The Good, Hard Lessons

They say that everyone who comes into your life is there for a reason. If that’s true, there must have been a million reasons I needed to know Maureen (Reen the Bean, Reenie). I became conscious of her presence in my life around age 3 or 4, although she’d been there before that. We were next door neighbors in Omaha, Nebraska, and we would spend the next 60+ years moving in and out of each other’s lives. Through each phase of our friendship—even the times we drifted apart—Maureen and I learned together, and taught each other, crucial lessons about life, love, and enduring friendship.

My 8th birthday, kneeling, Maureen far right.

1. Communication. In one of my earliest memories of Maureen, whoever finished dinner first would go out on their front porch and give a loud a mourning dove call: oo-OO-oo! That meant you were done eating and ready to play again. Back then, in our neighborhood full of young families, you played outside except in the most brutal winter weather. Some of us went to school, we preschoolers played all day or had half-day kindergarten, then we all ate dinner with our families as fast as we could and got right back out there until the streetlights came on. I still sometimes do my mourning dove call in the back yard after dinner when no one’s around. 

2. Construction (and Vengeance). A mean woman named Lillian lived on the other side of Maureen. She yelled at us to stay out of her yard, and she wouldn’t let us play on her very nice swing set. So in an empty lot behind Lillian’s house, Maureen and I built an elaborate, multi-story, low-rent public housing complex for our Troll dolls. We used cinderblocks, bricks, rocks, dirt piles, trash, and anything we could drag over. We made matchbox & Kleenex beds, fabric scrap carpeting, and stick & Elmer’s glue furniture. Poor Lillian could only sit at her kitchen window, watching us and wringing her hands. And I won’t tell you about the time a team of resourceful small people made a secret formula of Clorox, Wishbone Italian salad dressing, and dish soap, and poured it on Lillian’s new rose bushes, meant to be a barrier between her yard and Maureen's. Hell hath no fury like spurned first-graders.

3. Sharing. Debbie Lechner lived behind us on the next street over. I remember her as the sweetest kid in the neighborhood. One time, I grabbed Debbie’s tennis shoes, ran home and put them in the milkbox on our porch (those were the days we still got daily milk deliveries from the “milkman”), and sat on the milkbox. She cried, but I was unrelenting. Her crime? She wanted to play with us, and I wanted Maureen all to myself. But Maureen patiently and kindly negotiated a truce, I gave up the shoes, and from then on, Debbie was often part of our band of renegades.

4. Fashion. When we were 12 or 13, back in the days when it was safe to do this, Maureen and I took the bus downtown to Brandeis department store. Brandeis had four stories, a soda fountain, a photo booth, escalators, and an elevator. We could have root beer floats, buy PEZ (my favorite back in those hippie days was “Flower Power” PEZ which tasted, maybe a little too much, like flowers), and ride the elevator up and down till we got kicked off. But on this occasion, we were on a mission: to buy our first bras (which neither of us needed). We had both worn white shirts—so the straps would show through, of course—and hit the photo booth for our “model” shots.

Our sophisticated, bra-wearing model shot.

Another photo booth glam shot.

5. Travel. When we were 18, Maureen and I each bought a Greyhound Bus “Ameripass.” For $99 back then, you could travel on Greyhound on any of their routes in the contiguous U.S. for two weeks, getting on and off anywhere, any time, as many times as you wanted. So we went from Omaha, to Lincoln, to Denver, to Los Angeles, to San Fransisco, and on up the coast to Vancouver BC, then back home. We often slept on the bus by night (so we wouldn’t have to pay for motels) and toured different cities by day. We stopped in Lincoln to attend the Burt Hall banquet with friends at Nebraska Wesleyan. I had my Ovation guitar along, and we sometimes sang for our supper (usually grilled cheese or pie). We went to Huntington Beach. At Disneyland, we made 8 mm movies—I still have those reels somewhere, and interestingly, they’re all shots of cute guys, not us or the park. We got a motel room once or twice so we could shower. We sat on the library steps at UC Berkeley, where a young man told us, “I dreamed you last night.” We cooked dinner in San Fran for a friend’s brother—spaghetti…always spaghetti.

Greyhound depot, a bit too early.

Dressing up for the Burt Hall Banquet.

We're all Bozos on this bus.

Denver

Meetup in Denver with Maureen's dad.

The ocean at last - Huntington Beach.

Welcome to the hotel California.

Long overdue showers.

6. Real (Almost) Adulthood. When we got back from our epic bus trip, Maureen and I rented a house together in Lincoln (except for family and husbands, Maureen is the only roommate I’ve ever had). I enrolled at Nebraska Wesleyan (with a full-ride scholarship I would forfeit for dropping out less than a year later—it was the 70s…I was distracted), and Maureen enrolled at UNL. We had a tiny, cheap, one-bedroom house at the end of a street that dead-ended at a cemetery. I had seven cats to take care of (our mama cat, which I’m sure we couldn’t afford to properly vet, had five kittens). Maureen, the cats, and I all shared the house’s only bed. We both had jobs in addition to school. We paid the bills. We bought groceries. We did laundry. We had friends over for dinner. I remember our diet consisted mainly of spaghetti with butter and salt (pre-Ramen days), Wonder Bread, and Grape Nuts. We mowed our lawn.

The Tucker Hotel

The Tucker Hotel

Our little house in Lincoln.

7. Religion. My friendship with Maureen sparked what would become my lifelong interest in (obsession with) religion and spirituality. I was the one kid in our family who went to Florence Presbyterian church with my grandma, with whom we lived off and on in the North Omaha historic “Tucker Hotel,” a 17-room house and former hotel that had been in my mom’s family since the 1800s. I sang in the choir and was confirmed. I went to Bible camp in the summer. Maureen’s family was Irish and Catholic, so she went to St. Philip Neri, half a block from the Presbyterian church. On many Sundays, I went to mass with Maureen, then she went to the Presbyterian service with me. In the Catholic church, I genuflected, blessed myself with holy water, and knew all the call & response passages. I adored the ritual. I made Maureen go to confession when she picked a flower in Forest Lawn cemetery with its “DO NOT PICK THE FLOWERS” signs. I even took communion until a horrified Father Meyer discovered I wasn’t Catholic.

8. The Village. Maureen’s mother (who I remember only as a blurry sort of gorgeous “movie star” presence) died when we were quite young, leaving Maureen and her 8 siblings to be raised by her dad, a wonderful, warm, larger-than-life man who worked for Union Pacific railroad. We learned almost from birth that the Village raised children: my mom and Maureen’s older sisters all mothered us both. We had dance parties to “Spooky” on the hi-fi or Shindig on the TV in her living room, with her dad as our audience. My grandma was constantly feeding and washing neighborhood children. All the adults kept track of us.

9. Tolerance and Forgiveness. When we were 19 and living in Lincoln, I took up with a folksinger, as one often did back then, and went with him and his folk duo partner on a three-week road trip to New Mexico. While I was gone, Maureen met a young Iranian man who invited her to dinner, then convinced her to join the Unification Church (called the “Moonies” back then after their founder, Rev. Sun Myung Moon), and she left for New York, where the church was headquartered. She let local church members pick through the house and take what they wanted—these were considered “donations” to the church—and she left the house untended. She eventually called my mother from the road (this was pre-cell-phone days, so she couldn’t get in touch with me). She told Mom that she had gone. My mom had to borrow a truck and go clear out what was left in the house. The cats, left in the house, had by then torn open a screen and disappeared.

I ended up marrying the folksinger and moving back to Omaha and the Tucker Hotel. We eventually had a son and a daughter. I didn’t hear from Maureen for several years, although I learned she had been one of 4,000 people married by Rev. Moon in Madison Square Garden. She married a French man she hadn’t known before the wedding. They eventually had three daughters.

I’ll admit I was pretty angry with Maureen for a good long while after she left—I had lost some things very dear to me in Maureen’s church “donations” and the untended house, like my cats (my male cat, Gandalf, was an Abyssinian and a gift from my then boyfriend, Dave), my grandmother’s antique wool carpet, china handed down to me by a great aunt, houseplants my grandmother had been growing for years and gave me when I moved into the house, including a 30-year-old crown of thorns I had named Barney.

But once the anger softened, I missed Maureen. Seeing her again and knowing she was okay became more important than my stuff. Maureen stopped by to visit when she finally came back to town for the first time since joining the church. We muddled our way through that first rocky reunion. We weren’t back on great footing, but it was a start. A few years later, she was back in Omaha visiting family again, and she drove up to South Dakota, where I was living by then with my new husband, my two little kids, and our new son. She brought her three adorable girls, toddlers then, and we had a happy, sweet visit. We were slowly finding our way through. 

Maureen and her beautiful daughters, Ivy the dog.

We met up a few times after that, whenever she was back in Omaha. I’d drive down from SoDak, and we’d meet up for coffee or lunch, or we’d visit each other’s families. By our last visit in 2022, seeing her was joyful, natural, and light again, with lots of laughs, hugs, goofing around, and wonderful conversations about spirituality, our shared history, and family.

Maureen and her sister Margaret.

10. Life & Death. In another of my earliest memories, we were maybe five or six, I was playing by myself in our basement, twirling around a support pole. I remember the feel of the pole in my hands. My dad came downstairs and told me that Maureen had been riding her bike down King St. (our two houses were at the very top of steep King St. hill) and had been hit by a car. She’d gone to the hospital in an ambulance to get checked out, but she was okay. I can still remember bursting into tears, yelling, “Maureen’s dead!” To me, “hit by a car” meant killed, and my dad must have been lying about her being okay. I didn’t calm down until Maureen came back home, and Mom took me next door to see for myself.

When Maureen and I were living together in Lincoln, we had a tiny aquarium. We were young and still just learning to be responsible, so it may not surprise you to learn that one day, we noticed our fish were floating. Neither of us had the stomach to fish them out (pun intended) and flush them, so we invited friends over for dinner (spaghetti) and sweet-talked them into disposing of the fish. We were learning about our own strengths and weaknesses—we gave away the fish tank. 

Most recently, Maureen was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that had spread to her lungs. She was still living in NY, and every fiber of my being wanted to hop on a plane and go. But Maureen didn’t want visitors beyond her daughters. She was determined to fight, and she didn’t want distractions, sadness, or pessimistic energy around while she was doing that, which I completely understand. In the end, her departure was too swift and everyone too stunned for me to get there in time. So like too many other times in the recent past, I’ve had to test my beliefs about life & death—Maureen is helping me learn even now.

There are people in our lives we may not see often enough, but on whom our equilibrium somehow depends. We just need to know they’re out there somewhere we can get to if need be. Maureen is one of those people in my life, and I’m trying hard to be at peace with her being out of my reach now. In the meantime, I’m so grateful for every single memory—our joyful last visit and the lifetime of happy, crazy, challenging, angry, stubborn, silly, informing and forming moments that came before that. I am who I am in part because Maureen, my fellow student in this incarnation, my patient teacher, my dear friend, is in my life still and always. Oo-OO-oo, Maureen...

Dear Jack Blizzard - is that all you've got?!?

You can’t live in South Dakota and not talk about the weather, especially this time of year. Jack Blizzard stomped across the state in the first week of the year, dumping about 15” of snow on us. Happy fecking New Year! 

We got that just about cleaned up when Jack threw another hissy fit, and this one was a real doozey. Another foot of snow at least, real temps that got down into the -20s, and wind chills that got as low as -48 here (colder in other parts of the state). There are little mountains of snow all around town and down the middles of streets – nowhere to put it all. It’s a balmy -3 right now, heading for a high of 13, which will feel like summer. We’re finally going to venture out for groceries today, wrapped up for our polar expedition in multiple layers of wool, fur, wicking nylon, Thinsulate, and more wool.

I’ve heard a number of people wonder aloud lately (including us), why do we live here? The honest answer is “because we’ve always lived here, and humans don’t really like change.” But another answer, for me, has to do with something I learned early on about poetry: Good poems play with contrast. Think about it. My favorite poems show me the contrast between dark/light, life/death, day/night, out there/in here. Similarly, one of the things I love best about winters here is that when spring comes (or even on bright sunny days like today, with temps above 0), the contrast is absolutely stunning.

Spring isn’t just the next season here, like I imagine it is in warm southern states. It’s a goll dern miracle. The sense of relief SoDakians feel on a suddenly-warm winter day or with the first signs of spring beats any mood-altering drug on the market. We’re positively giddy. We peel off layers and go right outside. We invent chores to stay out as long as we can stand it. We scrape gunk off birdfeeders. We stack empty flower pots in order of circumference. We make a new garage hanger for our 17 pairs of garden gloves. Did I go outside this morning and brush a foot of snow off my clamshell lawn chairs? Why, yes. Yes I did.

And I know I’ve said it before, but SoDakians, like the stalwart prairie stock from which many of us spring, are uniquely prepared to deal with Jack’s little tantrums. Here at the row, we’re dipping into our larder for those wonderful jars of canned summer – stewed tomatoes. Tomato soup, chili, spaghetti. We could probably live a month on tomatoes alone. There’s always a couple whole chickens and roasts in the freezer, along with bags of frozen veg, and plenty of noodles, beans, and grains in the pantry, so we could live another month on soups. We have wine, a good supply of coffee beans in the freezer (I order coffee in 5-pound bags), and we refilled all our old-people prescriptions before Jack rolled into town.

Winterfolk learn early to self-entertain, which retirement makes infinitely easier: I have a new poetry book, Hysterian, coming out this year, and I’m already well into the next. Then there are jigsaw puzzles, guitars & ukuleles, crossword puzzles, TV documentaries (I now know more about cephalopods, fungi communication, and the Branch Davidians and Heaven’s Gate than any human should), knitting, journals, and books books books. I unpacked my new set of Fluent Pet language buttons yesterday, because I’m pretty sure Pretzel has something to say about winter, too. (Check out What About Bunny for a dog who’s mastered the buttons.)

So bring it, Jack. You don’t scare us. In the time it’s taken me to write this post, the temp has already gone up to +2, and the wind chill’s only -16. I’m pretty sure the students at Little Town University are wearing shorts. And if we get a few groceries today, we’ll be good till mid-April.

FOOTNOTE: Here’s a link to the poem that gave Jack his name, at least for me. It’s from Australian poet S.K. Kelen, who spent some time here as a visiting professor, so he knows whereof he speaks:"Jack Blizzard" 

In the name of...

I’ll keep this short because honestly, I don’t know what to say. I’m heartsick and kind of paralyzed by the war in the Middle East. And it IS a war, not an action, occupation, resistance, self-defence, or whatever else they want to call it to “clean it up” or justify it. And the fact that RELIGION is the excuse at the root of this ongoing war (and so many others) makes me sick, and it moves me even further away from whatever respect I used to have for organized religion. Throw in the Indian boarding schools, Magdalene laundries, sexual predation by clergy, obscene wealth hoarding, and more, and my blood boils when I hear religious figures talk about righteousness or sin.

So I’m turning to poetry again, as a way to sort it out for myself, to slog through it, to respond somehow. This is a poem by Joseph Fasano that we should all post in our homes, on social media, everywhere…and we should read it EVERY. DAMN. DAY.

Words Whispered to a Child Under Siege

Joseph Fasano

No, we are not going to die.

The sounds you hear

knocking the windows and chipping the paint

from the ceiling, that is a game

the world is playing.

Our task is to crouch in the dark as long as we can

and count the beats of our own hearts.

Good. Like that. Lay your hand

on my heart and I’ll lay mine on yours.

Which one of us wins

is the one who loves the game the most

while it lasts.

Yes, it’s going to last.

You can use your ear instead of your hand.

Here, on my heart.

Why is is beating faster? For you. That’s all.

I always wanted you to be born

and so did the world.

No, those aren’t a stranger’s bootsteps in the house.

Yes. I’m here. We’re safe.

Remember chess? Remember

hide-and-seek?

The song your mother sang? Let’s sing that one.

She’s still with us, yes. But you have to sing

without making a sound. She’d like that.

Sing. Sing louder.

Those aren’t bootsteps.

Let me show you how I cried when you were born.

Those aren’t bootsteps.

Those aren’t sirens.

Those aren’t flames.

Close your eyes. Like chess. Like hide-and-seek.

When the game is done you get another life.

Cottage Industry

Our Little Town is bustling with activity! Kids of all ages are back in school, the squirrels are stashing walnuts as fast as they can drop from our tree, and in spite of a heat wave that’s been cooking us with temps above 100°, there’s that smell some mornings that signals autumn is on its way. And everyone knows autumn is the time of year when prairie people panic (don’t say that into a mic without a good windscreen). With the first whiff of cool northern air, we shift into overdrive; we stock the larder, smack the dust out of our parkas with a rug beater, darn our woolies, and prepare to hunker down.

Inis Meain shawl between Pretzel's unravelings.

Photo David Shaw: The Real Deal

Ray and I have been getting in some end-of-season kayaking, a chance to relax for a bit, paddle around a lake, and pretend the garden isn’t at that very moment busting out of its fence and heading for the neighbor’s cat. Feed me, Seymour.

I have three poetry manuscripts finished and out looking for publishing homes—it’s amazing what you can accomplish with TIME (retire as early as you possibly can). Ray’s been playing lots of summer gigs and continues to amaze me with his quiet (ironic for a drummer?), consistent excellence. But he still won’t play “Wipe Out” for me.

We’ve also gotten in quite a bit of domestic industry. I’m working on a crocheted Inis Meáin shawl, a traditional shawl worn layered over dresses in Ireland back in the day. Like the Fates who spin out the thread of life, our puppy Pretzel occasionally decides I’ve had my “allotment,” and he pulls my skein of yarn apart, weaves it throughout the house, and wraps it tightly around table legs. Reclaiming my yarn is a lot like a game of Twister.

Sun sugar cherries...LOTS of them.

Cherry tomato confit, of course!

Ray bought a used set of electronic drums and has been working to convert Mom’s room into a music parlor. We have the piano, drums, and a host of stringed instruments all in one place now. Mom would love that her space is filled with playing and singing.

Roasting...more...tomatoes...

We’ve lost whatever false sense of control we ever had about keeping up with our garden, but we’ve put up dozens of quarts of roasted tomatoes. We’ve eaten cucumbers and zucchini until we finally put a “FREE” table out front to “gift” our surplus. We froze gooseberries, pesto, basil, and tomato confit. We dried parsley, basil, and dill. We have a lug of peaches on deck for processing. And with this week’s heat, we’re far from done.

Someone's been in the peaches...

I can’t quite explain my joy at seeing the pantry full of home-canned bounty. We live a mile or two from the Corporate Monster store, yet we stockpile tomatoes like they’ll soon have to buoy us through an apocalypse, like we know they’ll be currency if we need to trade for beaver castor for our steel conibear traps (which we don’t have).

Good year for our gooseberry bushes!

Gooseberry "pudding" is more like a cobbler.

I think my devotion to canning, drying, and freezing a summer’s worth of stuff I couldn’t work through in my lifetime (I’ve got frozen parsley that’s probably 25 years old) is a hereditary and geographical fear of Jack Blizzard, and his ability to lock us in during winter. I read a brilliant short story once, “Winter” by Kit Reed, where two old sisters in an isolated cabin find an ingenious way to stock their larder during a blizzard. I won’t give it away, but let’s just say without my garden and my canning obsession, I could BE one of those sisters…

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve never gone hungry a day in my life, except for my teens, when I lived on sunflower seeds and Boone’s Farm, or when I’ve gone willingly down some brutally restrictive diet hole. Still, I look at my seventeen jars of pickled jalapeños (2005) and my 13 jars of wild plum jam (2007 and yes, I’ll still eat them though I won’t feed them to guests), plus the last two years’ worth of tomatoes, pickles, and peaches, and I know I won’t starve.

Did we plant that zucchini on purpose?!?

They're breaking out!

A full larder is a joyous thing...

This weekend we’ve got a granddaughter’s 10th birthday to fuss over, more tomatoes ripening in this heat, and a couple of trees to plant. But first, a night of dancing and merriment at our Little Town Watering Hole, for what we like to call our Friday night happy hour “church service”—we are fervent, faithful, and [ir]reverent about our Friday evenings with Ray’s Little Town band. Then, it’s back to the industry and welcome, Autumn!

The Boyz in the Band

Better check that warranty...

I’ll be 67 on my next birthday. With age, wisdom, and one of the wise revelations I’ve had recently is that like an LG front-loading washer, human design includes planned obsolescence (PO). We are designed to break down and need replacing.

Another day, another backless gown.

This came into sharp focus over the past month. First, Ray had another heart attack. This was #5 (#1 with quad bypass and a couple stents was at age 50, for which he always thanks his mother’s genes). Thankfully, we know the drill by now and got him in post haste. This time, he needed a couple new stents (the cardiologist called himself “the plumber”). He also had a new glitch this time—atrial flutter. So they had to put the cables on and jump-start his heart back into normal sinus rhythm (a different cardiologist for this one, who called himself “the electrician”), which worked like a charm. After a few days in the Big City heart hospital, Ray came home wearing a monitor for a couple weeks and feeling good but tired.

(Sidenote: We learned that cardio nurses get a big kick out of police and hospital shows that zap dead people back to life. She told us there’s no zapping someone back from a flatline.)

The next week, I was picking up a laundry basket and felt a pop in my lower back. I couldn’t straighten up, I needed a cane to get up or down, I hobbled around like Quasimodo, and I whined. A lot. I loaded up on Advil and ice packs until the following week, when I already had an appointment scheduled for my annual Medicare checkup. If you’ve never had one of these, they’re pretty funny. They start with a “wellness check,” a series of questions to test your mental health and memory, and to try and figure out if you’re a fall risk. You can’t imagine how badly I wanted to blink my eyes like a stunned doe or make up silly answers just for fun.

Meanwhile, waiting back at home...

At my age, they forego certain formerly-routine checks—no pelvic exam or pap test needed, you dried up, non-reproductive old prune, and that last home colon test will hold you for another year or two. So after the wellness quiz, the wafflemaker (a mammo), a dexa scan, lab work, peeing in a cup, and an ultrasound of my thyroid to monitor old nodules, I was released on my own recognizance with Prednisone and muscle relaxers.

(Sidenote: Prednisone is my very favorite drug. You take it for a couple days, then one day you’re walking up the stairs and realize nothing hurts—not your back, not the arthritis in your feet, not your stiff “knitters thumb,” not the shoulder that you landed on falling off your bike—uh oh…should I have reported that as a “fall risk”? Yes, the steroids can make you a little cranky and wired, but the irritability is far outweighed by how clean your house gets.)

The BEST therapy.

Now I’m scheduled to go back in a couple weeks for a thyroid biopsy, because of course one nodule is .08723 mm bigger. If they test you enough, they will find something.

Somehow, in the run-up to all this, Ray put in a beautiful veggie garden, and we lived without water for a day and AC for a week, while a crew put in a new sewer line from our house out to the street, something that was long past due before we bought our 1904 house eight years ago. Our yard is now fragrant and gorgeous, dotted with hanging baskets of flowers in every color, the orioles and hummingbirds are back, and we’re settling back into our spring peace.

We’re eternally grateful for our “maintenance and service team,” which includes our daughter, who dragged all her children to our house to dog, bird, & house sit during Ray’s upgrade; our son, who trekked down once we were back home to help with lifting and pulling chores we both have to avoid for a while; our daughter-in-love, who kept me company all day in the heart hospital while Ray got his tune-up; and so many other family & friends who brought us food, sent cards and flowers, drove us to appointments, filled in on drums for Ray at our Little Town watering hole while he’s on the DL, checked on us, and let us recount ad nauseum our harrowing medical tales.

Blue iris.

Ray and I know well that each hospital visit, each doctor’s appointment, every effort to eat more salad and move every day is just us buying time. No one, regardless of genetics, healthy habits, longevity supplements, yoga, inversion tables, or prayer gets to wiggle out of PO. The warranties will expire. But I’m also grateful for the reminder that every moment we’re still humming along is a gift and a wonder.

What I really want to say about spring is...

Mom and Dad, 1952

What I want to say is, there’s nothing more welcome or more beautiful than spring in our Little Town. We’ve gone from another layer of snow last week, to an explosion of brilliant green and temps in the 80s, to rain and cool. Lilacs are budding; iris, lilies, columbine, and hollyhocks are all pushing up; a dozen wild turkey hens paraded down our street; our Little Town resident vultures have come back after a very successful winter south—when they circled over our backyard, I lost count at 55, and Ray says it was closer to 100.

I think what I really want to say is, I feel a little blindsided by this particular spring, which is also the first anniversary of my orphanhood: My mother died a year ago this month, after a years-long illness and slow decline, and my father died a month later, after his own years-long illness.

I’ve often said, it isn’t one event that sucks us under the waves—it’s an accumulation of events, the PILE-UP. And since 2020 with the pandemic, I’ve been in a kind of adrenaline-fueled fog of perpetual action and stress, my Superwoman crisis mode. Then 2021 brought “pandemic+” (a heart attack for Ray, multiple hospitalizations for Mom, Mom needing full-time care at home, and her decision to enter home hospice at the end of the year). Add in 2022’s deaths and debacles (see my Christmas 2022 post), and I’m pretty sure I was exhausted in body, mind, and spirit by the time the ball dropped on 2023.

I’d like to say that I still see hope on the horizon. Mom’s Bergenia is coming up, and when Ray raked out the hollyhock and iris beds a couple days ago, it was enough to make me cry, knowing how happy it would have made Mom. Ray and I laughed at the decorative marbles everywhere in the garden, where Mom had thrown them because they were “shiny.” I can still be slayed by the smallest reminders of her, found in corners where she’d lost or tucked them away—a hearing aid brush, a pearl fallen out of a ring, a note to her from a great-grandkid, tucked in a sock.

But what I’m also saying is, now with spring busting out all over, with no more classes to teach (I re-retired), with our health more or less stable, and with my general pace slowing and calming, I find I’m missing my parents terribly. This spring—a season Mom adored—reminds me I still have much work to do re-orienting my life on this new road. Maybe that work is never done. And I think I’m still exhausted, if that’s possible. I keep myself busybusybusy, warding off the Big Cry that I feel welling just under the surface, the kind of good cry that makes you take to your bed. I’ve been holding it back because, what if I can’t stop once it starts?

What I'm trying to say is, full steam ahead (or maybe half steam).  I’m breathing in spring after an extraordinarily long winter that started in 2020. I’ll keep slugging down coffee to stay awake, and I'll drink it on the porch in my pajamas. I'll keep plugging away at the inner work—Mom donated her body to the Med school of our Little Town U, so maybe once I get her ashes back (it can take up to 2 years) and scatter them in the places she loved, I’ll feel a shift. I’ll scrub the oriole and hummingbird feeders. I’ll switch from boots to sandals. Ray will get down the bikes, and the kayaks won’t be far behind. I’ll wear outfits specifically designed to call up Mom’s voice quipping, “Are you going out in public like that, dear?”

I guess I'm really just saying, spring is springing, and I’m okay. And to welcome spring’s renewal and to celebrate these bittersweet anniversaries, I’ll plant Cupid’s pansies this week (sorry…vague English teacher reference). You may even hear me singing (as Mom always told me to do, loud and off key, in troubled times), Battle Hymn of the Republic. 

 “We sat in silence, letting the green in the air heal what it could.” 

― Erica Bauermeister

Mom and Dad, 2019

Trying to Breathe

I know I’m not supposed to say this, or dignify “shooters” with their names, or regard them as worthy of consideration. And I know I’ll get some flak for this. BUT, I’m a mom and stepmom of four, all of whom were 18, or 24, or 27, or 30 at one time, and some of whom struggled to come out into the light and get to where they are today. So when I look at these [mostly, not all] young people who choose a path of violence, my heart cracks open—again—and I think like a mom.

When I think of my own kids at these ages, they were ABSOLUTELY still kids. They were making stupid choices, rash decisions, and every time one of them hit bottom, they BELIEVED that was it—no good would ever come again. They skateboarded down cement stairways (who wouldn’t break a wrist/ankle?!?), they lived in a car 400 miles from home, they had surprise babies, they thought about suicide.

So when I see another kid "shooter's" face in the news, usually the angriest, ugliest picture the media can find of them, I want to hug them, though I know that’s not the answer. I want to talk them down, though I know it would have been too little, too late before they ever stormed the school/nightclub/massage parlour. I want to comfort their families, though I know some of their families raised those kids in violence or dismissal or ignore-ance. I want to (and do) cry for them and their sulky, or defiant, or curly-headed, pimply, awkward baby faces.

IT ISN’T EITHER/OR, and this might be one of the biggest stumbling blocks to finding a national solution to this steadily-escalating tragedy. It’s not US vs THEM. We are ALL us. We are ALL them. I don’t disrespect or love or ache for these kids’ victims any less because I also feel compassion for those who see violent explosions as their best option in life (and death).

They say the human brain, especially the decision-making prefrontal cortex, isn’t fully capable of long-term consequential thinking until around age 25. This means many kids can’t understand that what they do now will have consequences—sometimes irreversible—in the future. They do know right from wrong, no question, but they don’t always understand that this wrong thing won’t just be “done” when it’s over, that the ripples could spread and continue for a very long time, and that there won’t be any coming back from it.

I think we have to stop kidding ourselves by demonizing “shooters.” These kids and young adults who go on violent rampages aren’t evil, even though they commit evil acts. They aren’t soulless psychopaths. They aren’t trying to “stand for something,” “make a statement,” or get revenge for gender discrimination, bullying, or bad parenting. They’re in pain or they’re mentally ill or they’re indoctrinated, and they’re committing suicide, like so many other teens and young adults today. They know their actions won’t end well; they just don’t understand how permanent that ending will be (for more on this epidemic, check out https://www.uclahealth.org/news/suicide-rate-highest-among-teens-and-young-adults).

Anyway, this latest school shooting in Tennessee makes it hard for me to breathe. The three students killed were the same age as two of my granddaughters, Ezri and Hazel. I don’t have answers. All I know is that we need to find the balls and human decency to control access to guns. We won't stop them all, but we can make it HARDER. But even that won’t solve the problem. We also need to figure out why so many kids (and that’s what they are, I know from watching four of them grow up, and now six grandkids) feel their only road to relief or recognition is dying.