Thirty years ago, I was in Danville, Indiana getting ready to be married for the second time. It was going to be a small event, because I had been divorced some years earlier, and my parents wanted to keep everything discreet. David and I didn’t mind, because neither of us wanted a big wedding with a lot of bridal dust being kicked up on our behalf. My mother and sister had taken care of the few details that needed to be addressed, and I had flown in from Arizona a few days ahead of David so that we could be married in my parents’ back yard under the arbor that my mother had built and covered with roses.
My sister, Buffy, had an apartment in the old Victorian house that had once been the funeral home. I was staying with her, and we were enjoying having a visit, wedding or not. Late one evening, her upstairs neighbors rapped on front door, and motioned for us to follow. We slipped outside, went across the yard, and trailed behind them to the storm sewer that opened up on the street. There lined up in the opening were a half a dozen little faces, each belonging to a baby raccoon. They were not alarmed by our appearance, as they could have slipped easily back into the safety of the storm sewer. As it was, we got a great look at them, and at their parents who emerged to stroll back and forth. My sister got her camera, and everybody cooperated by letting us take their pictures.
A few weeks later when I remembered to develop the film that we had shot at the wedding, the photos we had taken at the wedding were memorable. But the first half of the first roll was filled with baby raccoons, and my sister’s long ago neighbors.
So, happy anniversary, David. Nobody would ever understand why baby raccoons remind me of our wedding.
My mother loved birds. She studied them, fed them, followed them, and learned to whistle their intricate calls. Not only can I not whistle, but I don’t have the attention span to learn and retain everything my mother knew about birds.
But, there is no question that I love them. Especially the ones in my backyard. This morning, I hauled a watering can to a lantana that I am trying to talk into surviving. As I trickled water from the can onto the bush, a hummingbird came down to try to drink. I told him that the stream was too strong for him, but he ignored me and tried anyway. I told him I would put a fresh batch of sugar swill into his little feeder. He sat on the lantana, a mere foot or so away from me, and waited for me to finish watering while he chirped that little tiny rusty hinge sound that hummingbirds make. Then he sat on the shepherd’s hook that holds his feeder, and waited for me to go to the house, refill the feeder, and return.
It was an encounter that my mother would have treasured, and probably made several phone calls about, one of them to me. I wish I could phone her today and say, “Guess what happened to me this morning?”
Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And thanks for the hummingbird. I am sure you pointed him my direction.
We built the house as quickly as we could, because the children we had adopted needed bedrooms and a place to play. The neighborhood was so raw and new that there were no neighbors. But as other houses were added, and other households took roots, we were different. Not the same. Out of place. My children didn’t look like all the rest.
Deep into the first summer, I was lonely, frustrated, and finished with my attempts to get anything to grow in the heat in Arizona. I heard the knock at the door, and answered it with a baby in my arms, and two on the floor at my feet. The little brown man who stood there said, “I will help you with your yard.”
I recognized him. He appeared next door every other week, and when he left at the end of a few hours, everything was manicured, perfect, and uniform. I said, “I don’t have much of a budget.”
He answered, “Budget? You mean money? I don’t need much.”
He was true to his word, as it turned out. Every other week, when he was finished with the perfection next door, he went quietly into my yard and teased things into growing. He brought starts of pepper plants, and anything that seemed colorful, hardy, and stubborn against the sun. Eventually, my back yard was a friendly place, with splashes of red and green.
I traded him a fountain that I was afraid my kids would climb, for a brick patio that still sits as tidy and even as it did a couple of decades ago. I still plant peppers, and the pomegranate tree that he liked trimmed and I didn’t is now bushy, out of control, and prolific.
Manuel was part of the warm months for years, until one day I got word that his wife had died, and he was so sad that he went home.
My grandmother had a little side business baking angel food cakes. She used to send me to the creamery, which was right up the street and around the corner from her house. I didn’t have to cross a single street, so I could go alone, the coins in my pocket to pay for the eggs that waited for me.
If Mrs. Mullins (my grandmother) had a big cake order in, the ladies at the creamery set aside the very best eggs (or the ones they deemed were the very best) for her. They were always in a special place in a box, right by the window, a slip of paper tucked in among the carefully stacked selections.
I carried everything home in a great big woven basket, and I never broke a single egg. I wouldn’t have dared. The cake business would have staggered under the loss.
The creamery was a fascinating place, too. All the farmers sent in their eggs in bulk, and that’s where they were candled, graded, sized, etc. I used to watch it all for hours at a stretch. I was welcomed, too, mostly by room being made for me, and whatever chair I could find. I always just sat there between two great big Indiana women, while they talked, their eyes never moving from the work they were doing.
I thought I could eventually work at the creamery, in my own cotton summer dress with the white apron tied over the front. I said something to my grandmother, who replied, “It sounds fine to me, but your mother might have other ideas.”
There is still something reassuring to me about the low hum of conversation exchanged by women as they are working, and the almost invisible way a child can be incorporated into the cadence of what they’re doing.
When my kids were young, my daughter described her dreams as “night movies.” I liked the term, and tucked it away for future use.
I usually don’t remember dreams, but I have had a couple that were more revelations than post-pizza epiphanies. Last night’s will remain with me for awhile.
Somehow, I had ended up somewhere far away from home. I was young, single, and about to be married off to somebody very young, and very rich. I insisted that I wanted to go back to Arizona and David, and resume my life with all it’s accompaniments — aging, limited funds, and unending challenges. I finally prevailed, and was transported back. In fact, I woke up to the dogs blasting through the dog door to bark at the quail family sitting on the wall, who simply turned their backs and continued eating. The kitchen sat dark, and the paper was still in the driveway. Morning had broken.
So today I’m here doing what I usually do, but somehow I feel as if I have chosen this life, these people I love, and this existence. I did in a dream. I believe I would do so again in the bright light of day, if the choice was mine to make.
When I was in junior high, they segregated the boys and the girls for health class. We didn’t particularly care for the arrangement, because half the fun of health class was watching each other make fun of the charts of the human body. However, one morning there seemed to be a particular note of urgency in the teacher’s voice when she urged us girls to take our seats quickly because we had something very serious to discuss.
We shot knowing looks at each other, certain that this class was to be the lecture about “not doing it” before we were married, because of the danger of disease or babies.
We were quiet, and Mrs. Hamilton began to speak — on the dangers of opening bobby pins with one’s front teeth.
We sat perfectly still for a moment, and then I made the mistake of looking at my friend, Sally. She did her famous imitation of a rabbit, and then we were all in hysterics for a couple of minutes. Mrs. Hamilton tried unsuccessfully to focus our attention once again on the threat of destruction lurking in our beauty rituals — until somebody pointed out to her that all of us used brush rollers with pink plastic picks. This was 1964, and nobody had been near a pin curl in several years — not even the creepy girls.
Mrs. Hamilton finally gave up in disgust at our callous disregard for advice that could save our good looks, and went on to the next part of the dental hygiene chapter, which concentrated on the correct method for brushing one’s teeth. We graduated from eighth grade without ever having savored the salacious details of diseased sex and illegitimate monster off-spring. Those pleasures of youth would be left to the high school to sort out for us.
We bought a sandwich today, to send off the threadbare week. I needed the break more than the food, and we picked a run of the mill place to sit for awhile.There were two women — sisters, I think — and one very young little boy seated between them across the room from us. What first attracted my attention to him was his head bobbing between the ample bodies of the two women. They talked to each other, but also to him as he ate his lunch, then dozed in the warm, sunny room, his head nodding first to one side, and then to the other. Somebody was always rubbing his neck, or patting him, and he had the look of a child who felt absolutely protected from whatever might lie beyond the window over the parking lot.After they finished their food and their conversation, they hoisted him up and wiped his face, then carried him still mostly asleep, draped over a shoulder. They stepped out into a world that needs more nice, big moms and aunts for little kids. And more sunny afternoons where nothing bad is going to happen to small children with such women to protect them.
We observed the holiday for two days this year — on Sunday and Monday. Joe was able to get home for the weekend, and we all spent time in the pool and sitting around talking and eating. It was an informal, virtually unplanned, and absolutely organic period of time.
I thought about Memorial Days when my sister and I were kids in Indiana, and the rituals we observed. When my mother’s mother was still alive, we drove the 40 or so miles west to her house early in the morning, and cut peonies which we put into glass jars. Buffy and I shared the responsibility for shaking getting the ants out of the peonies so we wouldn’t have extra passengers on the car ride to the cemetery.
Once we arrived at Forest Hills on the edge of Greencastle, the work began to clean up the family graves from the winter and early spring. We weeded and trimmed, and made sure everything was in good order. The faded Mother’s Day tributes were tossed, and the jars filled with peonies were placed on the graves, as close to the headstones as we could get. The little flags waved over the names of the veterans, and even as children we were aware of how many there were, even in a small town cemetery.
After we had driven the circular road through the cemetery and checked on the resting places of friends and neighbors, we headed for the network of countryroads that lurched through Putnam County. We’d find a place along a creek or the river, and we would stay for the day on blankets spread out in a shady spot, coolers and thermos bottles close at hand.
Buffy and I combed the creek beds for interesting rocks and crawdads, and we always stayed much later than we had intended. The ride home was filled with the smell of mud and leftover food. The grown-ups would talk, and my sister and I took it all in. Much of what I know about my family I learned pretending to be asleep, riding in the back seat of one sedan or the other.
Yesterday, I looked at my desert-raised adult children, and I knew that tipping rocks over in a creek is something that never became a ritual for them. And since most of our dead are in urns or graves on the other side of the country, trips to the cemetery here in Arizona are not a part of our usual routine.
But we still have a rhythm, a pattern of our own. It was Memorial Day, and much will be remembered.
I prefer small cafes and neighborhood diners to ”good” restaurants, and David knows this. So we celebrated Mother’s Day at a local place that is a short drive from where we live. It was a sunny day, and it was heating up fast.
On the bus stop in front of the cafe was an entire family, including adolescents. They held flowers, balloons, and assorted bags and bundles. The bobbing balloons said, “World’s Best Mom”, and “World’s Best Nana.” They were all on a mission somewhere, on the bus, approaching the heat of the day in the low desert.
I just sent out a small prayer that their bus wasn’t late, and that they all had a wonderful time, wherever they were going. Happy Mother’s Day.
When I started college in the 1960s, birth control was not available anywhere from anyone for any reason, unless you were married. Period. The pill had been released to the public, but the public needed to be in conventional unions sanctioned by society in general. And the pharmacist had to agree to fill the prescription, if one was brought to him. And believe me, it was almost always a him.
In my small college town, unplanned pregnancy was everybody’s worst nightmare — and it was a bad dream that became reality for many of my friends. Most of them married each other, and were plunged prematurely into relationships that often did not survive. Some did, of course. But they probably would have anyway.
One enterprising gas station in the neighborhood began stocking its men’s restroom with condoms, which were dispensed by a machine with a wheel that cranked down the purchase one at a time. I believe that each twist of the knob was a quarter. I do remember that the line outside the restroom at the Shell station on Friday night was long, and there were few cars at the pumps.
Eventually, when the student pregnancy rate become unwieldy enough, the campus physician stepped in and risked his job by making both the pill available through the student health center. Every one of us was diagnosed as having “problem periods” (they were especially problematic when they didn’t arrive on time). He also kept a supply of foam and condoms handy that were available on a “don’t ask, don’t tell” sort of basis. We were sort of left to our own devices over the summers, so we were sure to renew our prescriptions before we disappeared into our private lives for three months.
A few of us resorted to abortions. They became legal in New York during my junior year, and more times than I care to remember we drove a terrified coed to the airport to catch a flight east. We would also pick her up in the middle of the night when she returned home. It was a grisly ritual, and it claimed many victims — both already-born and unborn.
For decades I have been a proponent of birth control on demand. And the demand should not have to be above a whisper. If the request is being made, clearly the need is already present. Sexual activity occurs whether we think the circumstances under which it occurs are proper, or not. Sex can result in pregnancy, and pregnancy is not something that should be forced on a female as a penalty for “doing it.”
There’s something else that birth control can prevent, besides pregnancy: abortions. An abortion is never a positive answer, but is almost always selected as a seemingly lesser of several evils. Regardless of which side of the debate a person takes, it cannot be argued that a deliberate choice of a death of some kind has been made. Even pulling a dandelion results in the demise of a living thing.
I was never able to complete a pregnancy, so my husband and I eventually adopted three children — all products of unplanned teen-aged pregnancies. They arrived in the world with many challenges, and even as adults their troubled beginnings pursue them throughout their lives. I raised them with love and hope, but now I think of the middle-aged women who are their birth mothers, and I wonder often how they have fared. I wonder why they didn’t use the contraception that they could have purchased easily, and why they chose to have their babies instead of terminating their pregnancies. I wonder, but I would never ask, even if I had the chance. Some questions simply have no black and white answers.
