of happy hearts and glorious things

as a child i used to sit on the living room floor, slide out the bottom drawer of my parents' secretary until the brass pulls clicked softly against the wood. inside the drawer were treasures — baby books for my siblings and me, old photograph albums showing my brother, sister and me as babies, and a creamed-colored book with gold-leafed edging that contained evidence of my family's beginnings.

it was my favorite — my parents' wedding album — and i would spend hours studying the photographs of the day my parents pledged their troth to each other. my mother, striking in her ballet-length crinoline, my father handsome in his white dinner jacket. they stood with their back to the camera in the center aisle of a church the likes i had never seen. large stone columns stood sentry as my brim-hatted grandmothers, my dapper grandfather and dozens of family and friends gathered around them.

they looked like teenagers, holding each other's hands as the young rector gave God's blessing over their union. (within 10 years, this same man would become bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina. would confirm my brother, my sister and me some years later in our home church.)

i studied the sepia images — the lights hung from the ceiling, the carved fretwork over the pulpit, the stained glass windows, stone floors and marble altar, those stone arches standing watch, protecting them from what lay outside the walls. and as i studied, i wondered what it might be like to sit in a church as grand as that. 

when i was 32, the sepia photograph faded into my reality, and i came to stand myself in the stone aisle of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, feel the grasp of those arches and knew i was home. my husband and i had just moved our young family to winston-salem from atlanta, where though we attended church most every Sunday, it never felt quite right. 

that first Sunday morning in Winston, we rose, not questioning where we would go. we set out early — getting to church in atlanta took 45 minutes — and arrived for the 9 o'clock service before the early service had even let out. our five-minute commute left us time to head back home, grab some coffee and start over again, and we marveled at our good fortune. on our return trip, we still arrived early enough to take the kids to Sunday School and the nursery, so the two of us could sit for an hour in peace.

uncertain of this new pace and space, we walked into the back of the church and there it was, the picture i had studied all those years ago. the place where my parents got their start, where i first became a twinkle in God's eye. and that's when home hit me.

that first day, the teacher in my 5-year-old's sunday school class invited us out for hot dogs. in the weeks after, we joined the young families supper club, even hosting it at our house. so easy it seemed to make friends, when in atlanta i struggled to make two close friends in four years.

but here, i wrote essays on my mornings at home, took the dog to show and tell at preschool, walked the baby with my next door neighbor whose son was the same age as mine. it was on the way to st. paul's that one day i found myself singing alone in the car: oh i feel so very happy in my heart, because i was.

we would be there only 18 months. 

the day we found out we would have to move, i came early for preschool pickup, walking into the darkened nave so i could spend a few quiet moments under those stone arches. i found my pew, kneeled, begged out loud for things to be different, for God to let us stay... we had just really gotten started in this place where it seemed so easy to be. i cried a bit...might have even screamed in the empty space, but i can't truthfully admit that now.

the arches didn't seem to hear.

we moved, started a new life, found a new church that has become more of a home to me than St. Paul's ever was. my daughter barely remembers her time here, and my son not at all.

but still.

///

ten days ago, we were in town for a family wedding. finding ourselves with an idle hour or so, i asked my mother if she'd like to go to her old church. it would be her first trip there in 61 years (61 years and two weeks, she reminded me.) so we drove up the meandering hill toward the church, and i almost lost my way.

'it's that way,' she said, pointing, never minding that she was 24 years old when she last made this trip. 

the stone bell tower stood right where we'd left it, and i hoped that a June saturday meant the doors would be open, though when we checked they were locked. we took a picture of her in front of the bell tower anyway, talked about that day so long ago in her life, then slowly made our way to the car.

just then i spied a man, keys jangling from his belt, slip out the side door. i approached, asking if there was any way we could get inside, and he pointed to the door he would happily unlock for us.

'take your time,' he said, slipping away quickly as we walked into the narthex. mama edged her walker onto the stone floor of the nave and stood, taking it all in.

at just that moment, the organ shouted through the stone, "Glorious things of thee are spoken," and i couldn't help it, the tears just came. i watched mama, her own eyes wet, but her mouth forming a smile.

///

my husband and i have a habit when we visit churches of slipping into a pew to say prayers for our family. from the corner of my eye, i saw him edge into a pew in the front. (didn't he remember that we always sat in the back?). i didn't want to leave mama, so i motioned to her to move down the aisle toward the pulpit.

she shook her head no, held onto the frame of her walker, listening.

"glorious things of thee are spoken/Zion city of our God; he whose word cannot be broken/formed thee of his own abode; on the Rock of Ages founded, what can shake thy sure repose? with salvation's walls surrounded, thou may'est smile at all they foes."

as i listened, i thought about all my mother had seen of this world from her last day in this church — her wedding day — to this one, the day her grandson would be married. i imagined what she might be thinking of that life well lived, the heartache she must be feeling without my father by her side this time. my family began on this particular rock, and God had formed it as he saw fit, and in my thinking, though Daddy isn't with us physically anymore, the fit was just right.

there is a line later in the hymn that says: safe they feed upon the manna, which he gives them when they pray.

my family has prayed plenty, has seen plenty of manna in its time, and on this day both my mother and i felt full to bursting with it.

'i'm ready to go,' she said, just as the organist ended hymn 522 and moved on to another. as my husband helped mama, i walked up the aisle to about the fifth row on the right and took to my knees. i asked for blessings on my nephew's new marriage, just as God had given my parents so many blessing they'd begun to feel first in this place. i asked for guidance, for blessings on my children and gave special thanks for my family gathered to celebrate, when for so many weeks we have felt so little joy. and i thanked God for this moment with my mother, etched forever in my mind like the stone arches of this beautiful church that was built the year my parents were born.

'tis his love his people raises over self to reign as kings: and as priests his solemn praises each for a thank offering brings.'

glorious things indeed. amen. 

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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i will always love my mama, she's my favorite girl

my mother sits in a wheelchair beside my father, her gloved hands holding his. she wears a brilliant blue dress just the color of her eyes, though it's obscured by the yellow gown we all have to wear now when we visit daddy. i watch the two of them, their eyes meeting as they nod to each other and speak a silent language only those who have been married for almost 61 years can understand.

she has been here at his side, most every day since that first day — february 6th. before the day that changed so much, i'd see her walking down the hall in her crisp denim pants and neatly pressed blouse or tailored jacket and i'd think: wow, i wish i could be that beautiful. in these weeks since daddy has been in the hospital, mama has seemed to grow more beautiful. she waves at the nurses in the hallway, the members of the lift team, the care partners —  by now she practically knows all their names and they know her, a quiet but kind woman whose beauty they see, like i do, in how she cares for my dad. 

now though, she can't get herself here, has to depend on others and on someone else's schedule to see the man she has been married to since she was 24. 

it seems impossible to think that they are now both on such difficult but parallel paths. daddy works each day to regain the strength he had when he walked into the hospital so many weeks ago. mama works to walk again, too, but for entirely different reasons.

in the middle of our day-to-day journey, there is something to celebrate. mama turned 85 years old today, and we had a party, just like we might any other birthday, with a picnic lunch in a side room and with yellow roses requested specially by my daddy, with cards. but we also celebrated by watching her learn to wheel herself down the hallway toward my father, so together we could cheer him on to lift his arms, shrug his shoulders, breathe on his own.

this might be a new challenge for mama, but it is not the first. 

betty jean mccormick byrum was born on april 12, 1928 and raised to be strong. to stand up for herself when need be, to fight back, even when she didn't feel like it. she has shown this to me over and over as i have grown up. when my father was sick and dying at 39 — and yet he didn't — when her family presented her with challenges — and especially right now. 

she. carried. on.

i wish i had gotten that from her. the pick everything up and steady the load and keep on walking kind of thing. she did a lot of that, the mother of three and wife of a doctor who was often with other people's families. she picked it— us — up, and gave us a pretty wonderful life.

i tend to leave life all on the floor — as evidenced by my bedroom closet and my home for the past few months — hoping someone else will come behind me and make everything all straight. usually mama. when i was a child, she usually did.

there have been moments in my life though, when i called on my 'mama' instincts and took care of the impossible. all by myself. picked myself up and moved through what i didn't want to, because i come from her stock.

now it is my turn again.

you know i am a storyteller. this comes sometimes much to my parents' chagrin. might i tell too much? in their eyes probably... i hope only to tell the important.

mama is not one to share many stories about her childhood. i can remember, though,  times when she shared a bit. how roosevelt died on her birthday. how she met my father at a medical school dance. (and my, was she beautiful.) how they lived their first married year with a murphy bed.

my favorite betty jean childhood story is the one when my grandmother sent her to the store to buy a loaf of bread, but wouldn't you know it? a new movie — "the wizard of oz" — was showing at the local theater. the 11-year-old betty jean rode her bike to the store, got the bread, and several hours later  — maybe she sat through two showings — she emerged from the dark theater, too late for my grandmother's sandwiches, but she was a changed little girl.

weren't we all changed by that movie? our grayscale worlds turned suddenly into color by the wind?

in these past weeks, it feels like the wind has taken our colorful world and upended it, picked up our settled family home with it and crashed it down so rakishly that we don't know which end is up. and the whole world has turned to grayscale again.

we are not alone. a church friend one day this week said her 97-year-old father had the same injury as my mom, her own mother already in 24-hr care. she wept, telling me her story, and all i could do was hug her. i understand. add her to my now pages-long prayer list for families like my own.

my siblings and i have often joked that our family is just so beige. to the outside world i am sure that's how it seems. we tend to cling close, though i am the one who puts the story out there. neither of my parents have been comfortable with my writing about them from time to time, but i hope one day they will understand why.

today is my mother's birthday. all the grandchildren called her, and one even came to visit. she sat next to the love her life and held his hand. and he told her he loved her, one more time. 

it was an honor to be with them as they shared their own private celebration.

today we celebrated my mother and my father. brave souls, both.


ps: a favorite college song was 'i'll always love my mama' by the intruders: watch the video here  and dance!

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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richochet, II

there is an apartment building in chelsea in NYC with a glass front (well, there are thousands), but a few years ago, the new york times magazine featured it in a photograph, which i can't find now. but in each backlit apartment in that small world, simultaneous living played out before the viewer's eyes. dancers practicing their steps. mothers feeding supper to anxious toddlers. a cellist leaning into her instrument. a lone woman watching tv. floor after floor, side-by-side, people lived out their lives unbeknownst to voyeurs, or to those who shared their walls.

i have been thinking about this for weeks, now, how on any given day at the same time of day, my children are doing one thing and i am doing another, far away from them, the walls between us never melting away. how when my son makes a phone call to a client in raleigh, my daughter walks the dog to doggie daycare on the upper west side in manhattan on her way to work, as my husband checks the drudge report for the morning headlines and i wipe up the kitchen before heading out to work.

parallel lives, it feels like. for this family who used to share the same space, once upon a time. now when we do, it's for usually for a few hours — on a church pew, around the kitchen table, opening presents on Christmas morning. a few hours. not nearly enough.

i will confess that until recently, i have not thought too much about the parallel life i had been living with my parents. every few nights i'd call home and find out about their days, and though i worried sometimes about them driving to and from the doctors office, or not having enough to do, i didn't picture them living life out in a lighted box next to my own lighted box.

in the past two months since daddy has been hospitalized, we have developed a new routine for our lives, all of us in our little lighted boxes. my brother works, my mother drives back and forth, my sister calls, comes home when she can. we have shared the lighted box at times, all of us converging in whatever glass-fronted room holds my father at that moment.

those back-lit boxes came back to me the other night, as i thought back to my wednesday, a week ago. how at lunch time, my husband came to my office to share a hot lunch of beef stew and green beans with me, while my mother sat in my father's hospital room talking to him, watching him breathe in and out. how my brother, at the same time, walked the corridors of the hospital to see patients as sick as my dad. how my sister, back in iowa was going through her day.

at 2 p.m., if you could hold up the glass box and look at our parallel lives, here is what you'd see: my brother talking on the phone with my mother. me sitting at my desk, sending emails, making lists for the rest of my day and another of what was in my father's doctor's bag years ago. my sister likely texting her daughter, who was on her third day back at work after the baby. we all stood in our separate boxes, miles apart. 

the moment i learned mama had fallen, i felt the walls fade away and suddenly we all stood in the same room again. this family who once-upon-a-time sat at the kitchen table and shared fondu on saturday nights. who themselves shared the church pew on Sundays, who warmed the seats as my brother played basketball in the old high school gym, who once rode all the way to newport, rhode island in a tiny ford torino, just to see where my parents had once lived. 

sharing the box these past weeks with my birth family has been something powerful, even in the middle of this very hard thing. in the box together, we make jokes, we pray, we look at old pictures, we cry. we laugh at the absurdity of what we face together, what my parents face.

this week, we have sort of retreated to our boxes again. my mother lies in a hospital room down long hallways and up elevators from my father. i'm back at work, as is my brother, and my sister moves between our parents, having her turn at trying to keep up with both of them, though neither is moving very far.

my sister-in-law told me the other day that i had to finish richochet, because it didn't end as most of my stories do. i have thought about that, too. but how to end a story that just doesn't have one yet? i wish i could invent something, but anything i dream up means i am just fooling myself.

and so i will just keep going in my own little lighted box, watching as the walls fade away every now and then when my family gathers. and i'll keep writing the un-endable story, until the words finally push me through.


writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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sing around the campfire, pt. 1

when i was 9 my my sister came home from a two-week sleep-away camp. she talked about the campfires, the dances with boys, the group picture, something called canteen, the sailing and the songs, and about all the people who were now her friends from other places. she didn't mention kp.

i didn't know anyone from another place besides a couple of cousins, and wondered what it might be like to meet folks i hadn't known all my whole nine years.

the week before she left, she packed a footlocker full of shorts and matching tops, sneakers and bathing suits — another thing i couldn't imagine — packing your whole self up and willingly spending 14 days away from family. where you hadn't already figured out that a witch did not in fact live in the linen closet. where you couldn't fall off to sleep listening to the sounds of your parents in the family room. she was the bravest girl i'd ever known.

i must have asked to go. surely they wouldn't have just sent me to camp without my permission. parents didn't do that, did they? but there my mother was, washing and pressing all my clothes into crisp squares (she has this habit), and we packed the metal trunk full, with socks and clean underwear, stationery and stamps, leaving just enough room for the sweatshirt i was bound to want from the camp canteen.

i had never been away from home for more than a night or two.

but we set off through the countryside. it was a long way, turning down a sandy road in the middle of pines, tall and straight. we drove by a spot in the sandy pine forest where my sister said the devil left his footprints. right outside an episcopal church camp? i hoped there was a fence strong enough to keep the devil out.

suddenly, we were there, driving through the gate, and i looked up at the sign: camp leach. leach. would there be leeches in the water? I wondered. (i doubt i'd learned to spell it right by then.)

we were barely passed the first cabin when my sister jumped out of the car, headed to find her counselors. i stayed close to mama, unsure. i could see the river before me, white clapboard huts scattered about, the masts of small day sailers peeking up from the water. 

i don't remember much about that day. just mama making up my bed and me climbing to the top, where i could see into the bathroom and the showers where there were no doors.

i did know somebody — a girl in my class from church — she was supposed to be my friend— but i was scared of her most of the time. i looked around at the strange faces that would be my cabinmates for the next two weeks and missed the faces of my friends from home.

i think it must have been at supper when the end of my adventure began. i don't drink milk, and so when they put a carton in front of me at the table, i ask for water. nothing doing. drink the milk. and then i started thinking i'm sure about how mama would put a little vanilla and sugar in my milk to get me to drink it. that thought led to watching mama fix supper and the softness of her apron and it was all pretty much over by then. and the tears fell.

somehow i got to sleep that night, and by day things seemed just a little bit better. i met a girl named penny and took her picture with the camera i had brought. 

i can't tell you when it turned again, but somehow i found myself on the phone with mama, and i was wailing. despite the fact that the counselors had taken me sailing and swimming and walking around the camp on my own personal tour. we'd had our camp picture made and heard ghost stories by the campfire and i was there for all of it — for a whole three days. but by that time i'd had enough of trying not to miss home, so there i was again on the phone, begging, pleading. come get me. i'm dying here.

and so she did. 

oh i know you're saying right about now that the only thing to cure a homesick camper is to leave her there and make her tough it up. well, that's probably what my mother should have done, but i can pretty much bet that even when she wasn't on the phone with me she could hear my crying, two hours away, through those pines. and you can bet that i was making everyone around me miserable.

she drove the wagon into the camp yard and i was waiting, my trunk packed inside the cabin. my sister once again combed the grounds looking for her counselors, drinking in the smell of the Pamlico, begging just as hard that my mother let her stay in my place. 

go get your trunk, mama said, and her words melted into me. i was going home. finally. I ran up the short steps and somehow filled with a new-found strength lifted that thing up by myself and straggled out the door.

that's when i saw the dust clouds. clouds kicked up by mama's station wagon, headed toward the gate. she was leaving me. it was not her finest moment.

i guess she thought seeing her would be good enough medicine, that it would buy her another three days without me at home. days of quiet. if i had been my mother, that's what i'd have thought, too. 

but that's what you get for thinking. i was what today would be called a high-strung child, and that translated into a loud and crying one most of the time. at that point in my life, i hadn't found my writing voice, but i had found my voice, surely i had.

so i saw those dust clouds, and i used that voice. screaming. don't. go. don't. mama. wait. please. take. me. home. it embarrasses me to admit what a baby i was.

and i ran. faster than i had ever tried, ran to catch up with her. i can't tell you whether i was running with that damn trunk or if i dropped it in the sand. 

then i saw the breaks, lit up like the tree in the early hours of Christmas.

she stopped, and i got in the car, satisfied that i would no longer be held prisoner in this place where i couldn't get so much as a glass of water, and i was going home.

whether you are the mother or the child in this story, there are no good answers. yes, she should have made me stay (probably never should have come in the first place, or shouldn't have thought i was ready or whatever. ) and no, i shouldn't have cried until all that was left was the driest of sobbing in order to get my way. i don't know about you, but i've been that mother who no matter what i did, it would be the wrong choice. and as for the child, sometimes there are no good answers there, either. no good way to get around what you're feeling except feel.

i was grounded for the rest of those two weeks, where i was content never to be too far from my mother's soft apron as she stood at the kitchen sink. i never went back to camp — never wanted to — but i suppose i am glad to have provided my family with a source of laughter whenever we gather around the holiday table.

my children went to camp and loved it, though when i left them each time, i spent the first 10 minutes crying my eyes out, imagining them feeling abandoned. but they never called home.

in the years since, i've found my voice and learned (sometimes) to temper my tears, so i could leave home, finally, for more than a sleepover. and on a warm July day in 2001 i dropped the kids off at camp and went on an adventure of my own. for five days i traveled coastal north carolina and virginia, promoting my first book. 

on the third day of the trip, i stopped in a small bookstore in elizabeth city, where a line had already formed near the door. i began signing books for students at a local school, one of whom had the last name 'spence'. oh, i knew a girl once named penny spence I said aloud. a suddenly a voice near the back of the line lifted above the din.

'i'm penny spence,' said the brown haired girl i had photographed in front of our cabin way back in 1967. 'do i know you?'

'well, probably not,' i said. 'we went to camp together, but i only stayed three days.'

she didn't remember me, but that was ok. that meant she didn't go home from camp telling her mother about the crazy girl who cried all the time and ran after her mother's car, screaming to beat the band.



writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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the glory and the power of it

my grandfather sold cars for over 50 years but he didn't believe in power windows. they would break too easily, he was sure, so i'm pretty sure as long as he was selling my parents cars, the windows had to be cranked down by hand. imagine. 

one summer night when i was 9 or so, Mary Wallace, my friend Lydia's mother, drove up in the driveway to show us her new car. and oldsmobile. plush seats, FM radio (Bigdaddy didn't believe in that either,) and windows that moved up and down as if by magic. 

'let's go for a ride!' she said giggling, her eyes as wide as her grin. we piled in and off we went, no doubt rolling the windows down and up in the summer air so much so that they might have broken. but they didn't.

Lydia's mother was fun like that. giggling at us girls as we made onion soup on her front porch from wild onions that grew in the yard, played dress up in her shoes. (we piled the onions in a tin bucket along with dirt and water and left our concoction on the front porch — which nobody ever used — to rot in the spring sun.) giggled as we created beauty parlors on her side porch, ate Oreos in her kitchen (no more than two.) crafted barbie doll houses with wall-to-wall carpet, new in the 70s don't you know, from scraps scavenged from her new house. the only thing that would warrant her ire was if we woke the baby. and there were always babies in the house.

birthdays at her house might mean traveling 40 miles to be on television... Lydia's birthday is in November, and so backyard parties like the rest of us had in summer were out of the question. in my memory, we rode across the miles for what felt like a day, then we marched behind WITN-Y the Marching Hobo, watching ourselves on the black and white screen, LIVE. now THAT was a party.

in first grade, she visited our classroom toting a harpsichord, then sat down with it in her lap and made music, playing the songs from our music book. whose mother could do that?  i can see her fingers now, picking out the songs, her voice taking on the words like a bird singing on the clearest of days. the very idea that mothers could be something other than mothers changed me. i didn't imagine that as work, but joy.

she called me su-su. i don't cotton to nicknames, but this one made me feel as if i were part of her brood. she sang at my wedding, my favorite hymn. "Lord of all hopefulness, lord of all calm, whose trust ever childlike, whose presence is balm..."

betty jean, left, with mary wallace

i remember standing there at the chancel steps as she sang the words i had so often sung to myself in the dark when i felt alone. in her voice, the words were balm to a nervous bride. she had known me all my life, and here she was, singing at my wedding. calming me, just because she was there.

Mary Wallace sang for countless brides, including her own daughter... and it was always an event. not to mention funerals— sending her husband off to heaven with a personal rendition of the Lord's Prayer.

she wrote me letters as i grew older, when i wrote stories she liked, and i still have one or two notes i cherish. she was proud of me, of who i had become. i could recognize her handwriting as if it were my own mother's. 

mary wallace, left, sending sparkles

three years ago, she came to my daughter's wedding. fitting, since my child had been in her daughter's wedding some years before. she stayed to the end, lighting sparklers and cheering the newlyweds on. i could not have had this special day without her. there Lydia is, too, in the checked dress in the picture there, celebrating with her mother as we sent the Pea off with her Prince. 

a couple of years ago i came home one day to a message on my answering machine. 'don't you call me back,' she said, but don't you dare take me off your Christmas card list!' (we routinely lampoon the standard holiday newsletter, and she loved the humor of it, knowing about my family, keeping up.) and i have kept her on my list, still.

this year, i won't get to. she died on Friday, and yesterday, we said goodbye.

if funerals can be great, this was. favorite hymns, stories that made everyone laugh and cry a little, and in the end, her own voice. the voice that celebrated and soothed so many, did all this and more for all of us gathered, once again to grieve for her. there she was, singing the Lord's Prayer, all the glory and the power of it, forever. and we were all blessed by it.

Lydia is not the crier i am. get up and get going, she would often say to me when i faltered. but yesterday, i had the chance to hold her up a little. after the service she looked at me with red eyes and said: "Mama would probably be upset with me, but i had to hear her voice in church one last time."

upset? i doubt it. just filled with joy to have a few last words for her brood.

writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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sooze in the city — or old hat, new hat, pretty little blue hat

just as my plane circled manhattan island, i thought of the first time i'd seen it, not quite this view, but far enough away to see the beauty in all that concrete and steel scraping at the clouds. back then, as a child, i wanted SO MUCH to get a closer view. to walk through the manufactured canyons, looking up and around. my thoughts on saturday of this week weren't so different, because this time i knew there was a piece of me already down there, just west of the edge of central park. my own blood and bone shaping the jawline of a beautiful girl who herself might just be watching the skies at that moment, waiting for me.

it feels a little old hat by now, these occasional trips into 'the city' to see my child. each year in the past six i have made the trip alone, with friends and family, wandering those canyons with her, seeing the city through her eyes. though we made a few mother/daughter trips together years ago, now — as she predicted what feels like so many years ago — this place to her is home. 

she's lived in more than a few places in her years of working in nyc. last fall my Pea and her Prince, moved into the 10th floor of a pre-war brownstone on a busy thoroughfare on the upper west side. after a half-dozen visits to this side of town, i've grown familiar with the neighborhood, the weekend market by the Museum of Natural History, with Harry's Shoes, and what on every corner seems to sit a storied Italian eatery. (on this visit, we ate at two), but it was my first trip to this apartment. i'd seen pictures, so i knew that after almost three years of marriage, my favorite couple was finally beginning to make a home.


you remember that, right? how without even realizing it, you found yourself replacing the tiny, temporary breakfast table with a good wood one? how you hung curtains in the windows — mine where hand-me-down from my aunt, though the Pea's are new. how you arranged your books in a creative tower on the floor just like in the magazines you now browse (well, the 2012 version is Pinterest) and made neat stacks of your wedding gift dishes in cabinets lined with shelf paper, and hung monogrammed towels in the bathroom because your mother was coming to visit and you know how much she loves pretty, clean towels. and how you brought in fresh flowers for the mantel — green and blue hyacinths, which were your wedding flowers — because she loves those, too. and how you carried around fabric swatches in your purse because you never knew when you might run across a chair or a rug or a print for the wall that just might work with that window treatment. how you and your husband wandered through flea markets on weekends and found just the thing to hold all your good dishes in the back of a barn where nobody else had cared to look. that kind of thing.


she is doing all that. has started to make her home, finally, in this sweet space where in the night, as she nods off to sleep she imagines who might have inhabited these rooms before her, in the 100 years since this brownstone was built. 

that is a gift of New York. that you live in three small rooms once occupied by those you can only imagine: the painter, the priest. the actress, the writer. the working mother at the end of her rope. the grandmother, the accountant. who knows what hats hung once in the little hallway where now maps of the places they love grace the walls? did someone like Peggy of Mad Men once live here, hopeful of what was to become?

but for now, the young woman who works in pr and the love of her life, who makes her laugh and loves her brother like his own... and the elegant Miss Bailey dog who sidles up to her grandsooze (who loves this, so very much) add their own history to this place.


when last i left her, my Princess Pea hadn't started all this, the collecting of the things that will one day find their way into other houses in her life with her Prince. their lives seemed temporary, disposable, like they were just biding time until the right thing came along. (the love seat i bought new for her first apartment found its way, somehow, into the place across the hall when they moved from there. a wicker chair that once sat in my sunroom for some reason met the curb, though she has kept the little desk that once belonged to my aunt, and another Santa brought her when she was 10.)

the right thing, for now, seems to be present in this house. and though it is just really three rooms, it is their house. 

her father and i started our married life in two rooms. beautiful rooms, with hardwood floors and two fireplaces, a brand new kitchen and windows taller than i am. three weeks later we left them for other rooms, then our first house, houses where we began to do what my Pea is doing. 

surely you remember that.

while i was in the city, the Prince stretched out on his new leather throne and in between ACC tournament games read highlights of the history of the neighborhood. later as we walked to dinner (at the first Italian place on the corner), he pointed out the gargoyle guarding their building just outside their living room window and the brownstones across the street that were the first ones to be built. 

Matt Damon lives on their street somewhere, as does Robert Duvall. (way down toward the Hudson). Mary Tyler Moore used to. And so did Sara Jessica Parker (who shared an apartment with Robert Downey Jr.) Might it have been this one?

on Sunday, we walked just up the block toward Central Park to a little gallery to see a collection of hats on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum. the Bard Graduate Center for the past couple of months has been home to  Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones. (through April 15)

image from the Bard Graduate Center, West 86th Street, NYC

i've never been much of a hat wearer, but i love the idea. my mother wore them every Sunday when i was a child, and i often wished i would grow up to be as elegant as she was in her hats.

we were alone in the gallery, which itself sits in a refashioned brownstone, so we wandered through the collection, wondering what kind of heads had once worn such beautiful toppers. the Queen mother. FDR. Babe Ruth. Mick Jagger. and dozens of nameless heads as ordinary as a schoolgirl in a straw bonnet and as jocular as a jester, perhaps in King Henry's court. a bowler woven from the NYTimes. a cloche worn by Gypsy Rose Lee. but my favorite was a small brimmed hat made entirely of feathers, which reminded me of one my mother used to wear, arranged to resemble a painter's palette.


later, as we wandered the flea market in search of rugs and kitchen table chairs, we tried on netted fascinators just for fun.

early monday, as my Pea stood on the corner trying to flag a cab for me before the sun was quite up, i wondered if we'd leave each other this time just as we had so many others — in tears. the cab pulled up, and she opened the door, then hugged me tight, but when i looked into those giant brown eyes, they only glistened with happy. 

and as i rode away from her, for the first time in a long, long time, it felt good to be wearing this particular new hat.


writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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to my pea

it was the coldest night anybody in middle georgia could remember. our red geraniums the size of cantaloupes just that morning now bowing under the frost. i felt swollen the size of the world, my nine-month's pregnant body ricocheting emotion all over our tiny house.


it was just four days after Christmas. the tree had been up since Thanksgiving, and two days before we had stripped its almost bare limbs of our meager ornaments and tossed it out with the wrapping paper. the washer, housed in a shed attached to the house had frozen solid, so i hadn't been able to wash the sheets. and though i had hired a woman to clean our house because i could hardly bend, she didn't show that day, so i spent most of the day mopping and vacuuming, knowing my mother would be coming soon.


as i crawled into bed exhausted, i couldn't keep the tears from coming. i lay in the dark, unsure of why in the world the young man who snored softly beside me had even wanted to marry me in the first place. there were so many more beautiful women out there besides the beached ball of me. i woke him with my sobs, and i probably meant to. i missed my parents, having spent my first Christmas away from home. i missed the body i had known, however imperfect. and i was scared to pieces about what was to happen soon in my life and if i'd be able to step up for the first time in my life.


my husband is a wise man... even at 31 he was. he woke, hugging and assuring me through my sobs that nobody on the planet could capture his heart like i had done. he soothed me to sleep with his words. 


i don't know how long i slept. maybe an hour. and then i felt punched in the stomach, but from the inside.


i didn't want to wake him. surely this was not IT. i walked across our tiny hall to the bathroom, and as soon as i sat down, there it was. a gush.


it took two calls, about four minutes apart, to wake him. it's time. better get up. make yourself a sandwich. i wish i had chosen to make him something other than egg salad.


i showered, scratched the dog's ears, talking talking talking as i recall, and he (my husband) never once asked me to stop.


my coat wouldn't even fit around me, but he'd warmed up the car, and as we drove away in the dark, the dog stood on the sofa, looking out our picture window. we had never left him in the dark before, and my heart broke a little. i looked at the geraniums, so full and red just hours before, now limp and dark, sad. was this a sign?


it took 30 minutes to get to the hospital in our little ford escort which i never liked. a few months before we'd traded in the mustang my father had given me in college (not a '68, but still), for a more family-friendly ride. and now, we were about to be parents. parents?


the whole drive i talked and talked, though i can't remember about what, i am sure my words were full of dreams. and fear. and prayers.


within an hour, the nurses had laid me out on a gurney, measuring my swollen belly — which was wobbling and waving as if this baby i carried couldn't wait to get out.


my husband, ever the patient concerned spouse what seemed like minutes before, disappeared, as character ned allyen would later say in Shakespeare in Love, for 'the length of a Bible.'


indeed. good thing he took his egg salad sandwich with him.


if you are not a reader of this blog, you don't know that my husband was a reporter back then. i was not progressing fast enough for him apparently, so he wandered over to the newsroom to pick up a first run of the paper, and to tell everybody there that he, HE was having a baby. (why are you here? the crusty reporters working the overnight shift asked him... apparently even they thought he should be at the hospital with me.)


meanwhile back with my feet in the stirrups and my abdomen doing flip turns, i wondered if he had left me in mid-contraction for that attractive artist type he'd met at the mall while framing a picture for our house.


turns out, he hadn't. around daybreak he returned, (one of the nurses apparently had told him it would be awhile), newspaper in hand, and neither of us knowing how long this baby would take to arrive, he settled with me into the labor room to watch the Waltons. as i watched john boy and his siblings negotiate life with the Baldwin sisters and Ike and his store, i found myself wondering how in the world in just eight years, i had gone from playing mary ellen in the church Christmas play to having a baby, i mean, how did this happen?

finally, just before noon, in a frenzy that baby did come. a girl whose great blue eyes searched the florescent lights of her new world as the orderly led us out of the labor room and into recovery. it was as if she couldn't wait to get to know the great wide world she had just entered. i promised her a lifetime feltman brothers dresses as i remember, though at the time i wasn't thinking beyond the first year — and an education at Carolina (lord heaven not georgia), and because i was just a baby myself at the time, nothing else seemed to matter. 


(as i grew with my child, i would add that i wanted her to make a new friend every day, and to treat everyone in her class kindly, even if they weren't kind to her, and as far as i know, she has taken those instructions to heart.)

two days later we left the hospital on another frigid day, me wearing a maternity dress borrowed from my sister-in-law and a blouse from my wedding trousseau, greatly uncertain about how i would raise up this baby. but as she grew, i dressed her up in those dresses i'd promised — she was baptized in white organdy with tiny tucks at the sleeve  — and in ribboned bonnets and sailor dresses (prophetic, come to think of it). and we figured it out somehow, me making plenty of mistakes along the way.

she grew to have gigantic brown eyes (which turned when she was 2), and an absorbing spirit that is exactly the same as when she took in all the lights in her first few minutes of life. she never made it to Carolina as i had planned but she did one better, and i marvel on this, her 29th birthday, at what a remarkable young woman she has become despite this small shortcoming and my many, many mistakes.


we have spent the past few days together over Christmas, she and her husband an elegant pup. last year, when she left me for the lights that draw her back to the city, we stood in the driveway and wept, hugging just the way we always do. and i looked into the light of her now brown eyes and saw that she holds a little bit of me in there, too. this year, we parted ways in front of her in-laws, and i didn't want to embarrass her with my ritual weeping, so though the tears hung at the corners of my eyes, somehow i held them in.


another year gone by for my pea and me. and another birthday has rounded the corner for her. this morning i said prayers for her, that her life and her marriage continue to be strong, her smile bright and her ties to home unwavering. and i did also, selfishly, pray that this year might be the one when her little family moves a drive away instead of a plane ride.

just about now, on that cold day in 1983, the nurses brought my clean and bright-eyed baby to my husband and me, and we were frightened and in love and enchanted and wondering just how we might do right by her.

happy birthday, my pea. we didn't do so bad after all.




writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.

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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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