Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Emily Dickinson
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Dances with Death
Pink moon peers through my window
With his longing steals the key
Haunts me with his wanton woeful
Face, he looks on me
Pink moon listens at my door
While I shift and move inside
Opening to be his whore
Wanting to confide
I break the paint and crank glass panes
And open to the night
Breeze floods in sweet smell of bane
And all that pale pink light
And just when I begin to speak
He pinches off the flow
And binds the sweet release I seek
Caressed with voice so low
No, not now he says so soft
I barely hear his words
He winds his way into my loft
And beckons me with chords
That promise holds of pleasure’s pain
The music of restraint I feign
It moves me, minor notes they strain
My brain, I am no longer sane!
Just then he pulls his pink moonlight
Back through the open door
And as he walks into the night
I call out wanting more
From far away I hear his song
While colorless and cold
I lay in pools of longing
My quilts of love unfold
And dance outside my window
Dance bring down the moon
Bring down that pale and rosy moon so low
It falls to swoon
Then suddenly, surprisingly
His hand is up my skirt
Pink light on bare skin dancing
With Death I am the flirt
He throws me down onto the ground
Into night garden’s dirt
And pounds me down ‘til I am found
No longer can avert
The knowing I am Queen of Death
Persephone I die
The little death, exhale the breath
To live again, come, hie!
August 22, 2005
Copyright 2005
All rights reserved
With his longing steals the key
Haunts me with his wanton woeful
Face, he looks on me
Pink moon listens at my door
While I shift and move inside
Opening to be his whore
Wanting to confide
I break the paint and crank glass panes
And open to the night
Breeze floods in sweet smell of bane
And all that pale pink light
And just when I begin to speak
He pinches off the flow
And binds the sweet release I seek
Caressed with voice so low
No, not now he says so soft
I barely hear his words
He winds his way into my loft
And beckons me with chords
That promise holds of pleasure’s pain
The music of restraint I feign
It moves me, minor notes they strain
My brain, I am no longer sane!
Just then he pulls his pink moonlight
Back through the open door
And as he walks into the night
I call out wanting more
From far away I hear his song
While colorless and cold
I lay in pools of longing
My quilts of love unfold
And dance outside my window
Dance bring down the moon
Bring down that pale and rosy moon so low
It falls to swoon
Then suddenly, surprisingly
His hand is up my skirt
Pink light on bare skin dancing
With Death I am the flirt
He throws me down onto the ground
Into night garden’s dirt
And pounds me down ‘til I am found
No longer can avert
The knowing I am Queen of Death
Persephone I die
The little death, exhale the breath
To live again, come, hie!
August 22, 2005
Copyright 2005
All rights reserved
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Third Coast Woman
The upper half of her ample body lay stretched for 150 miles from the hill country to the coast where her broad hips sank into the liminal beach sands bordering the gulf, and the wetness between her thighs sweetened the currents of the waters there. Her legs, spread wide, extended out to the deep blue drop beyond the sand bars and formed protective jetties that broke the power of the surf, preserving the land against the sea’s encroachment. Her rounded breasts softened by the years of suckling her many children are the limestone hills that replace, in this time, the once mighty mountain range that was slowly eroded by her rain and wind children. From her headlands pour the rivers, her tears, her laughter, the stories she tells her people by their campfires in the night.
Gold and Global Collapse
Hot and flushed, my heart was pumping hard to do the double task of cooling my body while providing continuous energy to my legs as I ploughed through the scratchy thickness of this south Pacific island jungle. My throat swollen and engorged from my body's effort to get blood to my brain, I struggled to breathe. Seeing a tiny clearing ahead, I slowed my pace for a moment anticipating a break in this forced walk, and immediately I felt the heaviness in my thighs and the weakness in my knees and ankles. A small patch of bright blue sky beamed through the opening in the immense green canopy surrounding and overtowering me.
I sank to my knees, pulled my water bottle out of my pack, guzzled down some of its coolness and poured more over my face to relieve the stinging and itching from the palm fronds scratching against my skin. The only direction from here was down as the broad landscape flowed towards its ending in the narrow crevice where a pool of cold, clear water lay embraced by its mountainous banks. It was on a ledge beneath and behind the narrow thousand foot falls cascading into this pool that I had hidden the gold and now I must, somehow retrieve it and return before I was discovered missing.
On the day of the collapse, we’d loaded up the stash of bullion onto the flatbed, breaking it out of the hole where I had it bricked up in my cellar. We’d taken the bars a few at a time from the vault at work when we realized the end was near. Getting to the edge of the valley of the falls was easy, but getting the gold down the mountain through the thick jungle was another story. John had devised a line and pulley system I won’t begin to describe here, because it is his area of expertise. Together we had sent load after load down the lines we’d poled to the base to get to the pool. Stacking them along the narrow bank, they'd laid in wait of the more labor intensive job of placing them on the ledge underwater behind the falls.
I sank to my knees, pulled my water bottle out of my pack, guzzled down some of its coolness and poured more over my face to relieve the stinging and itching from the palm fronds scratching against my skin. The only direction from here was down as the broad landscape flowed towards its ending in the narrow crevice where a pool of cold, clear water lay embraced by its mountainous banks. It was on a ledge beneath and behind the narrow thousand foot falls cascading into this pool that I had hidden the gold and now I must, somehow retrieve it and return before I was discovered missing.
On the day of the collapse, we’d loaded up the stash of bullion onto the flatbed, breaking it out of the hole where I had it bricked up in my cellar. We’d taken the bars a few at a time from the vault at work when we realized the end was near. Getting to the edge of the valley of the falls was easy, but getting the gold down the mountain through the thick jungle was another story. John had devised a line and pulley system I won’t begin to describe here, because it is his area of expertise. Together we had sent load after load down the lines we’d poled to the base to get to the pool. Stacking them along the narrow bank, they'd laid in wait of the more labor intensive job of placing them on the ledge underwater behind the falls.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Even Global Warming Gets Gulf Breeze
Sinking back on my heels for a moment and pulling away from the task that had me breaking a sweat, I became aware of the constant but variable cool breeze coming through the window. Mid December, now, was unseasonably, unreasonably warm, even for this subsiding area on the south side of Houston. As the wind currents stirred about inside this storage container where I was emptying Natalie’s toys and books, it occurred to me that this part of town from which I'd moved away when I was seven, was close enough to the gulf to get that steady, comforting breeze that consistently blew in on summer afternoons along the coast of Texas.
This realization immediately spurred a recollection of afternoon naps in my mother’s room in the house just a few blocks away from here. Her bed in that room had been shoved up against the open window facing south, and the stiff breeze activated by the daily pressure shifts on the coast would blow across the bed and wake me from my sweaty slumber with its cool relief every afternoon. Immersing myself in the memory and drifting in its rich sensory flow, I acknowledged the security I felt in its dependability. It occurred to me that during my youth nearby the coast, I had actually learned to tell time by it. Laughing silently to myself, I thought about how most often in those years, it had signalled release from the daily afternoon nap-time incarceration imposed upon us by my mother .
I hadn’t been in this declining area of town for many years, but being here now, I reacognized it as a place of high impact for me in early childhood years. Many of the old houses and stores had already been torn down or had fallen down, perhaps even vandalized or set on fire for the insurance money. John had recently purchased two lots in this broken-down part of town, trusting the investors who believed this area would be the next big attraction for urban reclamation. He was moving his and Natalie's things into storage here while finalizing plans for the studio he would build on the property, a place where he would begin his life again following the divorce from Natalie's mother.
Now, looking out the window of the large storage container placed here just last week, the hazy patch of sky visible within its frame appeared broken and torn by the gnarly black branches of the old oak tree left standing in the yard after the clearing. Empty of its leaves on this balmy winter day, it remained as a landmark to some young couple in the fifties who had planted it as an attribute to their new suburban home. Today, the ambient temperature had brought sweat to my brow, and now, a breaking wetness under my arms and between my legs began to evaporate as I sat back and allowed the stillness in my spread-eagle posture and the motion of the breeze combine to cool me.
This realization immediately spurred a recollection of afternoon naps in my mother’s room in the house just a few blocks away from here. Her bed in that room had been shoved up against the open window facing south, and the stiff breeze activated by the daily pressure shifts on the coast would blow across the bed and wake me from my sweaty slumber with its cool relief every afternoon. Immersing myself in the memory and drifting in its rich sensory flow, I acknowledged the security I felt in its dependability. It occurred to me that during my youth nearby the coast, I had actually learned to tell time by it. Laughing silently to myself, I thought about how most often in those years, it had signalled release from the daily afternoon nap-time incarceration imposed upon us by my mother .
I hadn’t been in this declining area of town for many years, but being here now, I reacognized it as a place of high impact for me in early childhood years. Many of the old houses and stores had already been torn down or had fallen down, perhaps even vandalized or set on fire for the insurance money. John had recently purchased two lots in this broken-down part of town, trusting the investors who believed this area would be the next big attraction for urban reclamation. He was moving his and Natalie's things into storage here while finalizing plans for the studio he would build on the property, a place where he would begin his life again following the divorce from Natalie's mother.
Now, looking out the window of the large storage container placed here just last week, the hazy patch of sky visible within its frame appeared broken and torn by the gnarly black branches of the old oak tree left standing in the yard after the clearing. Empty of its leaves on this balmy winter day, it remained as a landmark to some young couple in the fifties who had planted it as an attribute to their new suburban home. Today, the ambient temperature had brought sweat to my brow, and now, a breaking wetness under my arms and between my legs began to evaporate as I sat back and allowed the stillness in my spread-eagle posture and the motion of the breeze combine to cool me.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Mama -- A Day in the Life
I stared at the faded green aloe vera plant, long and twisted as it reached for the highly filtered light coming through the sliding glass door of my grandmother’s breakfast room. The backyard beyond the door's algae spotted base, though lovingly landscaped with azaleas and ligustrums, was shady and dense beneath the canopy of east Texas piney woods. The sunlight and bright blue sky found only pinholes for entry through its canopy.
The overgrown plant crowded the big yellow pot where it had grown for what must be twenty years or more. (Does an aloe vera even live that long I wonder as I write the words?) The jelly filled cactus plant had been a necessary component of every kitchen my grandmother ever established. Good for minor burns, she always said, and surely enough, her granddaughter’s first kitchen, and those that came after, also required the spikey horned plant with its soothing balm to be growing in the kitchen window.
My grandmother now sat on her perch, her face between the folds of her newspaper with her long, thin Benson and Hedges cigarette placed neatly into the corner ridges of the gamboge-colored ashtray whose angles were wedged between the sections of the morning newspaper. The ashtray was an accessory made to match the ultra-modern look of the chartreuse wrought-iron framed furniture standing boldly aslant in trapezoid shapes throughout her custom-built kitchen and dining area. A soft thin stream of smoke was slowly curling and flowing up from the tray's cool ceramic base to find its spot in the yellowing ceiling.
How ironic, I thought it was that my grandmother, born in 1901 before even the invention of the automobile, refused to be associated with antiques of the past, choosing to surround herself, instead, with this ultra-modern look of the early sixties. How many times had I sat like this in her breakfast room, my forearms cooling on the smoked glass table, taking in this very same scene? It must in these twenty-five years or so of repetition, by now, be impressed upon the ethers.
Mama, the name she invented for her grandchildren to call her, had been a maid of the twenties—the Roaring Twenties. She was the oldest of five Cox children living outside a saw-mill town where farm yard pigs often wallowed or slept underneath the pinewood planks of their kitchen floor. She loved to tell the story about the time she baited her younger brothers and sister into bad trouble with their tight-minded Baptist father by finding just the moment when her mother had vacated the kitchen leaving the pears cooking down to syrup for the preserves she was making.
Seizing the moment of opportunity, she enticed her sibs into the kitchen with the promise of a fun and daring adventure then showed them how to use the big ladling spoon to hold the boiling syrup over a knothole in the pine floor and call the pigs. The pigs, greedy for table scraps would come grunting and snorting, expecting gifts from heaven to be dropped to them through the holes in the floor. Then Mama would coach her little tribe to pour the sticky hot syrup through the knotholes onto their eager, hungry faces, sending the poor creatures squealing and scrambling out from under the kitchen, shaking the house as they tumbled over each other. The kids, of course, would fall all over each other laughing and rolling in the kitchen floor and never notice she had sneaked out of the kitchen long before. The tale ends with the other four being caught and promptly punished for their cruel play with whacks from their father’s razor strap while my grandmother went scot-free.
Mama was quite the story teller. I guess it came from her Irish background—it ran in the family, so it seems. She loved being the center of attention, so she would tell a story, always with herself as the central character, the one who cleverly made the joke fall on someone else. Though there were times she would tell the story on herself if it made a better story, she was the chief instigator and the main benefactor of every tale. The telling was always rolling-in-the-floor funny at the time, but later it surfaced to me as a cruel style of humor, maybe a bit like the "Uncle Remus" or "Peter Rabbit" series.
She married an older man with an income at age sixteen, she said, to get away from the restraints of her strict “papa” who made dating and dancing forbidden, and straight on, began to live the high-life. She was a looker—blue violet eyes and thick dark hair with olive colored skin—she told us she came from “the black Irish”. She loved to dress in the styles of the movie stars and always told me it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.
It wasn’t long before her husband became jealous and overly possessive. The stories she told me about his drunken fits of jealousy were a dramatic shift from those she used to entertain us at family gatherings. They separated during the Depression when my mother was five and though they made several attempts to reunite, when he died of a sudden heart attack seven years later, he left a widow. She had already found work for supporting herself and my mother as a secretary at one of the companies growing fast on the oil boom in a cow-town-become-oil-town in Texas. Here she met my wild-at-heart step-grandfather—the only one I ever knew—16 years younger than her.
My great aunt, her sister, used to say, “here comes the White Roach!” when he was coming up the walk to the front door. He’d made his first appearance "calling" on Mama in a white, Havana style suit which hung loosely over his tall, thin frame. His pasty white skin and slicked-back platinum blonde hair added to the ghostly insect illusion Aunt Mil was spinning. By the time I heard the story after a decade or more of family tellings, Mama (or even my grandfather) had managed to make it sound like he was an awkward albino boy coming to court my more refined and socially established grandmother. Their war-time marriage might have alienated her from her daughter except for the fact that my mother was fused fast to her mother’s hip, then, and for years to come.
Mama in her eighties was still a striking woman--though the deep blue violet eyes had faded, they still commanded attention when their icy blue focus was fixed to those of her listener. Her long thick black hair had thinned and was now covered with hair salon color that was befitting of her age—a warm, chestnut like color with tinges of gray, it was now short and permed to add back the body that the years had taken away. Though her once smooth olive skin now displayed a variety of moles, the regal way she held herself insisted they were marks of beauty.
Her five foot two and a half inch frame (which always seemed larger in the aura of her presence) was now rounded and her pear-shaped hips mimicked the jodhpurs she wore in pictures I’d seen of her as a young woman. Her belly was full like her breasts which hung braced against it when she hunched over in her reading posture, thin cigarette to her once full and red-lipsticked mouth. It was still easy to see the flare of her powerful appeal in the flash of her flirtatious smile.
Now peering over her newspaper at me, her eyes weary and jaw slack, she continued our earlier argument, once more trying to win me over through the force of her will (a willfulness for which she’d long been known, but which was today, clearly waning). Her tired words formed an ugly reality with which I was all too familiar, a reality born out of her own life and its long and painful relationship history. She wasn’t admitting what was clearly visible in the weakness of her posture and the tremulousness of her voice, and I wasn’t either. Perhaps registering the condition of this aging family matriarch was just too painful for us both to acknowledge.
In keeping with my own stubborn stance, I responded to the words themselves rather than acknowledging the gestalt from which they were spoken, making it easy for me to refute her rather weak argument. Instead of hearing the wisdom of her warning and trusting in the earnestness of her appeal above and beyond her history of attempts (with some success) at controlling and directing my life to her satisfaction, I chose to use my prime of life advantage to her advanced years in standing her down. She had no room to talk, I told myself--I could continue in this charade without shame.
The overgrown plant crowded the big yellow pot where it had grown for what must be twenty years or more. (Does an aloe vera even live that long I wonder as I write the words?) The jelly filled cactus plant had been a necessary component of every kitchen my grandmother ever established. Good for minor burns, she always said, and surely enough, her granddaughter’s first kitchen, and those that came after, also required the spikey horned plant with its soothing balm to be growing in the kitchen window.
My grandmother now sat on her perch, her face between the folds of her newspaper with her long, thin Benson and Hedges cigarette placed neatly into the corner ridges of the gamboge-colored ashtray whose angles were wedged between the sections of the morning newspaper. The ashtray was an accessory made to match the ultra-modern look of the chartreuse wrought-iron framed furniture standing boldly aslant in trapezoid shapes throughout her custom-built kitchen and dining area. A soft thin stream of smoke was slowly curling and flowing up from the tray's cool ceramic base to find its spot in the yellowing ceiling.
How ironic, I thought it was that my grandmother, born in 1901 before even the invention of the automobile, refused to be associated with antiques of the past, choosing to surround herself, instead, with this ultra-modern look of the early sixties. How many times had I sat like this in her breakfast room, my forearms cooling on the smoked glass table, taking in this very same scene? It must in these twenty-five years or so of repetition, by now, be impressed upon the ethers.
Mama, the name she invented for her grandchildren to call her, had been a maid of the twenties—the Roaring Twenties. She was the oldest of five Cox children living outside a saw-mill town where farm yard pigs often wallowed or slept underneath the pinewood planks of their kitchen floor. She loved to tell the story about the time she baited her younger brothers and sister into bad trouble with their tight-minded Baptist father by finding just the moment when her mother had vacated the kitchen leaving the pears cooking down to syrup for the preserves she was making.
Seizing the moment of opportunity, she enticed her sibs into the kitchen with the promise of a fun and daring adventure then showed them how to use the big ladling spoon to hold the boiling syrup over a knothole in the pine floor and call the pigs. The pigs, greedy for table scraps would come grunting and snorting, expecting gifts from heaven to be dropped to them through the holes in the floor. Then Mama would coach her little tribe to pour the sticky hot syrup through the knotholes onto their eager, hungry faces, sending the poor creatures squealing and scrambling out from under the kitchen, shaking the house as they tumbled over each other. The kids, of course, would fall all over each other laughing and rolling in the kitchen floor and never notice she had sneaked out of the kitchen long before. The tale ends with the other four being caught and promptly punished for their cruel play with whacks from their father’s razor strap while my grandmother went scot-free.
Mama was quite the story teller. I guess it came from her Irish background—it ran in the family, so it seems. She loved being the center of attention, so she would tell a story, always with herself as the central character, the one who cleverly made the joke fall on someone else. Though there were times she would tell the story on herself if it made a better story, she was the chief instigator and the main benefactor of every tale. The telling was always rolling-in-the-floor funny at the time, but later it surfaced to me as a cruel style of humor, maybe a bit like the "Uncle Remus" or "Peter Rabbit" series.
She married an older man with an income at age sixteen, she said, to get away from the restraints of her strict “papa” who made dating and dancing forbidden, and straight on, began to live the high-life. She was a looker—blue violet eyes and thick dark hair with olive colored skin—she told us she came from “the black Irish”. She loved to dress in the styles of the movie stars and always told me it was just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.
It wasn’t long before her husband became jealous and overly possessive. The stories she told me about his drunken fits of jealousy were a dramatic shift from those she used to entertain us at family gatherings. They separated during the Depression when my mother was five and though they made several attempts to reunite, when he died of a sudden heart attack seven years later, he left a widow. She had already found work for supporting herself and my mother as a secretary at one of the companies growing fast on the oil boom in a cow-town-become-oil-town in Texas. Here she met my wild-at-heart step-grandfather—the only one I ever knew—16 years younger than her.
My great aunt, her sister, used to say, “here comes the White Roach!” when he was coming up the walk to the front door. He’d made his first appearance "calling" on Mama in a white, Havana style suit which hung loosely over his tall, thin frame. His pasty white skin and slicked-back platinum blonde hair added to the ghostly insect illusion Aunt Mil was spinning. By the time I heard the story after a decade or more of family tellings, Mama (or even my grandfather) had managed to make it sound like he was an awkward albino boy coming to court my more refined and socially established grandmother. Their war-time marriage might have alienated her from her daughter except for the fact that my mother was fused fast to her mother’s hip, then, and for years to come.
Mama in her eighties was still a striking woman--though the deep blue violet eyes had faded, they still commanded attention when their icy blue focus was fixed to those of her listener. Her long thick black hair had thinned and was now covered with hair salon color that was befitting of her age—a warm, chestnut like color with tinges of gray, it was now short and permed to add back the body that the years had taken away. Though her once smooth olive skin now displayed a variety of moles, the regal way she held herself insisted they were marks of beauty.
Her five foot two and a half inch frame (which always seemed larger in the aura of her presence) was now rounded and her pear-shaped hips mimicked the jodhpurs she wore in pictures I’d seen of her as a young woman. Her belly was full like her breasts which hung braced against it when she hunched over in her reading posture, thin cigarette to her once full and red-lipsticked mouth. It was still easy to see the flare of her powerful appeal in the flash of her flirtatious smile.
Now peering over her newspaper at me, her eyes weary and jaw slack, she continued our earlier argument, once more trying to win me over through the force of her will (a willfulness for which she’d long been known, but which was today, clearly waning). Her tired words formed an ugly reality with which I was all too familiar, a reality born out of her own life and its long and painful relationship history. She wasn’t admitting what was clearly visible in the weakness of her posture and the tremulousness of her voice, and I wasn’t either. Perhaps registering the condition of this aging family matriarch was just too painful for us both to acknowledge.
In keeping with my own stubborn stance, I responded to the words themselves rather than acknowledging the gestalt from which they were spoken, making it easy for me to refute her rather weak argument. Instead of hearing the wisdom of her warning and trusting in the earnestness of her appeal above and beyond her history of attempts (with some success) at controlling and directing my life to her satisfaction, I chose to use my prime of life advantage to her advanced years in standing her down. She had no room to talk, I told myself--I could continue in this charade without shame.
Monday, September 17, 2007
The Storm
As the rain poured out of the cool mist and spattered in the parking lot she exhaled the smoke of her unfiltered Camel and looked sideways at her mother who was bracing herself weakly against the rough cedar wall, looking plaintively into her daughter’s face. “Are you just going to give up the rest of your life—all you’ve worked for, all you’ve struggled and sacrificed for—all you’ve ever said you wanted since you were just a little girl,” now choking on her tears, “all you fucking DESERVE—to take care of him and his self-centered demands? Is he going to be your child? Because you won’t be able to have one of your own, you know—he’ll be jealous!”
Her daughter shifted her weight forward and flicked ashes from her cigarette into the rain wishing she could as easily cast away the tension that had grown unbearable during the harrowing drive down from the summit of the mountain on whose midway shelf this small town stood. The rain had beat down on them unmercifully as she had driven, hands clinched upon the steering wheel, winding down the steep, unpaved road, barely more than a hiking trail, occasionally sliding towards the edge in the slippery clay and gravel. Her body had been frozen, spine incredibly straight as she leaned forward, eyes fixed on the road ahead. Her mother had been oblivious to the extent of her tension with the drive itself as their intense conversation had continued uninterrupted, and apparently, she’d been impervious as well to the percussion of the storm enveloping them, and their precarious position in it because of the heightened storm that had been going on inside them both.
“You deserve more than this,” the words came from a deep place in her she’d never touched into with her daughter before, maybe never touched into at all. They tore through a carefully grown membrane of separation strengthened through years of loving detachment into this intimate and painful place of empathy with the terrible dilemma in which her daughter struggled, a dilemma with which she was all too familiar. Recognizing this, she felt a pang of guilt in knowing her daughter had been a first hand witness to her own crippling ambivalence in a situation unarguably similar. Still, the mothering place that had opened up in her forced her with a fierceness to continue to engage in her daughter’s defense; as if, this time she might save them both from the ominous, inevitable outcome.
“It breaks my heart to see this happen to you. You know I’ve never tried to tell you what to do—I’ve always been able to depend on you for making good decisions. But this is something that is going to affect you for the rest of your life—it’s going to change the course of your life—and our relationship forever! I have to say this now to you, or I’ll never be able to forgive myself in the future. I would be remiss in my responsibility towards you as a mother and as someone who has loved you more than anyone could,” she choked back the tears, “if I didn’t entreat you to give to this decision all that incredible intelligence you have, Caitlin!” She had given her first daughter a name that came from the Irish roots she would carry in her bearing alongside the more dominant Italian ones expressed in her usually warm brown eyes, now looking bleached and tired.
The rainwater splashed up from the pavement onto their heavy hiking boots as they huddled for shelter under the eave of the roadside coffee house where they remained even as the temperature dropped so that the younger woman could continue to draw nicotine from the sweet smelling Camel to medicate the outbreak of anxiety she was no longer able to conceal. Her already pale face becoming thin and angular, the ridge of her jaw prominent, she turned to look at her mother with a plea for understanding in her eyes, “Mom, I’m trying to consider everything we’ve been through in the last year that could be a factor in the way he’s acting. I know I can’t go on with things the way they are, but I also feel like I need to give it a chance.”
“Oh, my god,” the mother said, as she thought of her own twisted experience so long ago and how it must have impressed upon her daughter the potential of repeating the same wounded response. With a gravity she hadn’t felt in years, she bore out the words that burdened her chest and burned as they pressed through her throat, while shaking her head in deep recognition of accountability, “I’m so sorry, Caitlyn—I can’t help but feel my relationship with Bill, and your being made so aware of it must have set you up for this!”
“Oh, Mom, let’s don’t go there please—I can’t talk about this anymore today!” She flicked the remains of her Camel from between her first two fingers using the cleanly clipped thumbnail that in her youth had been kept long and sharply pointed for digging into her sister’s arm when all else failed. These agile, quick fingers with cleanly clipped nails were joined to rosy, rough-skinned hands scrubbed frequently—hands of a surgeon which had gained strength and precision, her mother knew, and confidence in working with daily situations of life and death. The thirty hour days of intense demand for perfection in performance without food or sleep during her residency had conditioned her for living in this current turbulence. But how long could she continue at this pace? “Let’s go, said Caitlyn, it’s getting cold, and we need to get back.”
The older woman, feeling the weight of her sixty years in this moment, peeled herself from the cedar wall where her twenty year old Gortex rain jacket had adhered under pressure, pulled the hood over her head and stepped out into the rain. Her daughter pressed the lock release, got into her small, sporty Saab, and reached for the button to unlock the passenger door. They were quiet now, as it seemed there was no more they could say. The rain had slacked up and the state highway they pulled onto was smooth and well banked. The way ahead was clear, and around the curve bordered on the left by towering layers of rock, they could see Denver in the plain below.
Her daughter shifted her weight forward and flicked ashes from her cigarette into the rain wishing she could as easily cast away the tension that had grown unbearable during the harrowing drive down from the summit of the mountain on whose midway shelf this small town stood. The rain had beat down on them unmercifully as she had driven, hands clinched upon the steering wheel, winding down the steep, unpaved road, barely more than a hiking trail, occasionally sliding towards the edge in the slippery clay and gravel. Her body had been frozen, spine incredibly straight as she leaned forward, eyes fixed on the road ahead. Her mother had been oblivious to the extent of her tension with the drive itself as their intense conversation had continued uninterrupted, and apparently, she’d been impervious as well to the percussion of the storm enveloping them, and their precarious position in it because of the heightened storm that had been going on inside them both.
“You deserve more than this,” the words came from a deep place in her she’d never touched into with her daughter before, maybe never touched into at all. They tore through a carefully grown membrane of separation strengthened through years of loving detachment into this intimate and painful place of empathy with the terrible dilemma in which her daughter struggled, a dilemma with which she was all too familiar. Recognizing this, she felt a pang of guilt in knowing her daughter had been a first hand witness to her own crippling ambivalence in a situation unarguably similar. Still, the mothering place that had opened up in her forced her with a fierceness to continue to engage in her daughter’s defense; as if, this time she might save them both from the ominous, inevitable outcome.
“It breaks my heart to see this happen to you. You know I’ve never tried to tell you what to do—I’ve always been able to depend on you for making good decisions. But this is something that is going to affect you for the rest of your life—it’s going to change the course of your life—and our relationship forever! I have to say this now to you, or I’ll never be able to forgive myself in the future. I would be remiss in my responsibility towards you as a mother and as someone who has loved you more than anyone could,” she choked back the tears, “if I didn’t entreat you to give to this decision all that incredible intelligence you have, Caitlin!” She had given her first daughter a name that came from the Irish roots she would carry in her bearing alongside the more dominant Italian ones expressed in her usually warm brown eyes, now looking bleached and tired.
The rainwater splashed up from the pavement onto their heavy hiking boots as they huddled for shelter under the eave of the roadside coffee house where they remained even as the temperature dropped so that the younger woman could continue to draw nicotine from the sweet smelling Camel to medicate the outbreak of anxiety she was no longer able to conceal. Her already pale face becoming thin and angular, the ridge of her jaw prominent, she turned to look at her mother with a plea for understanding in her eyes, “Mom, I’m trying to consider everything we’ve been through in the last year that could be a factor in the way he’s acting. I know I can’t go on with things the way they are, but I also feel like I need to give it a chance.”
“Oh, my god,” the mother said, as she thought of her own twisted experience so long ago and how it must have impressed upon her daughter the potential of repeating the same wounded response. With a gravity she hadn’t felt in years, she bore out the words that burdened her chest and burned as they pressed through her throat, while shaking her head in deep recognition of accountability, “I’m so sorry, Caitlyn—I can’t help but feel my relationship with Bill, and your being made so aware of it must have set you up for this!”
“Oh, Mom, let’s don’t go there please—I can’t talk about this anymore today!” She flicked the remains of her Camel from between her first two fingers using the cleanly clipped thumbnail that in her youth had been kept long and sharply pointed for digging into her sister’s arm when all else failed. These agile, quick fingers with cleanly clipped nails were joined to rosy, rough-skinned hands scrubbed frequently—hands of a surgeon which had gained strength and precision, her mother knew, and confidence in working with daily situations of life and death. The thirty hour days of intense demand for perfection in performance without food or sleep during her residency had conditioned her for living in this current turbulence. But how long could she continue at this pace? “Let’s go, said Caitlyn, it’s getting cold, and we need to get back.”
The older woman, feeling the weight of her sixty years in this moment, peeled herself from the cedar wall where her twenty year old Gortex rain jacket had adhered under pressure, pulled the hood over her head and stepped out into the rain. Her daughter pressed the lock release, got into her small, sporty Saab, and reached for the button to unlock the passenger door. They were quiet now, as it seemed there was no more they could say. The rain had slacked up and the state highway they pulled onto was smooth and well banked. The way ahead was clear, and around the curve bordered on the left by towering layers of rock, they could see Denver in the plain below.
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