Back and Forth

In the past few weeks, my husband John and I sold our home, packed our things and moved ourselves across three states, back to the home we had built together when we were first married.  When we began to talk about moving back, I swore that I would not become keeper of the Heeg-family-museum.  I told myself a number of times that 'you can't go back,' that 'we are entering a place that's changed significantly over the past 15 years and that's a good thing.' Consequently, we're not only unpacking, we're also renovating -- ripping up carpet, painting walls, updating furnishings.  It's all new.  So, tonight, I surprised myself when I walked into the smallest bedroom...

Before there was a window here, I stood in this spot and looked out, looked through the space where a window would soon be installed, looked clear through to the young oak with its gangly, untamed branches and decided to have it trimmed back to something like normal.  I added that to one of several mental lists.  The other lists were longer and had titles like 'what to buy for this room before the baby comes' or 'who to call to help us move' or 'names for boys' and 'names for girls.'  No doubt, I screened the entries on those lists dutifully then, and yet I had other things on my mind too. 

It was late afternoon.  The builders were gone.  The quiet could come out of hiding again, and I could let myself daydream, often a more enticing pastime.  How many late nights would I enter through that doorway, I wondered, and lift a little body out of the crib, a baby who would rest on my chest, our child -- warm and sighing at the end of a good cry, confidently depending on me?  How many times would I rock him or her to sleep in this little nursery-room-to-be?

A shushing breeze blew through the empty space where there should be a window that evening, where there would be a window soon, where there has been a window for thirty-seven years since -- a window I have washed inside and out many times, trimmed around when painting the walls soft shades of color over and over and over again, variously dressed up with ruffles and dressed out in bandana handkerchiefs depending on the outcome of four pregnancies.  Girl, girl, boy, girl.  Joy, joy, joy, joy.  And swaying from side to side in a very small space, I invented my momma dance in this room, dimly lit by moonlight filtered through that gradually aging, sheltering oak. 

          I’m much older now, back again after a good, long run elsewhere.  Here I stand, looking through this same air to the same branches that never did quite manage to look presentable, and I casually note how, over the years, things like that have come to matter less and less and, eventually, not much at all.

          Tonight I suppose I should be thinking about what I will do tomorrow, but I’m not.  Instead I'm meeting myself for a few moments, and I'm glad for the opportunity because I've had some questions.  As a young woman, could I begin to recognize what was sacrosanct and what wasn't? Could I sense what would come to mean more in time and what would mean less?  Tonight as the oak leaves rustle and settle down once again, I think, yes, maybe a little, maybe often enough.        

Untitled

I've never felt very confident about choosing titles for my own writings (as evidenced by my explanation of the "Jo would" title for this blog in my previous entry!)  so I'm often impressed by a good title when I see it.  That may be why this contest appealed to me.  

Recently the American Library Association asked for contributions of short, visual poems made from the titles of books when they were stacked together. I really liked their examples (see http://atyourlibrary.org/national-library-week-book-spine-poetry-contest) and spent some time wondering what I would choose -- too much time, as it turned out!  It's too late to submit an entry, but I've still had fun doing this so I thought I'd share here. 


P.S. I found that some books don't have titles on their spines that layer well so, in case you can't read them from this photo, here's my stack of titles/poem: 

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side --
Things Fall Apart
This Side of Paradise

(Written by Agatha Christie, Chinua Achebe and F. Scott Fitzgerald, respectively.)

Now I'm wondering what you might choose?  

And, being the borrower that I am, I'm already working on my next book-spine poem! 

Why and Why Now.

I'm having trouble coming up with a name for this new blog. Today's my mom's birthday. She called me Jo at times, on a rare occasion, Josie. Maybe that was because I loved Jo in Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) or maybe because she did. I know that reference probably seems very long ago and far away. It does to me too, but still holds true. She, Jo, was a writer. Her loves, her responsibilities, even the color of her hair in the frontispiece, were the "me" I wanted to be both then, and, now and then, since. So, while I was wondering about whether or not to start this more personal blog after many years of writing as part of my profession, it finally came down to this question, if she were here, would Jo?  Yes, Jo would.

And the rest of this is about Mom.  It's her day really.  

The folds of her robe lapped one another in front, layer upon soft, pink layer, making her into a good place to run for a hug.   But she was also belted and surprising firm in the center.  They call that your “core” today and whole articles are written to explain how to work it, to strengthen it, to exercise it.  They didn’t have to tell her back then.  It was her survival mechanism and advantage to have such a hidden resource.  She could wring things out even if they were heavy or drippy.  I had seen her do it to pieces of laundry with her bare hands!  I knew what she was capable of.

For her aprons and her pies baked on summer Saturday mornings, for her children's Sunday School materials piled on the dining room table ready to go to church with us on Sunday, for her puffy arthritic fingers that bulged around my Dad’s wedding ring to which she had resorted when her own had to be cut off, for her love of vivid color, for her reticence to confront or argue, for her sparkly brooches, for the way she said my father’s name that could halt that momentous train of thought he engineered, for the way she stroked worn wooden surfaces with the grain as she dusted or refinished, for her tears when someone accidentally sat on her favorite Andrews Sisters 78 rpm record one time and broke it, for her grace with someone who experimented with perfume and rouge too soon, for her hopefulness as she waited for many half-hours in the parking lot of the Honolulu Conservatory of Music to try to make a piano player out of me, for the way she tugged at my hair when rolling it on curlers or wrapping it with smelly permanent papers, and, I swear, for inventing mental math and quoting whole rhyming poems and Latin phrases forty years after she graduated, for such a woman, there is no card on the rack.

There were low points.  One time she was reading the paper while I was telling her something.  Oh, she tilted her head as if she were listening to me, but when I looked up, I caught her eyes finishing the printed sentence I’d interrupted.  Continually the center of my own universe, I had been presuming that I also was the center of hers, presuming that she was on call, “Mooom!”   The newspaper, of all things.  It was the world that was crowding me out of sight, out of mind.   I felt hurt and a little lost. I felt rebuked that I’d over-talked, (probably, if I were honest with myself, once again!) At the same time, I felt like a light-weight in comparison to the world unless someone were to press down my side of the scale to balance it out.  Her finger had always been the counter weight I needed. Of course, now I was growing up and gaining weighty matters of my own.  The world needed her attention.  So eventually I shared, like I shared her with my sister.  But I was tempted to warn them in advance, if they’d listen, “People don’t stay because they are needed.”

She didn’t.
She was a good mom.