Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Snippets in a Bowl of Marbles
I put together sixty-seven of my 100-word stories into a chapbook called Snippets.
A graphic artist whom I’ve known for close to fifty years created the cover and then carefully laid out the stories. This is harder than one might think because of how a chapbook is constructed. It takes skill. I know this because I tried laying it out and it made me crazy.
The idea of the chapbook was to print it and give it away. So, I ordered 100 copies and I’ve been giving them to people I like – friends, family, people in my writing groups. If recipients weren’t standing directly in front of me, I mailed them copies. I liked this. It felt like sending things for Christmas. Real things – not gift cards or presents in big fabric bags from Amazon.
I gave a copy to each of my children including the daughter who passed away in June. She remarked on one story having to do with Nicaragua, “Adoption,” page 32, asking if it was about when I came to Nicaragua to bring her back to America. It was. She didn’t say anything else about the story, whether she liked it or not, but I noticed that when the nurse asked her to pack up her less essential things prior to a move to ICU, she put Snippets in the grocery bag that also had a small plant I’d given her that had wilted, earrings and a beaded purse that a friend had brought (I could never figure out why) and several self-help books, I guess because visitors thought being quite ill in a hospital is a good time for reflection.
She kept other books. Oh well.
I could make something of that. In the giant bowl of marbles that is the aftermath of a child’s death, everything can have meaning. I think of that when I look at the small stack of chapbooks on my desk. How I gave one to my daughter and she gave it back. Maybe it was for safekeeping, she didn’t say.
There’s no way of knowing. There’s no need to know. I just stir up the marbles on move on.
Night Swim: A Story
[It’s been a night swim these past few months after our daughter’s death, but now I’m finding the raft. It’s good.]
She’d dreamt of swimming across the lake a thousand times. The dreams were always the same. There was a full moon that shone on the water like a spotlight, soft, though, sweet and rolling with the waves. She saw herself swimming, always in a red suit, the skin on her back and arms perfectly white, alabaster as if she was a statue come to life. Her stroke was smooth with a two-beat kick, her body rolling side to side like she’d been taught in high school. Her swimming was languid in her dream and endless. She swam forever and it was beautiful.
After a night of dreaming, she sat in a canvas chair under a tree. The sun was up but just barely. The coffee from the old percolator was too hot to drink so she held the mug in her hands for a good long while, contemplating the distance to the other side of the lake. Was it a mile? Two miles? She could see children playing on the dock across the lake. They stayed the summer in the blue cottage. A raft bobbed some distance from their dock. She could swim there, she thought, but it would have to be at night.
She was afraid. Not of the water. Not of swimming. But of the dark. She had never swum in the dark – not in a pool, or the ocean, or a lake. She decided to set out that night, to make the dream real. To swim in the dark because if she did, if she swam to the raft across the lake, she could do anything.
Dinner was a hot dog and a hard boiled egg. She drank water and a half a bottle of Gatorade and then went inside in tiny cabin to put on her swimsuit, her only suit, a black one. The black would blend into the water. She would be seamless and smooth and lovely, like her dream.
She had fished with her father in this lake. Together, they’d trolled the edge of the bass beds in an old rowboat but got their biggest catches in the open water. Northern pike struck hard on their lines, the struggles sometimes went on for long minutes. Her father watched her reeling and pulling and never offered to help until the pike was next to the boat. Then he would scoop up the fish with his green net, dumping it slowly at her feet. Because of how long it took to land the fish, she would have to use pliers to get the hook out of its mouth. Her father showed her how to put her foot on the fish’s body and then reach in and twist. It took a long time but her father waited for her, his hand on the tiller, never moving except to light his cigar.
She rubbed her face thinking of the northern pike and their angry-looking jaws. Do they swim at night or sleep? What do fish do in the dark?
It was dark, very dark when she waded into the water. She felt minnows fluttering around her ankles. She knew those minnows. She’d held them in her hands when she sat in the water, sunning in the afternoon. They were tiny and silver and so perfect she’d thought of swallowing one just to feel it glide down her throat. Minnows were like silver, a necklace come undone. She still had her father’s minnow bucket in the corner of her kitchen.
Wading in, knee deep and then thigh deep and then letting go of the earth to float in the water seemed final somehow, like these could be her last steps in this life and she was giving herself over to timelessness, all of her memories of the lake floating with her. She began to swim. She kicked and stroked and breathed in a rhythm she’d known forever. Rolling with her breathing, stretching out as far as she could, watching the moon come out from behind the clouds.
The weeds wrapped around her right leg first and then her left. She’d known the weeds were there, a patch of them bordering the edge of the lake right before the drop-off. She knew that from fishing, looking over the edge and seeing the tall waving stalks give way to a deep so deep, she couldn’t see the bottom. She kicked and pulled, reaching down with her hands to pull the weeds off her legs and throw them in the distance. She shuddered, thinking about it, how easy it might be to sink or for a pike to find her wriggling. Turning back would be okay, no one would know one way or the other. She could make coffee and sit in the dark.
By then, the moon was pouring its light on the water. As in her dream, the light folded out in front of her, her strokes slicing the water like knives, clean and even, no splash. This is what she had wanted. This swim in this darkness and this light. The night was still except for her quiet breathing and fine drops of water falling from her silver hands. She swam this perfect way across the lake.
The raft had a metal ladder. She held on to the lowest rung, her legs hanging, resting, her breathing quiet like a thief. Slowly, she climbed on to the raft and then laid down on the rough wooden planks. The raft was very old but sturdy and she felt safe and comfortable lying there, so much that she fell asleep, only waking when the moon had disappeared back behind the clouds and the wind had picked up. She was cold.
She didn’t think about getting back to her cabin. It didn’t matter to her. She sat with her arms wrapped around her legs and waited for the sun to come up.
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Photo by Jaunathan Gagnon on Unsplash
Originally published in July 2024
Nola at the Splash Pad
Nola sat down on the next bench. She was smoking a long cigarette, maybe a Benson & Hedges like I used to smoke.
She looked over at me. “How old are you?” I stood up to get closer. She asked her question again, “How old are you?”
“Pretty,” I joked except she didn’t get it, asking her question a third time. I told her my age. She told me hers. I told her she was just a kid. She rolled her eyes and took a long drag. It looked dreamy, that drag, even though she seemed steamed about something. Not my age or me, but something else.
She pointed over at the slide. “That’s my great grandchild.” He was sliding down face first, landing inches away from my granddaughter who was playing dead at the bottom of the slide. Another girl walked over and put her hand on my granddaughter’s chest to ‘feel a heartbeat,’ declared her still living and they all laughed and ran to the top of the slide.
“My granddaughter lived with me a long time and then she had this boy and she just took off. And so now I’m raising this boy. I don’t want to raise any more kids.”
She scanned the couple dozen kids playing in the water and the nearby playground looking for one that might be attached to me. There weren’t any other white people there – not adults, nor kids. All Black except one little Hispanic girl and her Anglo grandmother.
“That’s my granddaughter,” pointing to the girl playing dead again. I thought about it a minute and then I said, “Her mom died a few months ago. So now she lives with us.”
Nola looked startled. “Your daughter died?” And I could see her calculus – was having a daughter die worse than having a granddaughter run off and leaving her son for you to raise?
“I have to go,” Nola said, looking around for her great grandson. She dashed off even though the boy kept playing with his new Hispanic friend. She didn’t say goodbye and I didn’t see where she went.
I just sat back down on the bench and listened to all the kids laughing.
Checking Worries Off My List
My daughter dying in a foreign country.
I’m free from this worry because she died here – in the United States instead of in Nicaragua where she had been living. Could I be any more macabre?
This morning on the back porch, I said to my husband, “I don’t want people to feel sorry for us.” He took a sip of coffee, put the cup down on the porch table and said, “If they read your blog post last night, they’re going to feel sorry for you.”
I suppose. The price for public lamenting is catching all the “Oh poor you!” vibes let loose by your moaning. Oh well. I don’t know what I’m doing with this ‘getting over it’ business. I do recall a friend who lost two of her children and who found a million reasons to avoid my consoling her. I finally, in my ignorant determination, went to her house with deli sandwiches and ice cream. She eschewed the sandwiches but picked a bit at the ice cream. She told me things that made me so weak I could eat neither a sandwich nor the ice cream. The sorrow was like acid rain and she knew it. She could see it dripping on my innocent well-meaning self.
Like my friend, I don’t want anyone bringing me sandwiches and ice cream. I don’t want anyone to ask me how I am doing or how my granddaughter is doing. We’re all fine, I’ll say. I want to maneuver through the world in a bubble of my own construction. There’s only one person I trust with my puzzling and opining and second guessing and that’s the person I’ve been married to for forty-two years. We meet on the back porch and sort things out and then revisit and rediscuss and then when something has been chewed to death, we put it aside and watch the squirrels hop on the fence like they think we can’t see them.
I am glad to be free of the worry of my daughter dying in a foreign country. It’s one less thing we have to talk about on the back porch.
Today at the Playground and Afterward: Grief Tunes
After a great sand-filled, barefoot, pants wet from the rain on the slide visit to the playground, my granddaughter hurt her finger somehow getting into the car. She told me her finger was broken and she started to cry. We drove out of the playground parking lot. She cried louder.
We got on the main drag to go home. By then, she was wanting her mommy, calling for her mommy in the most plaintive, lamenting way. And then more tears. Genuine tears, heartache tears, like it had come upon her all at once that she had lost her mom. Her mom had died. She says that matter-of-factly to people, “My mom died.” It is a thing that has happened.
But the calling out for her mommy, the lamenting, is something else altogether. It happens in private with just me and her grandpa. It is a four-year-old’s grief.
We come home and go in the kitchen. She pulls out the silverware drawer and sits underneath. She says the lights are too bright, so I turn them off and turn on the softer light over the sink. She watches while I peel sweet potatoes. The tears are still coming but she isn’t sobbing. She is just saying “I want my mommy.”
I hug her and tell her I am sorry that her mommy is gone. That we miss her, too. And I know that to be true because I went through the second drawer of my desk today and I found the one of the pictures of her mom that I had been looking for to display at her memorial service, the one with her in her high school graduation gown, her head buried in her dad’s shoulder and her dad looking so goofy and proud. It broke my heart.
Whose grief is whose?
I know this much. My granddaughter’s grief has taken my mind off my own. The need to surround her and protect her has superseded any grief or loss I let myself feel. But all of this is getting harder to stow away.
In the drawer I found a tiny Little Mermaid figurine. My granddaughter saw the figurine on my desk and asked to take her in a bath. She asked if her mom played with that Little Mermaid and I said maybe because I couldn’t remember but probably yes. I don’t remember all the things. There is an avalanche heading toward me and I have nothing on but shorts and an old t-shirt.
That is what I know about grief right now. Nothing.
Writing Bleak
(I wrote this on August 5, 2017. Nine years later, I’m in a different spot about death and grieving. I’ll write about that later today. Two posts on the same day. Wild.)
The problem with writing when you’re anxious or a little depressed is that everything ends up being about death – your own death, your spouse’s, your kids’, your dogs’, the death of the great American city, Death Be Not Proud, you get the idea. It’s depressing.
I considered submitting something for an essay contest. The topic was ‘the happiest day of your life.’ Oddly, I remember the happiest day of my life but it lacks drama and angst so I don’t think I could write convincingly about it.
My Happiest Day
It was a hot summer day on Lake Superior. All of our children were staying with us in our old house on the beach. I’d reluctantly come in from swimming to start dinner and, as I was chopping onions, my younger son ran into the house yelling, “Mom, why did you leave? Come back swimming.” And I put down my knife and walked back out to the beach into the water and swam along the shore with him and the other kids and our dog until the sun almost set and my husband was waving to us from the porch, “It’s time to come in for dinner.” And when I came in, Kathy Mattea was singing “Love Travels” on the stereo.
I found myself wishing the prompt was saddest day or most regrettable day. I want to start a post talking about how cocktail hour seems to be starting earlier every afternoon and how investing in Two-Buck Chuck has been my frugal move of the month. But even with all my little snarls of turmoil, I am a Strawberry Shortcake in the world of agony writing. I am nobody’s victim except, occasionally, my own. I can’t hold a candle to true despair. Mine is hobby suffering. It’s temporal and temporary.
I have friends who are experts at suffering. They allude to the physicality of it, the aches and pains, the lack of appetite. “Why are you not hungry?” I ask. “Because I am grieving,” comes the incredulous response. Me? I am not grieving. I have avoided grieving. But I am afraid of grieving and that itself is putting me in this strange, onion-like place. There are layers to all of this and I don’t want to peel any of them away.
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Photo by Tobias Macha on Unsplash
The Undocumented Bumble Bee Kite
I am trying to live an undocumented life but it is very difficult when one’s practice is to document everything.
This afternoon, flying a bumblebee kite, I thought about how I ought to take a picture of the kite, more specifically the string running from my hand to the bumblebee’s chest. That line, that string against a completely blue sky was the perfect shot so I looked around for my husband to ask him to get my phone because part of my undocumented effort is to quit carrying my phone in my pocket all the time.
But he’d gone inside after watching the beginning of the kiting, if that’s what they call it, and I knew he was probably napping. It was a July afternoon on vacation, after all, what else would he be doing? It wasn’t even worth yelling, the wind would drown out all but the shrillest, most terrifying scream and I wasn’t ready to go to such lengths just to take a picture.
Besides, I thought, one can remember things. I remember that when we were kids, my brother, who was nine years older than me, could make a kite out of newspaper and balsa wood. Having newspaper laying about seems common but why we had a ready supply of balsa wood I couldn’t tell you. My folks were handy, though, so they had stuff like vast assortments of nails and screws, tools of all sorts, tiny screwdrivers, vices that would hold thing still, my dad could fix a toaster and tie a fly, my mother turned dresses into curtains and vice versa, all of which goes by saying, of course, we would have balsa wood and probably enough lumber to make a rowboat if the need arose.
So my brother would make a kite, I can see him doing this in my mind’s eye, the newspaper spread out on the kitchen floor and then when the kite was done he’d tear up old cloth to make the tail. “It needs more tail,” he would say, and then outside when we tried to fly it, he’d say it again, “It needs more tail.” Then flying a kite seemed like something I would never be qualified to do, at least not without my brother.
I don’t have a picture of my brother making a kite or flying one. I have almost no pictures of my brother, even though for many years he was my great defender and caretaker. He wasn’t making the kite for himself, he made it for me. That’s what I remember.
So I flew the bumblebee kite today with my 15-year old granddaughter and 6-year old twin grandsons. Then my granddaughter put together a second kite, a Little Mermaid kite, and we took turns flying both kites but for long stretches of time I flew the bumblebee kite by myself, the wind blowing hard off Lake Superior and the kite flying as high as its string would take it. I am so lucky, I thought. I am so lucky to fly this kite. I don’t need a picture to remember my great luck.
But as it happens, there was a picture taken and so I share it here with you.
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Originally published in 2019
Back Porch Barbie: Entry #3
Back Porch Barbie is mightily irked.
Some foul creature has been nibbling on the plant I have been trying to bring back from the dead. (So apropos.)
It’s obvious that the foul creature is one of the squirrels that have made our backyard their conquered land. I’d know those teeth marks anywhere.
I read somewhere that squirrels hate peppermint. So I went to the famous Outpost Co-op to buy peppermint oil which I found almost right away although I’ve only been in the store once before despite my progressive politics. I then dotted the porch with peppermint oil, some I dabbed on cotton balls, some I dripped on the fence posts. It seemed to have been working until this morning where it became obvious that the squirrels had adaptive capabilities I lack. They outflanked me. It’s happened before.
Back Porch Barbie is thinking about changing her whole persona. She wants khaki pants and a matching shirt with a tiny insignia saying something like Porch Patrol or Squirrel Fighter. She’s done with the clunky earrings and the three-inch heels. And the hair.
She’s searching for meaning. Purpose.
Who could blame her?
We are sympatico, me and BPB.
Jumbled is What’s for Dinner
I know a few people who’ve lost their adult children.
But I only know one who became a guardian of a very young child as a result. And I saw her yesterday in a coffee shop where I was meeting with a colleague about older adult issues. Ours was the longest hug.
No one understands this crazy experience except someone who has been there. Oh, people are sympathetic – either about losing our daughter or about taking on responsibility for a four-year-old – but they can’t fathom how crazy all this is. Or how history is repeating itself in her little face (she looks so much like her mother) and her love of Barbies. When her mother came to us when she was seven, someone dropped off a dozen Barbies with bins full of clothes on our front porch. The Barbies were everywhere.
When I thought about writing tonight’s post, the phrase “Your body language screams self-pity” kept coming up. I’ve noticed how I walk with my head down and shoulders slumped as if the cosmos has dealt me a terrible blow – me, unique me, singled out me, me alone, me the poor mother, me the disheartened grandmother, me who plans to teach her four-year-old granddaughter how to properly wash a car.
Before one of her many heart surgeries, my grown-up daughter came to my room in the early morning to tell me she was afraid. I moved over and made room for her in our bed and, in a rare relaxing and letting go of everything, she made room for my comforting her. This morning, just before the sun came up, her daughter tapped me on the arm and I opened the quilt for her to slide in next to me, her little arm over mine.
I’m jumbled. But it’s not my job to be coherent and collected, to write the best essay, to flow, as they say, hang together. No. It’s just my job to stay afloat, do what’s next. Whatever that is.
I Think This is What Grief Looks Like
What are the ten thousand things you’ve done wrong?
Is there a list? Did you keep a list? It’s not too late to compile.
You could leave room for more, the list can be open-ended, just set another place at the table.
Runners wear weighted vests.
They do it to make a hard thing harder, punish themselves like monks whipping their own bare backs with branches
in order to call back their sins, free themselves from regret, show they are sorry. Runners love the heaviness, how the weight makes them sweat, how passers-by nod in admiration.
It is a bad idea to write when one is in a black mood.
People will think they need to call you and inquire. They won’t understand inquiry is unwelcome, obtrusive, that it is burdensome to explain that dark times will pass, they always do, that you are too busy to talk because you are working on your list. It is very long and people are calling your name from the other room.
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
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