adieux

On this dreary spring afternoon, another piece of my childhood slipped quietly into eternity.

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite places in all the world was my Uncle Gene and Aunt Ella Jean's house. It's amazing how many of my memories are tied so firmly to their farm on the hill beyond my parent's house.

As I sit here alone, watching the clock tick off the minutes, I can't help but think of all the pieces of the puzzle of my life that were spent in my uncle's company. Dimly, I remember the phone call from the hospital that announced the birth of my new baby sister. I was not even three, but I have a hazy picture of standing on a step stool talking into the phone mounted on the kitchen wall, my aunt and uncle and cousins close by.

I remember sweet, homemade ice cream and saltine crackers, and riding horseback clinging to his overall straps, and tart, green apples not quite yet ripe from the tree in their yard.

They always had a cedar for Christmas in the old, farm house hung with glass ornaments, streaming icicles and big, incandescent bulbs that even now I use on my front porch at Christmas and remember. Next to Christmas morning at home, Christmas Eve there was the highlight of the holiday season.

In my mind's eye, I can see, even smell, the barns where my sister and I raced across the floor on creepers Uncle Gene and the boys used to work on the farm equipment. We played in wagons full of soybeans, shelled popcorn, and jumped, in the last breaths of summer, from hay bale to hay bale.

The pictures are idyllic, no doubt. But they are mine. Precious and beautiful. I saw their house as a place of refuge when one cold, winter day school let out early and finding my parents gone, In my little red coat, I trekked across the field to their house where my older cousin watched over me until my mother, frantic with worry, found me there, unscathed after all.

It was there that we stayed the one awful summer when my mother had to work, there that I learned I would bend and not break under the sorrow that precipitated that change. Beside their fireplace, I filled pages and pages with adolescent yearnings and mourned innocence and anticipated adulthood.

So many days. So many memories.

One of the greatest tragedies of adulthood is how those childhood attachments unravel and slip away in the business of school and jobs, marriages and parenting. The people at the hub of our infant universe are often relegated to some distant galaxy, remembered at Christmas or encountered at a restaurant or church event. Life intervenes and we never sense the loss until a rainy, spring afternoon when it's too late to say...thank you.

A Lament

Last night I received a text message from a friend who was attending the school board meeting. I don’t go to board meetings. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I care too much, but that’s another story for another day.

The text included a list of names of people, members of the Harrisburg Unit District #3 certified teaching staff that will not have a job next year. As I read over the list, it occurred to me what a disservice we do the public when we talk about budget cuts in terms of “programs.” Cutting a “program” is so much more antiseptic than the translation, which is firing someone, maybe even your child’s teacher.

For those of you who don’t know me, I was a single mom for several years. I supported three children on my teaching salary. As I read over that list again this morning, I wondered if any of them are single moms and what they would do now. I felt a momentary sense of panic as I imagined how I would have reacted to the possibility of not being able to take care of my children.

In truth, there are teachers all over the state of Illinois who face a similar predicament this week. Men and women who have dedicated their lives to teaching our state’s children may now be unable to feed and clothe their own children because someone somewhere up the food chain dropped the ball. (I’d be willing to wager that the someone in question isn’t worrying about their mortgage either.)

I know that in today’s economy there are countless other professions in the same boat. Downsizing. Streamlining. They are all words for the same thing – firing people. And even though our government can’t pay the bills it owes, it continues to pass legislation that will eat deeper and deeper into the pockets of everyday Americans and drive us deeper and deeper in debt to whomever it is a country borrows money from when it overspends.

I’m not a politician or an economist, but even I know that you can’t continue to spend more money that you have or eventually somebody suffers. Today it was my colleagues – many of who were once my students and have become my friends. Next August it will be the many students who need classes and services that no longer exist. I can’t help but wonder when, if ever, those at the root of the problem will have to pay the piper for the damage they have caused this week.

Porches

When the first breath of spring wafts into town, I inevitably wander onto our front porch where I sit and watch as the daffodils and tulips peek through the dead grass. Perfect for writing or reading or daydreaming, porches have held a special appeal for me as long as I can remember.

******
My childhood home was possessed of a magical realm that daily converted from the crow’s nest of a ship to a castle tower to a space ship exploring unknown galaxies. My little sister and I lived on our front porch.

It wasn’t anything spectacular by architectural standards. The wooden floor was peeling and spongy where rainwater dripped out of the battered gutters and pooled in the corners, shaded from sunlight by the maple trees in the yard. The four posts that supported the roof were clunky and inelegant with white paint that was chalky and that rubbed off on our hands should we hold on while we stood on the sloping banisters to scout for pirates or aliens or Indians.

We often used the banisters as a perch to wave at the occasional car that passed by stirring up gravel dust or to sit and play “Old Lady Mac” or “Down, Down Baby,” clapping games that distracted me enough that one bright summer morning I fell off and knocked the wind from my lungs in the flowerbed below.

Our porch was a place of grand occasions. I received my first kiss, grieved my first death and planned my youthful foray into the waiting world right there. When my sister and I grew too old for games, I took my pretending underground and read books and books and books on our creaking porch swing. I suppose all that imagining was destined to make me fall in love with the porch, perhaps porches in general.

*****

One summer not too long after I moved out, my parents remodeled the porch. They poured a concrete floor, removed the old wooden banisters and replaced the posts with aluminum columns in the Doric fashion. Over twenty years later, they still strike me as oddly out of place on my parents’ small country home.

No doubt, the porch is more structurally sound than it was when I was a child. The floor is level and free of holes. My mother has stationed two wooden rockers where the porch swing used to be and has a wide array of flora flourishing along the edges in an assortment of pots and tubs. In spite of its reformation, my daughters and my nephews seemed to have had as much fun on the porch as my sister and I did. They rolled their cars and skates along the rough concrete, leapt off the open sides to roll in the soft grass below when they were old enough and have now begun to bring their own children back to toddle across the floor and watch the cows across the road.

When they tore out that wooden floor, I was sure the magic was gone forever, but I was wrong. The magic wasn’t in the wood. It was in our imaginations.

*****

I have my own porch now. It reminds me a little of the old one. The floor is tongue and groove and the posts wide and wooden. My husband and I toiled endlessly three summers ago, replacing rotten floor planks, painting and trimming, recovering the cushions on our wrought iron glider with red and navy plaid and finally hanging a navy blue barn star to complete the new look.

While I don’t pretend to fight dragons anymore, I have wrestled my share of monsters on our porch, but it is mostly a place of quiet. It’s the perfect place to contemplate, to rock the grandbabies, to say my prayers, and to look toward the future. It’s the place we most love to decorate at Christmas, to drape with bunting on the Fourth of July, to have our morning coffee and to eat lunch, especially in the spring when the weather turns just warm enough to sit outside, and I can steal away from school for a quick bologna sandwich.

My daughters and I watch from the porch as the grandchildren grow. They ride by on trikes and wave while their granddad follows just far enough behind to let them feel big, but close enough to catch them should our usually quiet street lure them off the broad walk. We’ve watched as they climb up the brick stairs, first holding a hand tightly and later pulling free to ascend on their own. How much more quickly childhood seems to pass with each generation.

I love a porch. It invites the people next door to talk for a bit on their way in or out, transforming them into neighbors in the truest sense, and it invites us all to stop and dream a little while, whether it’s of faraway places or the place closest to our heart.

Why Write?

Edmund Spenser: Amoretti LXXV (1595)

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his pray.
"Vain man," said she, "that doest in vain assay.
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eek my name bee wiped out likewise."
"Not so," quod I, "let baser things devise,
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where when as Death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew."

Like the speaker in Spenser’s sonnet, I’m of the opinion that we write in an attempt to give substance to that which is often fleeting – a memory, an emotion, an insight – we write it down in hopes of preserving it, perhaps of sharing it with someone else.

And yet, I’ve always been hesitant to get serious about writing. I’ve been put off by (1.) the vanity inherent in assuming that someone, anyone, would care enough about what I have to say to wring precious moments from their day to read it and, if I’m completely honest, (2.) my own fear of failure. What if no one reads it? What if I pour my heart and my soul into my essay or poetry or blog and no one chooses to read what I have to say? What if I write that novel and it ends up in the 99¢ bargain bin because it was so insipid, so trite, that no one in the world could stomach it.

I would imagine that it is fear of failure more than any other obstacle that keeps us achieving our dreams. We would blame lack of opportunity or money or time, but if we strip away the rationalization, we are just afraid to fail. And why not? We live in a culture where failure is something to be avoided like the plague. We shield our children from it and should we (or they) encounter it, we quickly seek out someone else to blame lest we have to accept the horrible truth that we tried…and failed. But if we don’t try, does that mean that we have avoided failure or does it simply mean that we have failed to try? And if we never try it’s a certainty that we will never succeed.

And so, here I am. I’m throwing my hat into the overcrowded ring, making an attempt at writing something that is worth reading, trying to make the moments, the thoughts, the insights a little more permanent and perhaps learn a little about living in the process. And while I have no delusions that what I write here will attain the permanency of Spenser’s sonnets, maybe, just maybe, some one will read it and be momentarily renewed.