this wasn’t about mary at all. this funeral was a tribute to billy, and mary made sure of it in every way large and small.

friends were important to billy, so mary and her husband danny decided to have the funeral today because they knew a lot of billy’s friends would be in town visiting their mothers and could attend the funeral.

during the visitation that preceded the funeral when mary spied somebody she didn’t know, she walked right up to them and introduced herself and thanked them for coming then listened to their stories about billy.

she was right there every minute. she was so present.

she made sure people had plenty to eat. she asked if they had moved their car to the line that would go to the cemetery. she thanked people. she fed people. she hugged people. she listened to people. you might think she was distracting herself with busy work, and you’d be wrong. mary was there, she didn’t shy away from the reality of the occasion, she cried – she cried plenty – she just never lost sight of the fact that today was about honoring and memorializing billy.

when danny (billy’s daddy) cried, mary put her arm around him and patted him. when the preacher came to clarify what song would be sung, she directed him to danny because danny had selected the song. when the pall bearers (some of billy’s friends from college) arrived, she took them all into her house, and when they got upset, she comforted them.

she told the preacher story after story after story to make sure it was a fitting, story-filled tribute to the multi-faceted, multi-talented young man billy is . . . was (it’s hard to use past tense). in the past few weeks and especially today, mary exhibited every trait and characteristic that made billy the fine and good young man we know him to be.

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(that’s billy there with the orange oval with his hand on mary’s shoulder.)

as an actor and a managing director of a theatre, i see my fair share of drama queens, and as a woman of that certain age, i’ve dealt with a lot of women who desperately want to be seen, and i want to tell you one very important thing: mary focused that spotlight on her son billy, and she made sure it didn’t stray, not one little bit. and in her unfaltering selfless mother love, i saw her more clearly than i’ve ever seen her before.

i love her so much.

featuring a selfie, a memory (or 5), and a wish

December 31, 2013 / / 0 Comments

being a stone turner of long standing,
i enjoy studying the back sides of art cloths
as much as i enjoy gazing at the front, more public, side . . .

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i flip The Rinse Cycle 2 (a new series) over, and i see
lush
green
growing.
i see every shade of blue
the sky has every worn.

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i see knots.
some of friendships – unions – marriages – new beginnings
celebrations that bring us together in festival and gladness.
i see knots of hanging on – depression – despair.
i see knots as fists, landing blows in the shape of words
and i see the knots i feel in my stomach
in the wake of the blows,
even after so much time has passed.

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i see trails taken
and trails not taken.

i see curves in the roads
detours
unexpected
mandatory re-routings.
who could have known?
there were no maps.
there couldn’t be.

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i see an undisturbed spot of aching
left empty
by those who predeceased me.
gone ahead, some would say,
passed on
left us
died.
they died and are dead.
i do not gloss over death
with prettier words
because it does not change anything
or lessen the longing.

i see those who might have died
but didn’t
and i rejoice.
oh my goodness gracious how i do rejoice.

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i see giant steps
and teensy tentative baby steps.
i see skips
and hops
and gallops
and waltzes.

i see crooked lines
paths that go every which-a-way,
often against the grain.

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i spy
rolling hills
garden spots
vast and small
planted
tended
harvested.

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i see hope
and life on the verge.
nay, i see life in leaps and bounds
as i stand in the present
remembering the past
and wondering with keen anticipation
and a quickening, actually
about the future.

happy new year to us all.
may we rock it
stitch it
traipse it
paint it
dance it
sing it
color it
hug it
live it
and mark it
as only we can.

questions and answers of the most important kind: a timed test

December 21, 2013 / / 2 Comments

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they (her children) say she went through a spell when she cried a lot. day in, day out, she cried, my grandmother ballard did. one of her children posits that she cried over the possibility that granddaddy had a girlfriend on the side, to which another reminds us that granddaddy was the town’s sheriff and it was his responsibility to make frequent trips to the . . . i don’t remember what they called it, this bawdy, rowdy house out on hwy 54. another child imagines the tears were brought on by the never-to-be-fulfilled life dreams. (grandmother had what we now call a full-ride scholarship to The Piano Conservatory, but after the first year, her daddy snatched her out of school saying girls didn’t need an education – especially one in music – they only needed a husband.) the third living child doesn’t remember her crying and has no earthly idea why she would.

this morning as i interrupt application of my daily facial moisturizer to allow my retired husband access to the bathroom for the fourth time since i started this activity (usually) of short duration, i imagine grandmother crying because she had no alone time and no personal space. no quiet time to just sit and ponder. i wonder if that’s why she made so many quilts – did the constant whirr of the old singer treadle machine provide walls of sound that served to keep everybody out and her in?

it’s what we do, you know: answer the unanswerable questions through our own filters of knowledge acquired through books and life experiences. sometimes it’s as though we gain permission to be ourselves, other times it gives us insights that explain us to ourselves. now would be a mighty good time to ask those questions as you gather round the tree to celebrate the holiday with your family. and hey, don’t forget to take a tape recorder. you can thank me later.

[ ::: ]

While others wore necklaces, Jeanne Hewell-Chambers had a Brownie camera hanging around her neck. Always a personal historian, she’s considering dusting off her old workshops on such things and converting them to online classes. Stay tuned.

they helped make me who i am in ways i may never know

December 19, 2013 / / 9 Comments

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we’ll never know if granddaddy died on 12/19 or 12/20. he simply went to bed on the 19th and never woke up. the death certificate says 12/19, though, on account of that’s the date his son – my uncle gene – was killed years before. the town’s doctor (the small town wasn’t big enough to have a coroner – shoot, we were glad to have a doctor there) thought it fitting that father and son died on the same date.

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i still ache for them – all of them, even though uncle gene died before i was even an idea. i’m named after him, you know. there are still people around who actually knew him, and when i say “tell me about him,” the first thing they all say is “he was funny.” i have two lamps he made from turned wood, i have his wallet (complete with the photo of his girlfriend), and i have photos of him on a tractor – probably not the tractor he was using to pull up stumps when it flipped over on him, killing him. but maybe. i don’t know. granddaddy reportedly found him, shoved the tractor aside, then my wiry little granddaddy picked up my rotund 18 year-old uncle and carried him all the way back to the house. the next day, in a fit of grief, granddaddy drove a silver stake into the ground to mark the spot.

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when i ask people what they remember about my granddaddy, they all – every one of them – say there wasn’t a dishonest bone in his body. that he was a good man. some even tell me about a time when he (the town’s banker) loaned them grocery money cause they left their checkbook at home. i have the clock that sat on his mantle; the tag he kept on his key chain asking finders, should he lose his keys, to return them to brooks bank; and i write sitting in the chair he sat in at the bank. it still has the original green leather.

nobody seems to know my grandmother very well. they tell me she was quiet. i remember her arriving home from a vacation, getting out of the car and walking straight across the street to see me – even before she went in her own house. later memories are of her being still, quiet, and lethargic, which i now know was a condition resulting from a series of strokes, but back then i didn’t know what was wrong until the day i was converting the pump house into a studio and got stung by wasps several times on each hand. by the time i got to the front door of our house, my hands had swelled up so much i couldn’t bend my fingers, and hurt – oh my goodness how they did hurt. then just like that, my little girl brain knew why grandmother sat quietly in the chair with a washcloth over her hands that were always idling in her lap. i spent three days like that, but the swelling went down, the pain subsided, and i was back out turning over bushel baskets upside down to become stools. grandmother never saw the results of my labor.

granddaddy and grandmother . . . well, if i ever walked as one who was once cherished, it’s because of them. they adored me, their first grandchild, and the feeling was mutual. they clothed me in ruffles and lace (i could seat 6 on the petticoats they bought me to wear under the dresses they bought me); shoes in every color; frilly fold-down socks; dozens of pairs of gloves. i even remember one dress – brown plaid. white collar with piping to match the dress fabric. sash. one of daddy’s favorite stories is of little me driving nails into the floor at granddaddy’s feet as he (granddaddy) sat in his rocker watching the news on tv. “JEANNE,” daddy said loudly, startling me out of my reverie. “junior,” granddaddy told him firmly, (daddy was named after granddaddy, and he hated being called junior, probably because he spent a goodly part of his life working to distinguish himself from his dad) “jeanne is in my room now. she can hammer wherever she wants to.” i rest my case.

i have lots of stories starring grandmother and granddaddy stored in my memory bank, but there are still stories i long to hear, questions i’d love to ask – questions and stories i didn’t know to ask back then.

i’m told that the internal voice that scolds me, saying i should not be living in the past or grieving because these people died long ago and besides, they weren’t my spouse or my parents or my children, they were only my grandparents. i’m told this is actually a caring voice, a voice that just wants to keep me safe. i’m told i should love this voice, thank it for protecting me, for caring so much about me . . . but i’m feeling more like thanking it through clenched teeth (by way of suggesting, you understand) to shut up and leave me to my grief and remembrances. i don’t care how long it’s been, i still miss them something fierce. and i don’t care about any alleged hierarchy of appropriate grief, they were my grandparents and we adored each other. and i don’t care that i never met my uncle, i can and do still love him and mourn him sight unseen.

maybe it makes sense on paper that i should be over this grief all these decades later . . . but on my heart, this grief will not be denied.

[ ::: ]

Jeanne Hewell-Chambers has spent most of her life collecting photos, stories, and information about the day in May 1933 when bandits knocked on her grandparents door and held the family (grandparents, midwife, newborn gene, and 5 year-old crawford) hostage overnight until the bank opened the following morning. next year she intends to pull it all together, and she’s very excited about that because she knows that event somehow impacted her life, shaping her into the women she is today even though her daddy was only five years old at the time and not even thinking about girls and raising a family.

Here’s the Church and Here’s the Steeple, Open the Doors and . . .

October 12, 2013 / / 6 Comments

The Short Version:

  • New York is fun.
  • And beautiful.
  • And a bit wacky.

The Longer (Illustrated) Version:
I am in New York City visiting my cousin Stacy and my other cousin (and his wife), Ginger. Being here in their beautiful 3-bedroom apartment on the Episcopal compound (don’t know the official name since I’m not exactly fluent in Episcopal) is like being in the magical world of Hogwart’s . . .

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Yesterday I spent some time roaming the Cathedral of St. John the Divine where I saw some pretty magnificent things . . . like stained glass:

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and likenesses carved into pews:

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and floors that sure look like quilts to me (quilts that were much more captivating when I stood right there on them than when I climbed up high and tried to get a picture of the “quilt” in its entirety):

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On the way back to their apartment, I looked at the cracks in the sidewalks and saw churches and steeples, some caught in the act of being struck by lightning:

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Fortunately the lightning only took half the steeple each time:

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Sometimes lightning only sheered off the point at the top:

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I saw a high rise church built on a mountain (or half a high rise church built on half a mountain for those of you who are more factually inclined:

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And best I can tell, this is 5.25 of the Ten Commandments, undoubtedly put on legs to save them from The Flood:

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Oh, and we rode the subway last night (a first for me on my fourth visit to The Big Apple) to Little Italy for supper, and I want you to know: I hadn’t been on the train a nanosecond when a fella in a red jacket hopped up and offered me his seat. He’s in construction, and I’m a little offended that he didn’t whistle at me as he offered me his seat. I broke all the rules, though, and not only made eye contact with him, but enjoyed talking to him. (Something that would’ve been much easier had he come with subtitles.)

A Perennial Special Day

August 28, 2013 / / 11 Comments

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Today is my son’s birthday. If you’re lucky enough to know Kipp, you might celebrate different things about him – not because he transforms himself into someone different with everyone he meets in hopes of gaining some invisible stamp of approval, but because he is such a delightfully complex and multi-faceted person who is interested in and excels at so many different things.

I celebrate his willingness to take risks – not stupid risks, but educated risks. He digs in, researches, asks questions, and learns before he leaps. Most of the time, anyway. There was the StartUp Weekend in Boulder when he’d gone to scope it out in preparation for presenting one of his three good ideas the following year. But at the last minute – and I do mean very last minute – he stood up, presented one of his ideas, formed his team, developed the prototype company over the weekend, and 48 hours later, he’d won the big prize. (So it all worked out.) There’s also the fact that while he was still sleeping on the floor of some friend’s uncle, he learned his way around Los Angeles by delivering food. And there’s the skydiving, which is pretty daring, if you ask me. (He’s also a certified skydiving instructor, too, if you’re interested.)

Speaking of skydiving, I’d like to take this opportunity to say how much I celebrate the caring and consideration he shows by calling me on the way to any jump then calling me again on his way home from the jump.

I celebrate his willingness to say “I don’t know” right out loud.

I celebrate his knowing that you can learn more about humans and their relationships from poetry, music, art, and literature than from any psychology class or textbook.

I celebrate his creativity that erupts in the poetry, songs, and essays he writes; in the acting he does on film and on stage; in the open mic events I hope he’ll find his way back to.

I celebrate that he is a wildly creative young man who also balances his checkbook.

I celebrate his dependability – if Kipp tells you he’ll do something, you can move on to something else knowing he will do what he promised. And he holds himself accountable, never accepting the blame for others but not shoving blame on others, either.

I celebrate his unwillingness to take a bunch of crap (which is to say his willingness to stand up for himself). On his first day at the new, private middle school, a big fat kid looked at the short, small Kipp, got right up in Kipp’s personal space, starred down into Kipp’s retinas, and barked “You ought to go back to kindergarten” to which Kipp said without missing a beat, “And you ought to go back to Weight Watchers.”

I celebrate his whipsmart and varied intelligences that spring from all parts of his brain.

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I celebrate his gentleness and his love of traditions. Kipp got his first stitches when he was in first grade, and we went for ice cream afterwards to make this a celebratory Milestone Life Event. Years later when Alison got her first stitches, Kipp called me in the ER to say that he wanted to pay for her celebratory ice cream.

I celebrate his sense of place . . . when the last box left the house he’d grown up in, Kipp and I spent a few minutes sitting on the front stoop, laughing and crying as we told stories as our way of thanking the house for sheltering us while transitioning into new shelter. It was a tender moment that I’ll remember long after I’ve forgotten his name.

I celebrate his thoughtfulness, his empathetic nature, his bend towards self-reliance.

I celebrate his self-awareness . . . Though he was slow to warm to swimming lessons (I don’t mean swimming lessons in general, but slow to warm to each and every weekly swimming lesson), afterwards he sat in the backseat shivering partly from the chill of a wearing a wet swimsuit in an air conditioned car and partly from the excitement of going straight to his grandmother’s swimming pool for more swimming. The day he went off the diving board at swimming lessons, he went straight to YeaYea’s diving board, walked resolutely to the end of the board, and stood there shivering, his little hands clasped in front of him as he looked down at the water, eventually turning to me and saying, “Mom, I guess you’re just gonna’ have to push me.”

I celebrate his attention to detail and his strive for the remarkable, though he is overly hard on himself sometimes . . . like the time he was learning to ride his bike. He got to the end of the driveway, and as he attempted to turn onto the road, he fell. He took a minute to look at his scraped knee, then picked himself and the bike up, walked it back up to the top of the driveway, and started over, falling again. This time he boo-hooed (and I mean loudly). “Are you okay?” his dad asked rushing over to check on him. “Yeah,” Kipp said, “I’m fine, but I FELL IN THE SAME SPOT.”

I celebrate Kipp’s sense of hospitality, his sense of humor, his precociousness. When I asked our pediatrician why baby Kipp wouldn’t stop crying, she said it’s because he was a 40 years old man trapped in a baby’s body. This woman of science told me that, and she was absolutely right.

I celebrate Kipp’s willingness to be vulnerable and his ability to let other people be vulnerable without rushing to make it better or fix anything. I celebrate his sensitivity, his desire to be his ow man, and how he lives with diabetes, taking good care of himself without whining and complaining of all the extra steps that involves for him.

I celebrate my lucky stars and swimmers and eggs that all came together to place Kipp in my arms, in my heart, in my life. As he said that one Christmas, rubbing the sleep from his eyes as he looked down on what Santa had left under the tree: “I didn’t know I be’ed this good.” Whatever I did i a former life, it had to be pretty darn special.

I call him Slug because he is the hottest coal that keeps my fires burning. Happy birthday, Kipp. I love you more than my pocketbooks.

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A Different Way to Look at the Heavens

August 6, 2013 / / 0 Comments

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Today was a play day with Stacy, a cousin who I love more like a brother, if you want to know the truth. We went to PARI (Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute), a delightfully marvelous, accessible, educational facility tucked away in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. We ran our hands along a tire that once stood between the earth and one of the space shuttles, and when we saw the ridiculously thin tread, Stace said “No wonder the shuttle needed a parachute to stop it.” We looked at satellites, one adorned with a smiley face painted on during the mid 1960s just to say to the Russians “We see you.” (The Russians, we were told, stamped out dirty words in the snow by way of response.) We marveled at the variety of meteorites on display and laughed out loud at the hallway lined with spectacular photos of the moon, an event our granddaddy died believing was television hoakery.

John the Tour Guide showed us all sorts of computers, one of which that’s tracking the earth’s drifting and shifting magnetic something-or-other. It kinda’ alarmed me, really, so I asked him about the implications of that change, and I don’t know if he understood my question or not, but I know for certain that I didn’t understand his answer. John in the Control Booth told us about watching quasars and blips and sounds that are so far away, it makes my head hurt to think about it. (Next time I’m going to ask him if he’s looking into our past or into our future.)

Then they gave us a map, circled some spots they thought we might enjoy, and bid us farewell. We went straightaway to the new Observation Deck where the view was quieting and the quiet was deafening. “Though I don’t know exactly how,” Stacy said as we were leaving, “my life will be better for having been here.”

To which I said simply: Amen.

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patterns of being

April 15, 2013 / / 6 Comments

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As a little girl, I’d spend the occasional Friday night with my grandparents. On Saturday morning, my grandmother would shake me awake: “Jeanne, are you awake?” she’d ask over and over with increasing volume. “Yes ma’am,” I’d eventually say. Upon her order, I’d sit up and look at her only to hear her say: “I just wanted to tell you to sleep as long as you want to.”

My granddaddy would feed me cornflakes then load me into his faded red-and-white Ford Fairlane and drive me around the county, pointing out every family’s homeplace. Back then, folks around town gave directions using family homeplaces as markers for turns or mileage. I still do.

Aunt Rene came into possession of the house when the elderly man she cared for died. Though she lived somewhere else for a period of time so Uncle Bill could be near his work, that white board house in the middle of town was Aunt Rene’s house for as long as I can remember. Forgetting to turn the stove off was bad enough, but when she began to dose them (her sister, Lucy, had come to live with her by then) their tablets several times a day because she couldn’t tell the difference between waking from a nap and waking from a night’s sleep, moving The Girls to an assisted living home became an undeniable, unavoidable necessity. Though she was less than thrilled with her change of address, Aunt Rene eventually settled in, flirting with the single men and finding a bigger pocketbook to hold her frequent Bingo winnings. She was quite the social butterfly, that one.

Shortly after the move, Aunt Rene began to collect napkins. We’d go out to eat at a restaurant, and while we paid the bill, she’d open that big ole’ pocketbook of hers and empty the napkin holder into it, never taking the holder itself, mind you, only its contents. I gave her packages of napkins purchased at restaurant supply stores in hopes of quelling her sticky fingers, but it simply was not the same.

She also became an avid collector of cardboard boxes – empty cardboard boxes, thank goodness – availability taking precedence over size. “You just never know when you might need a good empty box,” she’d tell me in what I declare was a tone of pride in her voice when I asked about the growing mountain of boxes in the corner of her room beside the bed. About once a week (sometimes twice, depending), Mother and/or I would go by rid her room of most of her stash, always respectfully leaving a few behind.

It was actually a rather endearing (if frustrating at times) behavior. Though she never gave us more of an answer than the standard you-just-never-know answer, I ‘spect those boxes were a throwback to times in her past when, from what I hear, she could fit everything she owned into a small cardboard box and still have room left over. And I ‘spect they represented the future. Though she quit talking to us about it, I’m quite sure the hope of one day filling those boxes with her earthly belongings and moving back to her home never completely left her. And every now and then when I think about Aunt Rene and her boxes, I imagine that maybe those boxes made her feel in control of her life somehow, if for no other reason than she and she alone would decide what to put inside them.

I think about Aunt Rene when I remember how as an undergraduate student, I transformed empty boxes into nightstands and coffee tables through the magic of paint, tape, glue, and old magazines. I think about her when I fill boxes with things I just can’t yet let go of, telling myself “The children will want this one day.” I think about her as I poke around in search of boxes to hold my various projects, boxes as creative containers that will keep visual clutter to a minimum while making it easy to start and stop without having to pull everything out or put everything up. It is a throwback to the days when to save time and conserve mental capacity, I had a tote bag for every organization I was affiliated with, filled with what I needed for that particular group, a way to grab and go. “What in the sam hill are you going to do with that?” my husband asks as I pick up an old hat box at the thrift shop. “Well,” I tell him as I continue to survey and assess, “you just never know when you might need a good empty box.”

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