a poem as lovely as a tree

i grew up next door to a large house with a porch as wide as a hat's brim with a porch swing and as odd as it sounds, two large crouching stone lions flanking the front porch steps. i used to 'ride' those lions as a child, imagining myself in some great parade toward Noah's ark. two cast iron deer stood facing each other in the front yard (the lions and deer are still there), and according to historical documents, both lions and deer have been fixtures since before the Civil War. 

many years ago, when i was a child, trains traveled the tracks on the other side of the road from the house, and town legend always said that when a train blew its horn at midnight, the deer would run around the house. nobody mentioned the lions, who no doubt stood sentry as any proper lion should.

the yard surrounding this grand house was a child's playground. high in the branches of the giant magnolia — its branches reaching to the roof of the two-story house — provided the perfect lookout. on the ground, my friends and i swept the ground clean, then marked the walls of our houses with magnolia leaves and seed pods. when i think of it, it seems as if we played in this yard for hours, coming home only long enough to pee or to eat, then we were back at it again, our imaginations taking us far away from the limits of our tiny town.

but my favorite place in the yard was another tree — a sugar maple —and i most often went there alone. it was my all-season thinking tree — the mossy carpet beneath it in the spring providing a soft perch, the empty branches scraping the sky in winter the perfect pitch. but it was best in the fall.

as cool weather hit, i would watch for the leaves to change, from green to shades of yellow and green to one day suddenly, the whole tree caught fire, in reds and yellow and oranges of a particular beauty. i'd climb the tree then, caught up in that fire myself, listening to the wind whip the leaves and branches into a chatter, all the while knowing that because i lived next door to it, this was not exactly my tree. i was just borrowing it.

it belonged to hanna.

since i am the daughter of a particularly Southern woman, i was raised to call the elders in my life by proper salutations like miss or mrs... hanna, who was 16 years my mother's senior, didn't particularly like to be called "Mizz Kitchin," as my mother required.  that was her mother-in-law, after all. so through the years, she became "big hanna," her daughter "little hanna", though we would never have called the senior hanna that in greeting. she was just hanna, which always felt strange to me, but this is what she preferred.

(i admit to having been a little afraid of hanna as a child, though in her yard, she never gave me cause. not once do i recall her asking me to climb down from the mighty magnolia, or to pay heed to the camellias when i was playing hide and seek, or to take care with the lions or the deer because they were irreplaceable antiques. we played in the playhouse out back — filled with spiders and mice and the most wonderful old china tea sets that she never seemed to worry we would break.)

maybe my fear was that Hanna was a stickler for etiquette, and i was always worried that in her presence i would somehow not know how to do it right. a few times in my life i actually stayed with her in the big house, sleeping in antique twin beds in a room at the top of the stairs that felt much like stepping into a hollywood film set in the 1930s. with  beautiful beds and window seat, this room was not at all like the one i shared with my sister. when i went to bed, i sometimes tiptoed through the other upstairs rooms, imagining what it might be like to actually live there, imagining ghosts behind some of the doors i didn't dare open.

we ate supper at 5 in the afternoon (hanna's husband, buck, was a farmer), and hanna served crab au gratin in large scallop shells with so many pieces of silver on the table i didn't know what fork (or spoon) to use first.

years later, she hosted my bridesmaid's luncheon, the silver so polished and crisp linen so white i worried that i'd spill aspic on it and she'd never forgive me. (never mind that my sister and two sisters-in-law, all nursing newborns at the time, pronounced at one point that it was time for the cows to go home.)

hanna taught me to prepare the altar for communion, something that was center to her own heart. she would later become in the national Altar Guild of the Episcopal Church, which is no surprise to me. After her husband died, she became a leader among women in our small home church, serving as the first woman on the Vestry. again, no surprise.

and though i've never served them this way myself, no doubt if i owned egg cups i could serve the perfect soft boiled egg in one because of her.

she always acted as if she was slightly amused by this spit of a girl who lived next door and flitted from tree to lion to deer to playhouse (though as i recall i always asked for permission), and who was more comfortable outside her house than in. she had slight giggle whenever we talked, as if: I can't believe you don't know this as old as you are. didn't you learn anything from me? and she was likely right.

a few fall seasons after i married, hanna sent me note in her perfect pen, and she included a Polaroid of the maple i loved. "our tree is particularly beautiful this year," she wrote. our tree? until that moment i never imagined hanna might have been watching me out her window as i sat beneath her tree or climbed its branches. it was as if she knew how much it meant to me, and she was pleased to share it. (of course that meant that she had heard me singing from the swing on her porch, giving commands to the lions and deer. oh dear)

one grand lady, to be sure.

over the summer i learned hanna was dying, and a month ago on a short visit home, i peeked in to see her. she had moved from the big house years ago to a smaller one next door, and when i saw her sitting on the edge of her den, though her frame was somewhat diminished, her eyes told me she was still hanna. i reached to hold her hand, to kiss her forehead, and she seemed surprised, and only later i realized that in all the years i had known her, we had never actually touched.

some people are touch-ers, of hands, with hugs and kisses. hanna was not, at least to me, but i knew she cared for me. we both loved the same tree.

on that visit i learned that hanna and my mother had years before stripped the old dining room table so large it felt like it would seat two dozen (maybe it would), and how on those days that my mother sanded and stripped, she and hanna talked. she was sort of like an older sister to my mom, and i knew how much my mom would miss her.

and as the weeks passed i prayed that hanna would live to see our tree one more time.

the maples are turning now. when i drove into my parent's driveway on the day of hanna's funeral two weeks ago — she died a week shy of her 99th birthday — i looked at our tree. green still, but the tiniest tinges of orange forecast the fire that would soon catch.

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the joy between the lines

Story sustains me. I used to comb my parents’ wedding album for some hint of who they were as young people, thinking somewhere hidden in my mother’s crinoline or my father’s slim smile was a clue to what I should expect of a marriage of my own. 

I once asked them to write their story, to recall what life was like when they were my age and busy parents of young children. I suppose I hoped their own love story held truths for me, too, and that my husband and I could sustain our marriage as long, though at times it didn't seem to me that ours was as as happy. 

Married 60 years next year, their sense of romance lingers, clear though those old photographs have faded a bit. They have yet to give me the written clues I need to ensure my own marriage will last. Maybe they are waiting until the 60th to reveal it, when they will gather with kids and grands and great-grands — so they will only have to say it once.

My kids, I vowed years ago, will know their story and our role in it even if they don’t want to. I kept my daughter’s early history in a journal, recording my dreams for her each year on her birthday.  I gave it to her at 18, and that summer decided that a pre-college mother-daughter adventure was a good idea, a way to give those old journal words life. Somehow we made it without too much argument the 500 miles from our home in North Carolina to Georgia, angling down wide strips of painted road with thousands of other summer travelers on their own pilgrimages, to Perry, where her story began.

When I moved to Georgia at 23,  I was single and knew just one person, a girl I'd gone to j-school with at Chapel Hill who worked for the paper there. It was the first real risk I’d ever taken in my life.

A year later and married three weeks, I moved to Perry with my new husband — whom I'd met on my first Georgia day — into a two-bedroom apartment with gold shag carpet and a landing where our collie could sit and look out the window. 

On our visit, the Pea and I drove past that apartment, where on move-in day, Rick and I picnicked with his parents on the carpet while we waited for the moving van; where the first bread I ever tried to make fell flat; where we staged our first Christmas photo as a married couple. There’s the dog’s window, the stoop where he used to sit.

A large willow oak stood at the foot of the sidewalk that day, but I didn't remember even a sapling there. Maybe that was where I tied the dog the day he ran away. It had been 20 years.

“It looks like the slums,” my child said, noticing, as I did, the chipping paint, the uneven blinds in the windows. Her idea of a first apartment even at that time was the New York City brownstone she now lives in with her husband, where her own marriage is just taking root.

Her father and I bought our first chair together with wedding money when we lived in that apartment, and an antique table from a flea market. We found an old chestnut jelly cupboard in a barn and refinished it, a cupboard that now holds all my wedding crystal.

 Living so far away from my family, my young husband was all I had then, he and our collie, Bogey. Without a job to occupy me at first, Bogey and I would wait for him by the window fan in the Indian summer heat.

In those early months I put into practice what I’d thought marriage meant. I set the table with our new everyday dishes on a tiny veneered table we borrowed from my mother-in-law. I used the matching placemats we’d been given, pulled out new pots and improved on my mother’s spaghetti sauce, made New England pot roasts from my new Betty Crocker Cookbook. We bought our first Christmas ornaments, hanging them on a tiny tree in the living room. They remain my favorites, even now.

Shortly before our first anniversary, we bought a house, setting up the tripod in the front yard to take the first picture of our anniversary album as the gnats swarmed around our eyes. My husband's father had been operated on with a brain tumor the day before, and in the picture, Rick holds tight to me as if he will never let me go.

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Rick and I married 30 years ago today. We’d met on the evening of that first Georgia day a year and a day earlier. He'd hosted a party at his house for people at work, and call me crazy, but I knew I would marry him as he stood by the car door for me at the end of the evening and said his goodnights.

The writer attracted me at first, a man who could assemble words with grace and clarity and emotion. His genuine interest in my life and dreams kept me interested. In those early months he told me that he fell in love with me for the same reasons.
We said our vows in my hometown church in front of a small gathering of family and friends, he weeping as he said the words, me wondering if I could ever love this man as deeply as he deserved.

Only weeks after we met he had confessed to being in love with me, the kind of love that leaves you breathless; two months into our courtship he asked me to marry him. Ecstatic, I studied the pages of Bride’s magazines until they were dog-eared. But there was precious little in those magazines about anything but wedding. No advice, really, about how to live beyond that first beautiful fall day. Nothing at all about keeping what turned out to be a living breathing thing alive for years.

On our trip back to Perry, I wanted to tell the Pea something important, to give her the secret of how to build a long marriage. But why then? She didn't even have a boyfriend at the time, and to be honest, her dad and I were not in the best of places at that time, so I wasn't so sure I had any answer to share.

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Our mother/daughter team meandered through the streets of Perry that day in 2002 and she thought we were lost. 

“Why don’t we just forget it?” she said. I’m usually so good with directions but did feel lost, slowly creeping up a hill that looked vaguely familiar.

I will find the house if we have to stay until dark, I thought, but then there it was, the brick ranch with the planter out front where geranium blossoms as large as softballs froze red as a still life the day before the Pea was born. There is the picture window, trim still painted the beige I knew.

“We lived in that?” she asked, knowing nothing then of the blindness of new marriage. Suddenly I saw my husband in the back yard, spray-painting a $5 yard sale bassinette she would sleep in. There I sat in the corner chair of our bedroom, stitching his Christmas stocking: a Mother Goose house, the sleeping heads of children tucked and waiting for Santa to arrive. And there I sit at the living room desk writing a journal to my unborn child, reading Gone with the Wind for the first time, later bathing the baby on a sponge in the tiny bathroom sink. I couldn't imagine how I could have forgotten it all.

In that house, my husband and I began to bring real shape to our marriage, to establish routines we have kept all these long years. With no money for dates, we spent Saturday nights watching Sonia Henie skate across our tiny black and white television screen; played Scrabble until the tiles ran out. We pulled up the carpet to find polished wood floors, stripped the lilac wallpaper that covered the master bedroom walls.

The woman who lived in the house before us had made it her home for 30 years. She left us a note when she moved away, wishing us all the happiness that she and her husband had known in their life there.

Rick brings me coffee in bed on weekends, a ritual he began in that little house. If he came home during the day while I was at work, he would leave notes for me and the dog. I cherished them, though I often forgot to tell him so. And I'd almost forgotten about them until we visited that house. 
It was there we plotted our future together on weekend mornings with the dog at the foot of the bed. Babies, better jobs, books to write. And it was on one of those Sundays together that the Pea herself went from "a twinkle in God's eye" to real.

As I sat on the curb outside the house, it hit me: We had lived the life housed in the stitches of the Mother Goose stocking, right down to the daughter asleep in the attic. Our kids were almost grown, the business thrived. I had written books in the house with windows looking over an azalea-lined back yard, bluebirds flitting in and out. And I'd almost missed the dreams revealed in those stitches, for the fact of living them out.

I longed to linger there, to peek into the windows of our little house, to find a young man who once on a rainy winter Sunday evening combed the shops in town for a frozen chocolate pie to share with his expectant wife. I wanted to watch him mow the zoysia in the back yard, walk the dog, powder the baby, to drink him in again like I did when we were young.

Turns out, what I thought was my daughter's trip to find her story, was actually not hers at all. And I felt ashamed that far too many times I had not done my part to sustain the joy between the lines.

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What is it that happens in marriage, makes its inhabitants needle the warts instead of the wonder? Too often, we choose to overlook the wonder, when the warts are so much easier to see.  

A lasting marriage — 30 years, 50, or 60 like my parents — is two people, a life together dreamed about and lived out, shared and fought over, even when it is not always happy. The word, happy, seemed so easy to define when I stared in the bright faces of my parents captured in sepia on their wedding day. Arm in arm and smiling. Happy. But now with these 30 years of my own marriage behind me, I think I finally understand.

Though the margins of our life together have stretched well beyond our hopes — and too often to uncomfortable limits — the reasons that pulled us together in the first place are still recognizable at our core. 

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Oct. 10, 2011: As the Pea and her Prince stand at year 2.5 of their own happy start, here is what I will say to her now: Hold onto your hope, savor your story, or you might just lose it in the middle of living it out. 

We didn't, in the end, lose ours. Now I know that reality sometimes changes the shape of your hope, becomes your history and redefines your dreams as you are living them out. Though through the years it might have looked to us like we might unravel, we didn't, in the end, let go of that happy core. 

 

 

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just a teaser

today i'm over on 3x3x365.blogspot.com as a guest blogger for Patti Digh, author of Life is a Verb. you can find some of the rest of the story here on writemuch later on today.

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of spitfires and the written word

my friend nell, in her early 80s, and is a spitfire. widowed a few years ago — after having lived some 60 years with the love of her life — she's challenging herself to try new things. she's been to Russia, traveled the Seine and the Rhine rivers by boat, taken her turn at singing on the small stage, been in a mission trip.

and she is writing. i am teaching her how in a writer's group at my church, which is not altogether unlike other writing groups i have been part of in my career, except for the fact that most of the people in the group (including nell) proclaim quite loudly that they are NOT writers. i ignore them so we write anyway. and since we are a church class, we write about faith and doubt and just trying to be good Christians in a world that too often seems weary of the whole idea.

we've been on hiatus for the past year, and i have felt refreshed to see the regulars like nell take their seats on Sunday mornings along with a few new faces. among us are several professional writers like myself who nurture the newbies. nell is no newbie, but she is always reminding us that she is (this, having written poems and stories enough to fill a notebook.) our running joke is that the pros show up to class with no paper or pencil, while the newbies sit ever ready, a crisp clean sheet of white in front of them as we begin. (ever the school marm, i bring a box of no. 2s in case the muse should strike.)

in past years, our amoebic group produced books of meditations for the season —Advent or Lent — and have shared them with the congregation. few of the readers can know the work — and sometimes the boxes of Kleenex — it takes to complete each piece.

we've looked at Advent for what will be our fifth year now, and though we are all expectant and excited about Christmas, the work of the class includes coming up with something new to say that hasn't been said for a two thousand years already. so as we look look once again at Mary and Joseph, at Gabriel and the shepherds, each week we ask ourselves questions like: what would we do if an angel came to visit us and told us we would be the mother of God?

well. i for one would emphatically say that menopause means it's not possible, thank God, even by the power of the Holy Spirit. and if she insisted that nothing is impossible when the HS is involved, i would whine that i bet we put our heads together and come up with something else. (one year, melanie pondered not just the angel's words in her heart, but just how many 13-year-olds had to be asked before one of them said yes.)

on Sunday, the prompt was this: think about the path you imagined yourself traveling, but how God had a different idea.

Nell, it turns out, wanted to be a doctor. with an acumen for science and having had pneumonia half a dozen times in as many years, little Nell was sure of her path. though she didn't know any female doctors at the time, she was hopeful she would find the way toward her dream. and then she fell in love with the man she would care for years later as he faced Alzheimer's. and her course her new path was set. 

as she read — and later talked — about how women of her generation acquiesced to their men, i looked around the room at the other women present. melanie, who turned 40 this year, will run the Chicago marathon on Sunday and just completed a triatholon in the pouring rain. She is the mother of three girls under 8 and the wife of our priest and has never asked for permission to do anything. beth chose career over family years ago, and has discovered because of our writing exercise that she is really just fine with that choice, which was a surprise to discover.

nell is happy with her life, but she has always felt something was missing. and though she knows she'll never be a doctor now, she has used her resources to establish a scholarship for some young person who might well be. beth has never had to ask permission from anyone to accomplish what she has as a reporter and editor. and now she is moving forward on a new path, discerning what her role as a Christian might be.

it likely never occurred to melanie that she should ask anyone's permission. she just does it. what might her girls grow up to be like with a mother who takes charge of herself like that?

how different are these generations of women, and how rich it is that they share their stories and learn from each other. as i have learned from each of them.

i have always felt i was on the writing path. and though that path has meandered from newspaper photographer to feature writer to freelancer to teacher to volunteer editor to author, now all the tendrils seem to be gathered into one. and some days it feels as if that's God's doing.

there have been many times when i didn't think i was getting anywhere. but when it felt like i was trudging through the mud of it, my husband would do something really wonderful for me. like the Christmas, years ago, when he gave me a bright white filing cabinet — a place to keep my words in some sort of order. you'd have thought he'd built me an entire office from the way this small gift made me feel. and for a birthday some years later, he gave me a glitzy new IMac. then threw me a book party when i finally wrote that book. even tried to sell one of my books to a barber giving him a hair cut.

when he first started reading my stories and made comment, i would cry because i thought he was criticizing me. only later did i understand he was trying to make me a better writer. trying hard to toughen me up.

in truth, my own dream of being playwright or novelist or essayist has not been waylaid by God sending me off in a different direction so much as by my own sense of inadequacy — and maybe not listening to the voice whispering in my head.  sure there was that occasional editor who wouldn't return my calls, the project that fell flat, that great enemy of the written word —time (too much or too little.) but in the end, i'm the biggest unnudgeable boulder on this road of mine.

but i still have that filing cabinet. and writing friends who help lure the story out of me, even when i fight hard to keep it in. and the memory of my father's voice, telling me this is what i should be. and a class like the one that meets each Sunday morning, when i get to listen to the stories of other people's lives and in the process learn so much more about my own.

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