Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
I Smell Bees
[The prompt this week for my writing group is “I smell _____, and I am.” This is my go at it.]
I smell bees.
It is August. The grass in our yard is yellow, burned by the sun. Everything is dry, brittle. I would water the lawn but my father says it is a waste of money. He knows about money and there not being enough of it which is why he runs his dime store during the day and sells televisions out of the trunk of his car at night. My mother reminds me that I need to mow the lawn. Mowing seems ridiculous when the grass is so stunted by heat but there are green patches under the trees. That must be what she thinks needs mowing.
I can’t tell if I smell bees or heat or the remnants of yesterday’s oil treatment on the dirt road in front of our house. They oil the road so the dust doesn’t blow around but the oil is foul and messy. It lies in pools near our mailbox. I reach around the wooden post to open the metal door. Inside is a postcard from my sister in California. There is a picture of palm trees and fancy cars. “You should come visit! It’s great here!” But I am twelve and not going anywhere. I have to mow the lawn.
The lawnmower is big and green and filled with clots of grass from the last time I mowed. I try to pull the old clumps of grass off the blades but they’re stuck like glue. I wonder if the blades will still cut the grass or just pat it real hard and leave it all standing. Don’t the blades need to be sharp? Or doesn’t it matter? It doesn’t matter. It’s just the mowing that matters. The roar of the lawnmower has to reach my mom on the davenport. I’m not one hundred percent sure that’s where she is at this moment but I’d bet big money on it. She is in depression mode, lying motionless, her face to the wall. When I asked her if she was okay, well, that was when she reminded me to mow the lawn.
I wind the rope around the lawnmower’s starter and pull. Hard. I wind it again and pull again, this time with two hands. I do this ten more times. The lawnmower sputters but doesn’t turn over. When I try to turn the lawnmower over, the metal burns my hand. I leave the lawnmower lying on its side and go sit in the breezeway. My face is red, I can feel it, and the sweat is dripping in my eyes. I want to go in the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and stand there, maybe get a tray of ice cubes out and dump them in my shirt.
The bee smell gets stronger. Hotter. Thicker. I can hear the sounds of heat but maybe it’s crickets or heat bugs or some other creature. Not bees. Bees don’t say anything, I don’t think. It’s just my imagination or a wish. That I could be a person who could sniff out weather and birds and insects of all kinds. I look at the lawnmower laying on its side on the yellow grass and I decide to climb a tree.
It is my favorite tree. It has a split in the branches about halfway up where I can sit and watch things, like cars going back and forth on the oily road. Not today, but sometimes I take a book up in the tree. Today, I just sit. It is green and shady, and I see the grass below the tree is long and needs mowing.
______________________
Photo by Damien TUPINIER on Unsplash
Not Everyone is Looking: Advice to My Teenage Self
Not everyone is looking at you or judging you or thinking that you are anything other than what you actually are. People have their own lives. They are not spending their time dwelling on your shortcomings.
Or wondering why your tennis shoes are cheap and your socks off-brand. They aren’t keeping track that you wear your favorite matching teal skirt and sweater once every week or that your rotation of what you consider to be outfits fit for school looks like the discount rack at Arlen’s. They shop there, too. They just don’t tell you.
You really need to stop thinking everybody else is rich. They’re not. And if they were, it wouldn’t matter.
The things that make you so indescribably uncomfortable aren’t things that anyone else notices. You are making these things up in your head and then using them as excuses to hang back.
You could’ve been a cheerleader. You just lost your nerve.
I’m really sorry to heap humiliation on you but, seriously, you need to confront your role in making yourself feel like an outsider in high school. Nobody put that on you. You put it on yourself.
That’s pretty rough, I know. Uncharitable.
But nothing’s gained by deciding that the other kids in high school make you feel self-conscious or any other kind of way. They bustle their way down the hall, carrying too much, and dropping books just like you. They wear the wrong socks and forget their locker combinations. Their best friends ditch them for hipper people, and they can’t climb the rope in gym class.
Lucky you have one teacher who thinks you’re super smart and weird that it would be your typing teacher. After all, what kind of person goes to college to teach typing? And what kind of serious student goes to typing class unless that’s what they’ve planned for themselves – lifetime of typing. It was right of your father to insist that you learn to type, after all, like he said, if you can type you can always earn a living. It turned out to be true.
This is my advice, young Jan. You are the definer of yourself, not other people. You aren’t a reflection of other people’s opinions.
You shine on your own.
____________________
Originally published in 2022
Oh, So Talented, Aren’t We All?
My talent is catastrophizing. For example, every time I go over the Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee, I envision my car flipping over the guard rail into the water and knowing that the power windows probably wouldn’t work under water. I watched a video once that said to just take a crowbar and bang out the rear window. But my crowbar (if I even have one) is in the trunk. Who carries a crowbar in the front seat? And could I even hit the window hard enough to break it? And then what? Cuts, no doubt. A lot of cuts.
Another talent, just now emerging at a later age, is striking up conversations with strangers. The only place I don’t like doing this is the dog park since I’m all about my dogs and calling my reps on 5Calls. Otherwise, being sociable has become my new thing. Chatting and joking and carrying on. It’s wild.
Speaking of talent, the Artemis II crew. Talent, competence, humor, and grace sent to us by some weird happenstance to lift us up at this frightful, fearsome time in our country and on the planet. We’re going to be happy, grateful, and really sad when they splash down tonight. Man, it has been a long time between heroes.
I’m publishing a chapbook of 67 very short stories. It’s called Snippets. I’m doing this to celebrate my upcoming birthday. It’s not so easy to organize a chapbook – there’s a lot of arranging and pagination that I hadn’t thought about which is why it was a gift from above to have my very experienced and quite talented artist friend offer to figure it out for me.
And then, there is the remarkable talent of cats to own whatever space they occupy with authority and complete abandon. Here is Herc in repose after all the hubbub and commentary of the Artemis II splash down, his reclamation of attention and affection complete.
Leeches, Bows, and the Shedding of Drudgery
One of the things I love most about my life right now is that I pay someone else to clean my bathroom.
The toilet. The grout. The shower door. Most of all, the shower door. I’ve stopped doing internet research on new clever, multi-ingredient strategies for cleaning the glass shower door. I boxed up the ten thousand bottles of dangerous cleaning concoctions and hidden them away, for what purpose, I’m not sure. I guess in case I run out of money to pay someone else to clean my bathroom.
This was a long time coming. First, there had to be a decades’ long war between my desperate longing for people to clean not just my bathroom but my whole house and my deep belief that one should be able to tend one’s own house without help. It seemed elitist to have a cleaning service. Frivolous.
It’s not. It’s delicious. I love it so much. Today, I came back after the cleaners had left and one of them had made a bow on the stove door.
So, what’s the point of this post? As we say in our writing group, ‘what is this about?’
Shedding drudgery. Not shedding work. I like work. I even like heavy work – like doing the spring clean-up outside. Drudgery is like Mr. Allnut being covered in leeches and then getting back into the leech-infested water to pull the African Queen through the hideous weeds of the Ulonga River. That’s how it was for me cleaning my shower. I’d have to mentally prepare for days. It was sick.
No more. I have shed that drudgery. Cut it loose. Made it a memory.
And now I have all sorts of free time to write about drudgeries I have lost. Meanwhile, there is the bow on the stove door.
How I Hope It Happens
When it comes, if it comes, the twelfth time I put my car keys in the freezer, leave the house wearing a towel on my head, wonder what rain is made of, I hope it will be my daughter who tells me I have lost my mind, that I am ‘off’ in a new way, a pathological way, not the usual, and I hope she tells me while we are laughing so hard that we can barely breathe, and that after she tells me we link arms and go have coffee someplace with a view of the ocean.
____________________
Photo by Lesli Whitecotton on Unsplash
100 Word Story: Soft Feet
“My birthday was on Easter once when I was a little girl.”
“I know. You’ve told that story before.”
“It’s a good story to tell, so you should just listen again. Be a nice person.”
“Fine. Tell me.”
“I was very little and we lived in Hastings. My mother was very sad because her sister Marjorie had died. The night of the phone call, my father cried at the dinner table and my mother stopped speaking. We tiptoed during the day and slept holding our breath. On Easter, my mother slipped into my room before dawn holding three chocolate eggs.”
____________
Originally published in 2022. A story about my beloved mother and Easter.
There was a Sale on Clouds
A friend once told me that the average person thinks about replacing their pillow for seven years before they actually do it. It seemed like a factual thing, something he’d read in a scholarly journal. He wasn’t just wisecracking. Still, seven years equivocating about new pillows seemed excessive to me.
I bought four pillows today. They are so big and puffy that I couldn’t keep them stuffed in the too-small bags the store gave me and so I dropped a pillow first in the parking lot and then on the sidewalk. I was also carrying a giant new comforter at the time.
Anyway, about the lead-up to the pillows. I have been thinking about the deep inadequacy of my pillows for a long time. They are flat and lifeless. I try to bunch them up so they have more heft, but they wilt. My pillows wilt. I’ve endured this situation for a very long time, maybe not seven years but possibly. Time flies when you’re my age.
A few days ago we stayed overnight at a nice hotel. The pillows were extremely pillowy. They were like the clouds you drew as a kid with the whitest crayon in the box right after you drew the sun in the corner of the paper and colored it the best yellow. The hotel pillows were that perfect.
I asked my husband the other morning, “Don’t you think we need new pillows?” as if we had to have a unanimous vote on this major investment. “No,” he said, “My pillows are fine.” He would say this if they were the consistency of a worn sock.
Because he said his own pillows were fine, I could have bought new pillows just for myself. But that seemed mean-spirited, like having him continue to sleep on his worn sock-like pillows was just desserts for his tolerance of inadequate pillows. Besides yesterday was his birthday.
We are very pillowy around here and I have only myself to thank.
Keeping Track is a Super Power
Chaos is a strategy.
It worked for my teenage kids. Everything everywhere all at once. Except back then, we’d say, “There’s always something.” Or “There’s no rest for the wicked.”
So, here we are in Milwaukee. It’s pouring rain. This morning’s news told us that the head of the local Islamic Society was detained by ten ICE agents at his home. He is a legal U.S. resident; his wife and children are U.S. citizens. He has been in this country thirty years, runs a business, and is the elected leader of the Islamic Society. He has also been very vocal in his criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Community leaders, elected officials and those involved in immigration advocacy feel that this man’s detention is the result of the exercise of his right to free speech. Right now, he is in an ICE detention facility in another state. A cadre of lawyers is gearing up; a community leaders’ press conference is scheduled for 4:00 p.m.
I’m going to have to make a new sign for Saturday.
The signs are stacking up in my trunk. Are we protesting about No Kings or Protect Social Security or No Cuts to NPR or Remember Renee Good and Alex Pretti or Voting Rights or No War or Abortion Rights or ICE OUT or Release the Epstein Files or Hands Off the Universities or Free Liam or Protect Birthright Citizenship or Save Ukraine or Release the Islamic Society Leader?
It truly is everything everywhere all at once. And its intended or unintended consequence is to make our markers run out of ink and us run out of gas. And make us so used to the craziness and injustice that we barely notice it anymore. Oh yeah, another dude got picked up for no apparent reason and disappeared into the black hole that seems to be the ICE detention system. Oh well.
I’ve learned so much from this past year. How it happens. That’s the biggest thing.
Keeping track of all this and not losing our minds – that’s our super power. Hang on.
_______________________
Photo by Soheb Zaidi on Unsplash
Back Porch Meditation with Coffee and Dogs
I go downstairs and let the dogs out. I watch Durant take a giant leap off the back porch and run to the back fence. Tempest picks her way down the stairs as if she’s wearing heels and a pencil skirt.
I make a pot of coffee and then I portion out the dogs’ breakfast into two bowls. I take the two bowls out to the porch where the two dogs are pacing. Durant looks partly crazy at this point. I put his bowl down first, artfully sliding it across the porch floor so his intense energy doesn’t accidentally sever one of my fingers. Tempest’s bowl is set before her as if it is cucumber soup in a china bowl.
Once the coffee is done, my husband and I sit on the back porch. This happens if the temperature is above, say, forty or so, maybe thirty-five, depending on the wind. I put on a coat over my pajamas and robe and my husband, already in a very old but thick robe, brings a blanket and we sit in our ancient porch chairs, drink our coffee, and pet our dogs.
We also take note of the birds. We talk and laugh. The conversation is fractured and often funny, mostly because at this point in the day, I can’t hear because I’ve not yet put on my hearing equipment. My husband uses his own version of sign language to talk to me, often spelling out words, letter by letter, in the air. When we are tired of this and have finished our first cup of coffee, we go inside, get more coffee and go upstairs to read the paper.
There are no pictures of all this because the back porch is a no phone zone. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
Naming Rights in the By and By
My name is a married name and not even the current marriage’s married name. My name harkens from a marriage that ended decades ago. Never mind that my name is a borrowed name, long overdue, what would I like it put on after I’m gone is the question.
I’m from Detroit, so maybe a car? A new edition Thunderbird, something very sleek and low to the ground. Thinking of the guy at the gas pump who, when I rolled up next to him in my 2005 Thunderbird, told me my car moved like a shark through still water. He was awed. I liked that. So, yes, maybe a car.
I’m from Hastings, so maybe one of the ponds at the Fish Hatchery? We went ice skating there in the fifties – my brother, sister, and I – while our mom sat in the car waiting. My brother speared frogs there. He brought them home in a bag and my mother cooked their legs which was wild because the legs danced in the iron frying pan. I can see it now.
I’m from Milwaukee, so a fallen tree along Lincoln Memorial Drive? A few years ago, somebody painted a tree lying on the hillside a deep, profound red. It wasn’t spray-painted. It was painted by hand. You could tell that even from the road – the color was so thick and purposeful. Dead trees stay on the hillside until they rot into the earth so there’s a permanence there that might not exist with a car or a pond, for that matter, global warming being what it is.
Just thinking about it – having this visible legacy in the world is, yes, a true tonic for the soul.
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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