Winter in Rockport – February – 06
It was to be two things for us; a chance to knock those snug winter doldrums askew before February’s onslaught, and a research trip for me. The choreography of our kids’ care and safety while we were away was in place and we’d been looking forward to this long weekend. Perhaps I was looking forward to it too much, since February, the month of my recently deceased brother’s birthday, was the month I’d chosen for our slip from everyday life. I needed a few days that couldn’t possibly align themselves with quotidian tasks and could transport me to the place where I’d set my novel, to the time and the house I’d chosen, and deliver my husband and me to more intimate corners of our marriage that seem more distant when life gets in the way.
Rockport, Massachusetts, a tiny town on Cape Ann that shares its getaway status in a very different way with Gloucester, is just 6 hours away from Philadelphia, without three kids, a dog, and stops for fast food and bathrooms times five. Once you get near it, you’ll know. Aside from the signs that start welcoming you into New England’s venerable towns established in the 16th and 17th centuries, you begin to feel the ocean, even in winter.
There is sand on the shoulders. Even mixed with grey, grainy snow, you can see the sand. The marshes along Route 128 are covered in snow, but by then, the bay is to your left and you’re about to enter the Cape.
I should mention that we’ve been to Rockport in the summer numerous times, to the same inn where we were headed on this particular Super Bowl February weekend when the Eagles were pitted against the Patriots (and lost). Summer in a town like Rockport that is nirvana for artists and shop owners from ice cream to sterling silver is the same to any tourist who doesn’t mind a bit of a crowd. We’ve loved it, coming ourselves two consecutive years as a treat following rigorous White Mountain hikes, then last summer bringing our children and my parents who also drank it in. We would have stayed on if school weren’t about to start.
A summer town in winter is a quirky choice to make for a getaway when your friends are going to the Dominican Republic, Hawaii, and Trinidad. It might even be a brave choice. But I had to see and feel Rockport buried in quiet to be able to understand it in a season other than the one that brings flocks of people, like a winged migration, between April and October.
Since we started coming here, we've favored the Linden Tree Inn. It is just a block up the road from the Atlantic Ocean and down the street from the Sandy Bay Historical Society. From the inn’s cupola, or widow's watch, through leafless branches you can see the Union Cemetery where the town’s Civil War soldiers are buried, and far to the right, a lighthouse, one of the twin Thacher lights. Rockport Presbyterian’s spire rises above the town, clearing the trees. Mill Pond, where in summer painters set their easels along its pathway, is a stone’s throw. Up here in winter, with the morning sun shining so brightly I can hardly see my computer’s monitor, I hear the ducks even with the windows closed, see them skating onto the ice as they land. It’s a small, square room, hardly larger than a bathroom, with a telescope and windows that ogle the town from all sides. You can see the foam of the ocean as it swirls and eddies against the rocks.
John and Tobey Shepherd, the innkeepers, have put two chairs up here and a table so that I can write. I like to imagine that one of my female characters spends time up here, wondering about her fate, why she’s been dealt such a loss. Perhaps it’s trite, having a character in a fishing town in the 1870’s lose her husband at sea. Or maybe it’s prophetic. I didn’t know what it felt like to lose a loved one when I set out to write my novel. Ironically, it was my brother, Colin, a writer working on his own book, who encouraged me to get off my laurels and just do. So, I am here for him, too.
One of the places we revisited was a café-bistro called Alchemy on Gloucester’s Main Street. When we first started going there after a leisurely poke-around across the street at Mystery Train, the used music/book store we can still hardly leave each time we enter, Alchemy was a charming carpet bag of a joint, with old couches on tattered rugs, baskets of books and toys to distract children while their parents fiendishly darted a few feet away to the juice and coffee bar and chose a dessert. Now, a couple of years after our first visit, the place is completely transformed. The couches are leather, elegantly strewn with throw pillows I coveted as soon as I sat back in one, and the menu is gourmet deli. The juice and coffee bar are gone, but the toy and baskets remain, stowed under a large coffee table. We sat there all afternoon, me poking at my laptop, my husband at his while he enjoyed the Greek salad and a latte and I lapped up the pumpkin carrot soup. The gratis wireless was a dividend we didn’t expect.
The Linden Tree Inn was built around 1850 as a residence and in the 1920’s it became an inn when the daughter who was raised in the house began to take in guests, calling it Broadview House. The Shepherds took it on as newlyweds in 2002 and keep it open all year, with lulls in winter that have made this house our home for this particular weekend. For, while they have retreats and conventions ideally scheduled for these quiet spells, we are the only guests. The house doesn’t echo with our footsteps; it absorbs us. The radiators twitter early in the evening, then fade to a whisper that keeps the house hearthside warm.
One thing we love about the Linden Tree is Tobey’s breakfasts, served in the formal dining room that is intimate enough to feel like your own and large enough to be almost grand, with elegant furniture, seamlessly built-in hutches that must date back to when the house was built, and a bay window where there is one of four tables for two around the larger table.
The aroma of Tobey’s scones swelling in the oven and her coffee ripening in the Bodum waft to the cathedral ceilings. Because we’re the only guests this weekend, we can ask for breakfast at whatever time our hearts desire it. Tobey is glad enough that we’re not early birds, but she and her husband, John, an affable Brit and an economics professor at Bentley College, are well-accustomed to those who rise early to take in what they can. If we’d said we eat breakfast at 7:30, they wouldn’t have blinked, though it would mean rising before the sun.
Something about being around the British, and remembering how I drank tea in Canada where I was born and raised, makes me want to drink my P.J. Tipps the way John would, so I do. After all, I’m on holiday.
After breakfast, we sometimes sat on the enclosed side porch, summery in any season, with white wicker furniture cushioned in blue with those Victorian patterns that invite you into another time. In the afternoon, it is drenched in sunlight and a perfect room for reading. Retreat groups and conferences that the Shepherds encourage to book at the inn gather there as they do in the dining and living rooms to conduct their programs.
In the summer, after a deliciously filling seafood meal at the locally popular Fish Shack (now under construction, but normally open in winter, too), we would amble along the Bearskin Neck toward the water and poke our heads in and out of shops and galleries, buy indiscriminate amounts of penny candy from Tuck’s. But it is winter. So, each evening after dinner we retire to the living room at the inn, a room off the main hallway, with plush couches flanking the doorway in an L-shape so that you feel brought toward them. There is a wood-burning stove and a pleasing Victorian sensibility in the way the room is furnished that flows with the rest of the house.
There Joe and I work on our separate projects, absorbed in them, just as free to stretch out and cuddle while we watch a movie as if we were in our own living space. On one evening, we do, and it’s more of a delight than I’d imagined. Somehow, I worried that this - something we can do at home in our own family room - would be a waste of precious time. But perhaps because it is precious, one should allow a little of it to go to waste now and then and to taste that pleasure without worrying about time ebbing the way the tide does.
As reliable as the tide were those few winter nights we spent at the inn, lulled by the house’s sonorous quiet, behind it the distant thunder of the surf, a rhythmic roar that placed itself just behind a membrane thin wall of my consciousness. It was quiet enough to allow for sleep, the thunder and hiss of the ocean present enough a reminder that we weren’t in Philadelphia.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Autumn in Rockport – November 18-06
To Mrs. Cynthia Peckham, I owe a debt of gratitude. This morning, I marched up to the Sandy Bay Historical Society at the top of King Street and she let me into the old house (by arrangement), once owned by one of her ancestors, Levi Sewall when he built it in 1832 out of granite from his quarry. She led me up into the reading room, where there were volumes of books, some of them entire genealogies for some of Rockport’s residents who take an interest in their provenance. There were also town records, history books and literature, as well as letters that I never even got to during my two hours.
But I found a plumb resource, a journal written in 1848-49 by a young Susannah Norwood Torrey, when she was in her early 20’s and newly married, living a middle class life in Rockport. It was a revelation to read something so similar to what I’ve created in my own head and committed to over 100 pages so far; the language, the overall mood, were eerily like that of my character, Marianne Parsons. I took away some pages of introduction to the transcribed journal and about two pages of what Susannah Norwood Torrey had written to get a feel for her daily rhythm. I am in complete disbelief. Susannah is, forgive me, almost a dead ringer for my protagonist, Marianne Parsons, with an aspect of her that veers a little away from the conventional just as Marianne’s nature tends to do.
Mrs. Peckham, curator of the Historical Society, is a descendant of the Norwood and Poole families; the Norwoods being great landowners going back to the early 18th century, the Pooles among the earliest settlers of Sandy Bay (founded in 1690 and which became the town of Rockport in 1840), once part of Gloucester. Mrs. P., in her 80’s herself, was generous with facts and remarkably clear-headed. She had much to offer and was happy to oblige as I ferreted through this and that stack she handed me, skimming a book or two before moving hungrily onto the next thing and losing myself in what I felt was the prize; the journal and the file on Hannah Jumper.
Before I knew anything about her other than that she was queen of Temperance, I had slipped Hannah Jumper into my book without knowing when she lived and died. The trail I’d begun to sniff a few days ago (on the internet) brought me to a book written about her by Eleanor C. Parsons, detailing the day Hannah and dozens of homemakers took to the establishments in Rockport, hatchets hidden under their lace shawls (July 8, 1856), to lay waste to any liquor they could find. Never married, an enterprising seamstress and handy with rendering medicine from herbs which is how, it is recorded, that she knew and was admired by Rockport’s women, Hannah Jumper was a spry 75 when she led that revolt against illicit supplies of alcohol. Though I hadn’t known until today about that riotous day in Rockport’s history and its effect on Temperance (which ended here in 2005 when the law of no liquor licenses was repealed in Rockport), I realized that if she’s going to be a guest at a dinner party at the Pringles’ table in my book, I had better figure out if she was still alive.
Of course, she wasn’t, not in 1870; she died in 1865. And, not only was she dead, this morning Mrs. Peckham told me that Hannah Jumper’s line is gone. She has no descendants, although Story Parsons, Eleanor Parsons' late husband, was descended from Hannah Jumper (I learned this later) whose maiden name was Parsons; how to keep it all straight! So, looking at the day the hatchet gang went on their liquor vanquishing rampage and realizing, too, that it was before the Civil War into which Rockport sent some of its men to fight but which was also not as significantly a part of their lives as in other parts of the Northeast, I’ve decided that I might place the diary in 1856-57 (a year in Marianne Parsons’ life) and include this historic event in my book as a bit of backdrop. I now have a document, written in 1933, of the account (as told to, and eye witnessed) of Hannah Jumper’s siege. It’s actually told in a decidedly light tone, and seemed even then to be a source of some amusement. The triumph of her will is celebrated.
The other touchstone I’ve been led to when researching Hannah Jumper is Eleanor C. Parsons, Rockport’s resident historian, perhaps one of several. To her enormous credit, Mrs. Peckham is definitely a fount of history with her familial ties to a rich legacy of town folk through the centuries. And this morning I asked this marvelous curator if Eleanor Parsons is accessible to anyone. So, she gave me her address and tel. number, saying the Mrs. Parsons would enjoy being “bothered,” as she’s often bored. Boredom can be lethal to an elderly person. No wonder Mrs. Parsons uses that still lucid brain to keep writing historical books.
Now I’m set to meet with her tomorrow afternoon. Her late husband is Story Parsons from Rockport, his family dating back to its earliest days. Though Mrs. Peckham – a woman, I soon learned, with an eagle eye for accuracy and truth in non-fiction - more or less waved her hand in dismissal of my worry that using the Parsons name might be a problem in my fictional work, I plan to ask the nonagenarian history maven if I can use her surname; just dumb luck on my part to have chosen it in the first place. She’s written an embarrassment of books on Rockport’s history, one of them about Hannah and her Hatchet Gang, and she’s 91 years old. She’s still writing and publishing!
So, I called the venerable Mrs. Eleanor Parsons and we spoke a few minutes. I figured, I’m only here another day and uncertain as to when I'll be back; I must make hay while the sun shines. She was only too happy to agree to a 2 o’clock meeting tomorrow at her house, down the street from the Sandy Bay Historical Society which is just a few minutes’ walk from the inn. I feel a little like a sleuth even though much of what I’m discovering seems organically to sprout from the thing I discover and turn over before it. But this is what research is and I don’t want to get too deep into it yet, just gather bits here and there to inform my story so that I can proceed and return later to facts and places as they occur and arise.
Right now, Joe is upstairs in our cozy room doing his own work and in an hour or so we’ll stroll back into town for dinner. We took a walk this afternoon after lunching on some crackers, cheese and fruit (and a bit of Port wine for me; my favorite in small, self-indulgent doses) which really hit the spot. I’m setting this elegantly furnished living room on fire with the after effects of too much cheese.
Later today or tomorrow, Tobey Shepherd, the proprietress of the Linden Tree Inn (along with her husband John whose English lineage – he’s from a naval family in Plymouth, England – is rich indeed) where we stay when we come here, is going to show me the interior staircases in this house where I’ve set my novel. In the four years and half-dozen times we’ve been coming to the inn, these staircases were unknown to me. This house is filled with rooms, two deep stories of them, topped off by a widow’s watch that I like to visit just to look through the ogling windows on all sides. Today they were steamy and I could only peer through one tiny space out to one of the twin Thacher lighthouses in the distance.
Being here with Joe, feeling the presence of the ghosts of my book’s characters, absorbing the warmth and comfort of this 155 year old house, is my heaven. Joe is cheering my efforts on when I gush about my discoveries, is happy to enjoy the surroundings as much as I do. He is a good companion.
In February when we were here, I struggled with the continuation of the book, my confidence and convictions wobbling. But it is nine months later, the full cycle of a pregnancy, and I’m ready to nurture it to the end and watch it grow beyond its beginnings; most vitally to help it along since it can’t grow without me to nudge it further.
To Mrs. Cynthia Peckham, I owe a debt of gratitude. This morning, I marched up to the Sandy Bay Historical Society at the top of King Street and she let me into the old house (by arrangement), once owned by one of her ancestors, Levi Sewall when he built it in 1832 out of granite from his quarry. She led me up into the reading room, where there were volumes of books, some of them entire genealogies for some of Rockport’s residents who take an interest in their provenance. There were also town records, history books and literature, as well as letters that I never even got to during my two hours.
But I found a plumb resource, a journal written in 1848-49 by a young Susannah Norwood Torrey, when she was in her early 20’s and newly married, living a middle class life in Rockport. It was a revelation to read something so similar to what I’ve created in my own head and committed to over 100 pages so far; the language, the overall mood, were eerily like that of my character, Marianne Parsons. I took away some pages of introduction to the transcribed journal and about two pages of what Susannah Norwood Torrey had written to get a feel for her daily rhythm. I am in complete disbelief. Susannah is, forgive me, almost a dead ringer for my protagonist, Marianne Parsons, with an aspect of her that veers a little away from the conventional just as Marianne’s nature tends to do.
Mrs. Peckham, curator of the Historical Society, is a descendant of the Norwood and Poole families; the Norwoods being great landowners going back to the early 18th century, the Pooles among the earliest settlers of Sandy Bay (founded in 1690 and which became the town of Rockport in 1840), once part of Gloucester. Mrs. P., in her 80’s herself, was generous with facts and remarkably clear-headed. She had much to offer and was happy to oblige as I ferreted through this and that stack she handed me, skimming a book or two before moving hungrily onto the next thing and losing myself in what I felt was the prize; the journal and the file on Hannah Jumper.
Before I knew anything about her other than that she was queen of Temperance, I had slipped Hannah Jumper into my book without knowing when she lived and died. The trail I’d begun to sniff a few days ago (on the internet) brought me to a book written about her by Eleanor C. Parsons, detailing the day Hannah and dozens of homemakers took to the establishments in Rockport, hatchets hidden under their lace shawls (July 8, 1856), to lay waste to any liquor they could find. Never married, an enterprising seamstress and handy with rendering medicine from herbs which is how, it is recorded, that she knew and was admired by Rockport’s women, Hannah Jumper was a spry 75 when she led that revolt against illicit supplies of alcohol. Though I hadn’t known until today about that riotous day in Rockport’s history and its effect on Temperance (which ended here in 2005 when the law of no liquor licenses was repealed in Rockport), I realized that if she’s going to be a guest at a dinner party at the Pringles’ table in my book, I had better figure out if she was still alive.
Of course, she wasn’t, not in 1870; she died in 1865. And, not only was she dead, this morning Mrs. Peckham told me that Hannah Jumper’s line is gone. She has no descendants, although Story Parsons, Eleanor Parsons' late husband, was descended from Hannah Jumper (I learned this later) whose maiden name was Parsons; how to keep it all straight! So, looking at the day the hatchet gang went on their liquor vanquishing rampage and realizing, too, that it was before the Civil War into which Rockport sent some of its men to fight but which was also not as significantly a part of their lives as in other parts of the Northeast, I’ve decided that I might place the diary in 1856-57 (a year in Marianne Parsons’ life) and include this historic event in my book as a bit of backdrop. I now have a document, written in 1933, of the account (as told to, and eye witnessed) of Hannah Jumper’s siege. It’s actually told in a decidedly light tone, and seemed even then to be a source of some amusement. The triumph of her will is celebrated.
The other touchstone I’ve been led to when researching Hannah Jumper is Eleanor C. Parsons, Rockport’s resident historian, perhaps one of several. To her enormous credit, Mrs. Peckham is definitely a fount of history with her familial ties to a rich legacy of town folk through the centuries. And this morning I asked this marvelous curator if Eleanor Parsons is accessible to anyone. So, she gave me her address and tel. number, saying the Mrs. Parsons would enjoy being “bothered,” as she’s often bored. Boredom can be lethal to an elderly person. No wonder Mrs. Parsons uses that still lucid brain to keep writing historical books.
Now I’m set to meet with her tomorrow afternoon. Her late husband is Story Parsons from Rockport, his family dating back to its earliest days. Though Mrs. Peckham – a woman, I soon learned, with an eagle eye for accuracy and truth in non-fiction - more or less waved her hand in dismissal of my worry that using the Parsons name might be a problem in my fictional work, I plan to ask the nonagenarian history maven if I can use her surname; just dumb luck on my part to have chosen it in the first place. She’s written an embarrassment of books on Rockport’s history, one of them about Hannah and her Hatchet Gang, and she’s 91 years old. She’s still writing and publishing!
So, I called the venerable Mrs. Eleanor Parsons and we spoke a few minutes. I figured, I’m only here another day and uncertain as to when I'll be back; I must make hay while the sun shines. She was only too happy to agree to a 2 o’clock meeting tomorrow at her house, down the street from the Sandy Bay Historical Society which is just a few minutes’ walk from the inn. I feel a little like a sleuth even though much of what I’m discovering seems organically to sprout from the thing I discover and turn over before it. But this is what research is and I don’t want to get too deep into it yet, just gather bits here and there to inform my story so that I can proceed and return later to facts and places as they occur and arise.
Right now, Joe is upstairs in our cozy room doing his own work and in an hour or so we’ll stroll back into town for dinner. We took a walk this afternoon after lunching on some crackers, cheese and fruit (and a bit of Port wine for me; my favorite in small, self-indulgent doses) which really hit the spot. I’m setting this elegantly furnished living room on fire with the after effects of too much cheese.
Later today or tomorrow, Tobey Shepherd, the proprietress of the Linden Tree Inn (along with her husband John whose English lineage – he’s from a naval family in Plymouth, England – is rich indeed) where we stay when we come here, is going to show me the interior staircases in this house where I’ve set my novel. In the four years and half-dozen times we’ve been coming to the inn, these staircases were unknown to me. This house is filled with rooms, two deep stories of them, topped off by a widow’s watch that I like to visit just to look through the ogling windows on all sides. Today they were steamy and I could only peer through one tiny space out to one of the twin Thacher lighthouses in the distance.
Being here with Joe, feeling the presence of the ghosts of my book’s characters, absorbing the warmth and comfort of this 155 year old house, is my heaven. Joe is cheering my efforts on when I gush about my discoveries, is happy to enjoy the surroundings as much as I do. He is a good companion.
In February when we were here, I struggled with the continuation of the book, my confidence and convictions wobbling. But it is nine months later, the full cycle of a pregnancy, and I’m ready to nurture it to the end and watch it grow beyond its beginnings; most vitally to help it along since it can’t grow without me to nudge it further.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Life Space
Toronto is where he should be, so carrying my life through its every day in Philadelphia with my family, I don’t feel Colin’s absence. When he was alive, we only spoke on the phone about once a month and, while it was a reflexive motion that sent my hand for the phone to tell him good news or just share my litany of the kids’ antics with him, I’ve toyed with the idea that I don’t miss that freedom.
But I do. I miss it, that right to just pluck the phone from its cradle and dial him up, the way a tooth that was once in an easy-to-probe spot now leaves a pulpy black cavity in its place. So, I push that feeling away when I get the urge, when I forget for a moment and move toward the phone, and I resume the every day to sidestep the bruise of reminder.
Here in Toronto, the empty space is altogether different. It is everywhere I look even as he did not roam the city or always make it a point to be at Mom and Dad’s house upon our arrival. When I see a cyclist, the blunt force adjustment to fact makes me swallow harder, look away; a dog like his Gabby trots past and my head turns with it, following it for a few more steps. I have talked myself momentarily into hallucination, spying men who look so like Colin that if I weren’t a lucid woman, I would stop them to peer into their faces and prove to myself that there is only an unsatisfying likeness. Something would be missing in the eyes – and they would no doubt be the wrong color, blue instead of a light brown, round instead of slightly slanted and long-lashed, further apart than mine – the smirk would be missing that he sometimes wore, more a clue to his clever mind than a put-down. So, I let his feeble doppelgangers walk the earth. I do not hound them with my haunted version of who they could, who they cannot possibly, be.
Now that we’re here, I notice more the way my parents’ home has filled with things. Still a safe house for the treasures my mother picks up at yard and estate sales, turning a few of them over on e-bay, it has also become a repository for all of Colin’s work. Volumes of paper clutter my Dad’s music room, the space where he does his own e-bay whirligigging and listens to his voluminous record and CD collection.
In the room where Joe and I sleep, my bedroom for one year before I married, Colin’s down comforter covers the bed and some of his books are stacked on the shelves and night tables. They are books I took from his house after he died, though I took many more home; the ones he’d inscribed with his name, or slipped a piece of paper in between the pages. He had, I knew, read all of the books he owned. It was part of his weave; a voracious appetite for words, for language, for meter and, I believe, the juxtaposition of this with life, his life. Life.
When I first enter this city, I feel a veil of something like grief come down on my shoulders, feather light but present. It is a welcome feeling, I don’t mind admitting, because it’s the reminder that eludes me in my everyday life with my family which, in its manipulative way, is merciful. For my parents, living in the city where they were born, where they raised us, where their son no longer lives but may circle overhead in the frantic space in their own minds that harbors that grief now that two years have passed, it can only be a kind of hell.
I don’t always feel it the moment I arrive. Perhaps it’s shamelessly maudlin of me to say I do. But I wait for it, welcome it and let it come to me in its time. Grief has become such an elliptical thing that I sometimes wonder, how can we all continue as we do, move unimpeded, plan, hope, and aspire when this life, Colin’s truncated, soon-to-be-brilliant, already so promising life is gone? It’s when I think in these terms that I know the answer and need hardly spell it out for myself, for anyone reading, listening.
Last night I dreamt of being held, of riding in a car, of seeing people riding their bikes and being tossed in the air, left to die on the ground. I awoke anxious and knew what the dream was; a symptom yes, a reminder, of course.
Mom and Dad keep talking about cleaning up the clutter even as they fill rooms with more. The thought of walking into a house without the stacks of books, the boxes of trinkets and knick knackery, Colin’s works-in-progress (of which I know I have copies), and a pervasive sense throughout the house of a life no longer lived but cherished, even if it isn’t only Colin’s, would send me out the door thinking I had come to the wrong place.
They will attempt slowly to clear the house, maybe to archive his works and to have a gala yard sale, even giving much of their decades’ worth of collection away, but I do need to feel the presence I always felt when I’ve come here, before losing Colin and since. I wonder if my parents share my feeling that clearing the decks would, in some way, leave gaping a space that, filled with its heaps of things blocking staircases and linear movement throughout their lovely old house, signifies life.
Toronto is where he should be, so carrying my life through its every day in Philadelphia with my family, I don’t feel Colin’s absence. When he was alive, we only spoke on the phone about once a month and, while it was a reflexive motion that sent my hand for the phone to tell him good news or just share my litany of the kids’ antics with him, I’ve toyed with the idea that I don’t miss that freedom.
But I do. I miss it, that right to just pluck the phone from its cradle and dial him up, the way a tooth that was once in an easy-to-probe spot now leaves a pulpy black cavity in its place. So, I push that feeling away when I get the urge, when I forget for a moment and move toward the phone, and I resume the every day to sidestep the bruise of reminder.
Here in Toronto, the empty space is altogether different. It is everywhere I look even as he did not roam the city or always make it a point to be at Mom and Dad’s house upon our arrival. When I see a cyclist, the blunt force adjustment to fact makes me swallow harder, look away; a dog like his Gabby trots past and my head turns with it, following it for a few more steps. I have talked myself momentarily into hallucination, spying men who look so like Colin that if I weren’t a lucid woman, I would stop them to peer into their faces and prove to myself that there is only an unsatisfying likeness. Something would be missing in the eyes – and they would no doubt be the wrong color, blue instead of a light brown, round instead of slightly slanted and long-lashed, further apart than mine – the smirk would be missing that he sometimes wore, more a clue to his clever mind than a put-down. So, I let his feeble doppelgangers walk the earth. I do not hound them with my haunted version of who they could, who they cannot possibly, be.
Now that we’re here, I notice more the way my parents’ home has filled with things. Still a safe house for the treasures my mother picks up at yard and estate sales, turning a few of them over on e-bay, it has also become a repository for all of Colin’s work. Volumes of paper clutter my Dad’s music room, the space where he does his own e-bay whirligigging and listens to his voluminous record and CD collection.
In the room where Joe and I sleep, my bedroom for one year before I married, Colin’s down comforter covers the bed and some of his books are stacked on the shelves and night tables. They are books I took from his house after he died, though I took many more home; the ones he’d inscribed with his name, or slipped a piece of paper in between the pages. He had, I knew, read all of the books he owned. It was part of his weave; a voracious appetite for words, for language, for meter and, I believe, the juxtaposition of this with life, his life. Life.
When I first enter this city, I feel a veil of something like grief come down on my shoulders, feather light but present. It is a welcome feeling, I don’t mind admitting, because it’s the reminder that eludes me in my everyday life with my family which, in its manipulative way, is merciful. For my parents, living in the city where they were born, where they raised us, where their son no longer lives but may circle overhead in the frantic space in their own minds that harbors that grief now that two years have passed, it can only be a kind of hell.
I don’t always feel it the moment I arrive. Perhaps it’s shamelessly maudlin of me to say I do. But I wait for it, welcome it and let it come to me in its time. Grief has become such an elliptical thing that I sometimes wonder, how can we all continue as we do, move unimpeded, plan, hope, and aspire when this life, Colin’s truncated, soon-to-be-brilliant, already so promising life is gone? It’s when I think in these terms that I know the answer and need hardly spell it out for myself, for anyone reading, listening.
Last night I dreamt of being held, of riding in a car, of seeing people riding their bikes and being tossed in the air, left to die on the ground. I awoke anxious and knew what the dream was; a symptom yes, a reminder, of course.
Mom and Dad keep talking about cleaning up the clutter even as they fill rooms with more. The thought of walking into a house without the stacks of books, the boxes of trinkets and knick knackery, Colin’s works-in-progress (of which I know I have copies), and a pervasive sense throughout the house of a life no longer lived but cherished, even if it isn’t only Colin’s, would send me out the door thinking I had come to the wrong place.
They will attempt slowly to clear the house, maybe to archive his works and to have a gala yard sale, even giving much of their decades’ worth of collection away, but I do need to feel the presence I always felt when I’ve come here, before losing Colin and since. I wonder if my parents share my feeling that clearing the decks would, in some way, leave gaping a space that, filled with its heaps of things blocking staircases and linear movement throughout their lovely old house, signifies life.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Ghosts (written in August, 2005)
When I was ten and my brother, Colin, eight, my parents bought an old schoolhouse in a northern corner of Ontario, just north enough to be away from home; too far away for me. It sat on an acre of grass with trees all around it on the outer perimeter, and it was one hundred years old. At first, we went there on weekends and lived in it just as it was, with its pit toilets right inside the house, its one remaining wood and wrought iron desk nailed to the floor, its one large room filled with our bedraggled furniture.
I hated it there. When I wasn’t playing on one of the two puckered wood swings, their thick, rusty chains gritty in my hands, or trying to keep my brother up in the air on the sea saw, I truly hated it. In between charming the garter snakes out of the nest they’d made under the house or climbing the barbed fence to go groundhog spotting in the neighboring field, I wanted so badly to go home that I refused to betray any fleeting interest I had in the place with a smile.
Right from the first, I began to imagine children who must have gone to school at our weekend home when it was built in 1875. In my mind, it was mostly girls who played in the yard, wading through the thick, uncut grass with their long dresses, coming toward me with smiles and a plan to rescue me from my crippling boredom. I wanted them to exist and I day dreamed them into the lonely days I spent with my brother who annoyed me as much because he seemed to like to the schoolhouse as for his speed and agility.
Tree climbing was effortless for him, though I managed somehow to clutch the limbs that would take me high enough to look from that silver maple out onto the other fields and the houses and farms and think of jumping in one free-flying leap toward the farthest one just to see if I could. But rather than jump from tree to swaying wheat, we climbed over the barbed wire to plod through the adjacent fields.
While our parents read and napped, we got to know the McDermotts up the road, whose farm boasted pigs and cows, dogs and cats. If the pigs were out, we rested against the fence, our arms dangling over it while the pigs lay around, their muddied backs cracking in the sun.
Sometimes we headed for the barn and Colin scrambled up into the loft, his little blond head rising almost indistinguishably from the hay bales stacked high as he grabbed onto the rope and swung into the heap of straw below. It was fun to watch him, but I wasn’t tempted. The sweet smell of the hay, its ends brushing against my clothes and prickling my bare legs, was enough for me.
Our parents knocked the ceiling out after the first year, in 1976, and put in three bedrooms, leaving the first floor open after they took out the makeshift walls and moved beds upstairs. The railing at the top was one person wide between slats, the stairs gapped wide enough for an errant foot to slip through. My room had a map of England covering one wall. In love with England through books, I looked at that map every night, running my finger along it, imagining the patchwork of fields brought into focus past the grid lines on the map.
Attached to the schoolhouse was, and still is, a small barn, with a door leading into the house that was sealed shut. Inside were cobwebbed remnants of the building, covered in dust. It was the smell of things forgotten that I still equate with death, not knowing what death smells like, not making sense even then of my longing for the ghosts of children who’d lived a century before me and what they would have smelled like if I could have met them in my own stultifying reality.
When we were old enough to venture further away from the schoolhouse, Colin and I took to the unpaved road that led to Glen Huron, a tiny town with a water wheel and a general store, two or three miles away where there was salvation in candy. We didn’t talk much on the way, united only by our boredom and the appalling lack of kids our age, a persistent problem through the years we’d spent there so far, removing ourselves from our friends most weekends from June through August. Fingering the few dollars entrenched in my pocket, I imagined the chocolate bars I’d buy that would see me through the rest of the weekend. My brother, more private by the time he was 11 or 12, might have been thinking anything; maybe thinking he’d rather be playing with his friend Martin than poking along a country road with his older sister. I never asked him that question, never thought to.
I don’t remember when I was first allowed to stay home while my parents went up North. I must have been about 17 and possibly Colin stayed with me. A few times in my college years I took a girlfriend up for the weekend without my parents there and we went to the beach, to the shores of Georgian Bay, went out to dinner, or cooked at the house, its one room filling with the steam and smoke of whatever our botched efforts yielded. Colin would go up on his own often in his late teens and twenties, perhaps preferring his own company.
I never talked to him about why he liked the schoolhouse so much; likely, I connected it with his inclination away from the family, his pronounced need to spend time apart from us even as he treated us all with a kind of acquaintance-level respect. He and I got along well enough when we reached our teens, but I don’t think we found a mutual pass-through until our thirties when we revealed the work we were both doing, the writing we’d both chosen that would define our lives, shape them and, for Colin, ultimately rob him blind of the life he’d chosen to pursue as a writer.
The crime was committed indirectly in the summer of 2004, by a man driving a car as if he had the right-of-way all over the road, as if my brother were merely a decoy he could plow over. Yes, he stopped afterward, but by then Colin was broken and gone from me, from everyone.
As soon as I could get away with it, I didn’t go up to the schoolhouse; not for years, forgetting the ghosts I waited for who never came, audibly grateful for my autonomy as soon as I had it. Being allowed to stay home while my parents were up there was a power enough. I was too square to dream up illicit alternatives. At 18, I brought my then-boyfriend up and his very real allergies to old things made him ill, so we never went again.
Not long after, I was engaged to Joe and he, too, was plagued by an allergic reaction to the mold that inhabited unmined corners of the house. We weren’t a fastidious family, my mother content to leave things coated in dust, smeared with grease, dotted with crumbs so she could gather fiddleheads or milkweed to make edible. It drove my father mad, but I didn’t know this until long after I moved away and kept my own house. They would visit Joe and me and out of her earshot he’d remark to me how much neater I was than my mother. I’d smile, aware of the truth, that my husband was a far more exacting housecleaner than I would ever be, or want to be, that I kept a reasonably clean house more to sidestep his scrutiny than as an antidote to my mother’s slovenly domesticity. And anyway, though I didn’t say this to my father, I’d always thought of that aspect of her as part of her unusual lack of accountability to anyone. I still admire this about her even as I poke a little fun which has the effect of making her laugh at herself.
Our children love the schoolhouse. They love the supernatural quiet of it, the remove from everything they think of as natural. Of course, they haven’t been there for two years and their last time didn’t leave them hungering for their creature comforts; their internet, cell phones and X-Box. But they still want to go and when we drive up to Toronto to visit my parents, we ogle the indolent cows lying in the sun, the horses grazing near the roadside, and clutch our guts on the roller coaster of the Hockley Valley road. (Just the name of that highway summons queasiness.)
When we’re there with the kids, I look up at the night sky and remember it differently, wishing I’d looked with less fear as a child. One August, when our youngest daughter was a baby and the older two children were still awake, a brilliant light undulated across the sky and I felt certain something terrible was going to happen. It lingered for hours, soundless and graceful, and we stood under it. Beneath that brilliance, I could see where the ground was scarred where the sea saw and swings used to be. The bats had the good sense to stay in the eaves, away from light. Occasionally, I’d go inside and stand behind the screen willing the terror out of me, finally half-convinced that we were all experiencing a close encounter. I pictured our family clawing at the ground with feeble fingers as we struggled against being beamed onto a mother ship and I still laugh at how that single protracted sighting of Northern Lights could stir such panic in me when my mother stood fearless most nights of my childhood under the night sky, beckoning me out when I couldn’t sleep, her absence and my fear pulling me from my bed. And I would join her and my father for a few minutes only to scurry back inside, favoring a lonely house with a maddeningly sleeping brother over a star-clouded ceiling.
In the months before my brother was killed, he told me that part of his plan to write and teach English and Drama the way our grandfather had involved the schoolhouse. He wanted to live there for several months with his dog Gabby who loved it there as much as he did. He would do so in winter, the loneliest time up there, waiting it out until he could earn his teaching degree in Australia the following year. Most years our parents had rented the place to skiers, the sport popular up there with the swells of Blue Mountain and other runs nearby. So, it was winterized and ready to receive him.
I had looked at him in disbelief and possibly admiration when he filled me in. Yes, I knew he liked it; I even felt a certain jealous prickle that he was free to chase his dream, that he could make a decision to change his life and be truer to himself and that part of his scheme involved a cross-Canada cycling trip that would begin his new life.
But what resonated when he first told me about his plan during an October visit to Philadelphia, and asked me not to tell our parents yet, was the idea that he would hole up at the schoolhouse when the earth was dead and the trees bare, the wind shrill at the windows, the people…well, that last didn’t matter because people were not what he was after.
I didn’t tell my parents, leaving it to him when he was ready. When he finally let them know what he’d be doing, from selling his home, to cycling across the country, to staying at the schoolhouse writing away the months of autumn well into winter and then attending school, I recall that pride stuck in my throat, displacing envy. I hope I told him that what he was doing was hats off incredible.
I didn’t tell my brother that I’d started to write a play about our earliest years at the schoolhouse and that the characters of Carrie and Mitchell were composites of my two older children, him and me, or that there was a prominent ghost in the story, named Penelope. She comes to Carrie in her dreams, lulls her away from her belligerent need to hate the place, shows her clues to a lush legacy in the town, relics in the barn adjoining the schoolhouse, mends fences between Carrie and her vexing younger brother, helps them hatch a plan to keep the schoolhouse when their parents find it’s much more than they’d first thought they could handle when they plucked their children from city life to show them that quiet wasn’t just when the lights went out at night.
When I was ten and my brother, Colin, eight, my parents bought an old schoolhouse in a northern corner of Ontario, just north enough to be away from home; too far away for me. It sat on an acre of grass with trees all around it on the outer perimeter, and it was one hundred years old. At first, we went there on weekends and lived in it just as it was, with its pit toilets right inside the house, its one remaining wood and wrought iron desk nailed to the floor, its one large room filled with our bedraggled furniture.
I hated it there. When I wasn’t playing on one of the two puckered wood swings, their thick, rusty chains gritty in my hands, or trying to keep my brother up in the air on the sea saw, I truly hated it. In between charming the garter snakes out of the nest they’d made under the house or climbing the barbed fence to go groundhog spotting in the neighboring field, I wanted so badly to go home that I refused to betray any fleeting interest I had in the place with a smile.
Right from the first, I began to imagine children who must have gone to school at our weekend home when it was built in 1875. In my mind, it was mostly girls who played in the yard, wading through the thick, uncut grass with their long dresses, coming toward me with smiles and a plan to rescue me from my crippling boredom. I wanted them to exist and I day dreamed them into the lonely days I spent with my brother who annoyed me as much because he seemed to like to the schoolhouse as for his speed and agility.
Tree climbing was effortless for him, though I managed somehow to clutch the limbs that would take me high enough to look from that silver maple out onto the other fields and the houses and farms and think of jumping in one free-flying leap toward the farthest one just to see if I could. But rather than jump from tree to swaying wheat, we climbed over the barbed wire to plod through the adjacent fields.
While our parents read and napped, we got to know the McDermotts up the road, whose farm boasted pigs and cows, dogs and cats. If the pigs were out, we rested against the fence, our arms dangling over it while the pigs lay around, their muddied backs cracking in the sun.
Sometimes we headed for the barn and Colin scrambled up into the loft, his little blond head rising almost indistinguishably from the hay bales stacked high as he grabbed onto the rope and swung into the heap of straw below. It was fun to watch him, but I wasn’t tempted. The sweet smell of the hay, its ends brushing against my clothes and prickling my bare legs, was enough for me.
Our parents knocked the ceiling out after the first year, in 1976, and put in three bedrooms, leaving the first floor open after they took out the makeshift walls and moved beds upstairs. The railing at the top was one person wide between slats, the stairs gapped wide enough for an errant foot to slip through. My room had a map of England covering one wall. In love with England through books, I looked at that map every night, running my finger along it, imagining the patchwork of fields brought into focus past the grid lines on the map.
Attached to the schoolhouse was, and still is, a small barn, with a door leading into the house that was sealed shut. Inside were cobwebbed remnants of the building, covered in dust. It was the smell of things forgotten that I still equate with death, not knowing what death smells like, not making sense even then of my longing for the ghosts of children who’d lived a century before me and what they would have smelled like if I could have met them in my own stultifying reality.
When we were old enough to venture further away from the schoolhouse, Colin and I took to the unpaved road that led to Glen Huron, a tiny town with a water wheel and a general store, two or three miles away where there was salvation in candy. We didn’t talk much on the way, united only by our boredom and the appalling lack of kids our age, a persistent problem through the years we’d spent there so far, removing ourselves from our friends most weekends from June through August. Fingering the few dollars entrenched in my pocket, I imagined the chocolate bars I’d buy that would see me through the rest of the weekend. My brother, more private by the time he was 11 or 12, might have been thinking anything; maybe thinking he’d rather be playing with his friend Martin than poking along a country road with his older sister. I never asked him that question, never thought to.
I don’t remember when I was first allowed to stay home while my parents went up North. I must have been about 17 and possibly Colin stayed with me. A few times in my college years I took a girlfriend up for the weekend without my parents there and we went to the beach, to the shores of Georgian Bay, went out to dinner, or cooked at the house, its one room filling with the steam and smoke of whatever our botched efforts yielded. Colin would go up on his own often in his late teens and twenties, perhaps preferring his own company.
I never talked to him about why he liked the schoolhouse so much; likely, I connected it with his inclination away from the family, his pronounced need to spend time apart from us even as he treated us all with a kind of acquaintance-level respect. He and I got along well enough when we reached our teens, but I don’t think we found a mutual pass-through until our thirties when we revealed the work we were both doing, the writing we’d both chosen that would define our lives, shape them and, for Colin, ultimately rob him blind of the life he’d chosen to pursue as a writer.
The crime was committed indirectly in the summer of 2004, by a man driving a car as if he had the right-of-way all over the road, as if my brother were merely a decoy he could plow over. Yes, he stopped afterward, but by then Colin was broken and gone from me, from everyone.
As soon as I could get away with it, I didn’t go up to the schoolhouse; not for years, forgetting the ghosts I waited for who never came, audibly grateful for my autonomy as soon as I had it. Being allowed to stay home while my parents were up there was a power enough. I was too square to dream up illicit alternatives. At 18, I brought my then-boyfriend up and his very real allergies to old things made him ill, so we never went again.
Not long after, I was engaged to Joe and he, too, was plagued by an allergic reaction to the mold that inhabited unmined corners of the house. We weren’t a fastidious family, my mother content to leave things coated in dust, smeared with grease, dotted with crumbs so she could gather fiddleheads or milkweed to make edible. It drove my father mad, but I didn’t know this until long after I moved away and kept my own house. They would visit Joe and me and out of her earshot he’d remark to me how much neater I was than my mother. I’d smile, aware of the truth, that my husband was a far more exacting housecleaner than I would ever be, or want to be, that I kept a reasonably clean house more to sidestep his scrutiny than as an antidote to my mother’s slovenly domesticity. And anyway, though I didn’t say this to my father, I’d always thought of that aspect of her as part of her unusual lack of accountability to anyone. I still admire this about her even as I poke a little fun which has the effect of making her laugh at herself.
Our children love the schoolhouse. They love the supernatural quiet of it, the remove from everything they think of as natural. Of course, they haven’t been there for two years and their last time didn’t leave them hungering for their creature comforts; their internet, cell phones and X-Box. But they still want to go and when we drive up to Toronto to visit my parents, we ogle the indolent cows lying in the sun, the horses grazing near the roadside, and clutch our guts on the roller coaster of the Hockley Valley road. (Just the name of that highway summons queasiness.)
When we’re there with the kids, I look up at the night sky and remember it differently, wishing I’d looked with less fear as a child. One August, when our youngest daughter was a baby and the older two children were still awake, a brilliant light undulated across the sky and I felt certain something terrible was going to happen. It lingered for hours, soundless and graceful, and we stood under it. Beneath that brilliance, I could see where the ground was scarred where the sea saw and swings used to be. The bats had the good sense to stay in the eaves, away from light. Occasionally, I’d go inside and stand behind the screen willing the terror out of me, finally half-convinced that we were all experiencing a close encounter. I pictured our family clawing at the ground with feeble fingers as we struggled against being beamed onto a mother ship and I still laugh at how that single protracted sighting of Northern Lights could stir such panic in me when my mother stood fearless most nights of my childhood under the night sky, beckoning me out when I couldn’t sleep, her absence and my fear pulling me from my bed. And I would join her and my father for a few minutes only to scurry back inside, favoring a lonely house with a maddeningly sleeping brother over a star-clouded ceiling.
In the months before my brother was killed, he told me that part of his plan to write and teach English and Drama the way our grandfather had involved the schoolhouse. He wanted to live there for several months with his dog Gabby who loved it there as much as he did. He would do so in winter, the loneliest time up there, waiting it out until he could earn his teaching degree in Australia the following year. Most years our parents had rented the place to skiers, the sport popular up there with the swells of Blue Mountain and other runs nearby. So, it was winterized and ready to receive him.
I had looked at him in disbelief and possibly admiration when he filled me in. Yes, I knew he liked it; I even felt a certain jealous prickle that he was free to chase his dream, that he could make a decision to change his life and be truer to himself and that part of his scheme involved a cross-Canada cycling trip that would begin his new life.
But what resonated when he first told me about his plan during an October visit to Philadelphia, and asked me not to tell our parents yet, was the idea that he would hole up at the schoolhouse when the earth was dead and the trees bare, the wind shrill at the windows, the people…well, that last didn’t matter because people were not what he was after.
I didn’t tell my parents, leaving it to him when he was ready. When he finally let them know what he’d be doing, from selling his home, to cycling across the country, to staying at the schoolhouse writing away the months of autumn well into winter and then attending school, I recall that pride stuck in my throat, displacing envy. I hope I told him that what he was doing was hats off incredible.
I didn’t tell my brother that I’d started to write a play about our earliest years at the schoolhouse and that the characters of Carrie and Mitchell were composites of my two older children, him and me, or that there was a prominent ghost in the story, named Penelope. She comes to Carrie in her dreams, lulls her away from her belligerent need to hate the place, shows her clues to a lush legacy in the town, relics in the barn adjoining the schoolhouse, mends fences between Carrie and her vexing younger brother, helps them hatch a plan to keep the schoolhouse when their parents find it’s much more than they’d first thought they could handle when they plucked their children from city life to show them that quiet wasn’t just when the lights went out at night.
Friday, August 25, 2006
The Sky's the Limit
Somehow, our tiny white protege's life has ebbed between last night and tonight. This morning when we took her from her bed she was scrambling in our hands and took a bit of her formula, though not enough to satisfy us that she wouldn't need another feeding midday which she did, with Ariel. This, after being in Ilana's and Jonathan's warm, loving clutches all morning. It was worth a few giggles to watch Jordan Tikki run amok in her box and flip and pitch herself forward and sideways, a little out of control but as if healthy and ready for some serious growing up. We really believed we had a future with her. These last three days have passed as languidly as three weeks.
But by this evening, she was drowsier than usual and by 8 or 9 when we were about to sit down to Shabbat dinner with our family and Joe's brother, Danny, his wife Lisa and their bairn, JT was lethargic. We tried another feeding and she could hardly lift her head to drink. It didn't take a close look to see her stomach had become concave.
It's well after midnight now and Ariel is upstairs keeping a vigil. We've been on the phone with a veterinary hotline, told we were doing everything right. As Joe, Ariel and I sat in her room and watched JT reach, shudder, and twitch, her mewing a plaintive, scratchy sound Ariel couldn't bear, thunder started. It was far away at first, scudding quickly closer until, within a few minutes, there was a terrific light show with hail that took a great limb down from Laura and Gabe's oak tree, the other side of our twin, onto their porch. It landed with a house-shaking crash that I thought was Ariel and Joe moving around upstairs in a panic. Some of the tree limb is on our shared third floor roof, a flat surface we all use if one of us is locked out of our house. We've always left our back third floor windows opened so that we could go upstairs in one another's homes, climb out the third floor window and steal into our own.
The lightning has moved off. I watched the flickering of it through our soon-to-be cut down willow in front of the house. This tree stands tall in the front yard, a long-haired lady, rather than the usual, by comparison stout, thick-trunked willows with dense, generously bowing limbs. Long before we arrived in our 90 year old home, our willow had grown straight up to adapt to the crowding of other trees over the decades. And as I watched the light surge and ebb through those branches, I knew the effect of this air borne energy was precisely, poetically matched to JT's struggle to live.
Thankfully, Ilana is asleep with her girl cousins, Malka and Avital, and Elan, 7, is alseep in Jonathan's room. When they went to bed, these four youngest children were aware that JT, her thin coat whiter today but not as downy as yesterday and now hardly covering her tiny jutting bones, was in distress. For the children visiting us, this household is at odds. When they come they always look forward to playing with their big cousins, Ariel and Jonathan, and with Ilana who is ideally matched to the girls' ages, 10 and 11. They love Norman, whom Elan called No-No when he was a baby. But they walked into a funereal mood that has deepened since they said goodnight.
Ilana takes a more philosophical approach to life after death, something I learned when I lost my brother, Colin, two years ago. After days and days, perhaps weeks of Ilana questioning me about what happens when a person dies, to which I could only give her my own truth, that the ones we love live in us afterward, she announced that heaven is inside us, not in the sky.
That night, I left her room feeling certain she was right. And tonight, with the fallen tree amplifying our anxiety and punctuating our grief over a briefly beloved pet, I feel certain, too, that tomorrow if JT isn't with us anymore, that if she chooses to, Ilana will be able to comfort her older sister as she did me.
(Jordan Tikki, born August 19, 2006, died August 26, 2006)
Somehow, our tiny white protege's life has ebbed between last night and tonight. This morning when we took her from her bed she was scrambling in our hands and took a bit of her formula, though not enough to satisfy us that she wouldn't need another feeding midday which she did, with Ariel. This, after being in Ilana's and Jonathan's warm, loving clutches all morning. It was worth a few giggles to watch Jordan Tikki run amok in her box and flip and pitch herself forward and sideways, a little out of control but as if healthy and ready for some serious growing up. We really believed we had a future with her. These last three days have passed as languidly as three weeks.
But by this evening, she was drowsier than usual and by 8 or 9 when we were about to sit down to Shabbat dinner with our family and Joe's brother, Danny, his wife Lisa and their bairn, JT was lethargic. We tried another feeding and she could hardly lift her head to drink. It didn't take a close look to see her stomach had become concave.
It's well after midnight now and Ariel is upstairs keeping a vigil. We've been on the phone with a veterinary hotline, told we were doing everything right. As Joe, Ariel and I sat in her room and watched JT reach, shudder, and twitch, her mewing a plaintive, scratchy sound Ariel couldn't bear, thunder started. It was far away at first, scudding quickly closer until, within a few minutes, there was a terrific light show with hail that took a great limb down from Laura and Gabe's oak tree, the other side of our twin, onto their porch. It landed with a house-shaking crash that I thought was Ariel and Joe moving around upstairs in a panic. Some of the tree limb is on our shared third floor roof, a flat surface we all use if one of us is locked out of our house. We've always left our back third floor windows opened so that we could go upstairs in one another's homes, climb out the third floor window and steal into our own.
The lightning has moved off. I watched the flickering of it through our soon-to-be cut down willow in front of the house. This tree stands tall in the front yard, a long-haired lady, rather than the usual, by comparison stout, thick-trunked willows with dense, generously bowing limbs. Long before we arrived in our 90 year old home, our willow had grown straight up to adapt to the crowding of other trees over the decades. And as I watched the light surge and ebb through those branches, I knew the effect of this air borne energy was precisely, poetically matched to JT's struggle to live.
Thankfully, Ilana is asleep with her girl cousins, Malka and Avital, and Elan, 7, is alseep in Jonathan's room. When they went to bed, these four youngest children were aware that JT, her thin coat whiter today but not as downy as yesterday and now hardly covering her tiny jutting bones, was in distress. For the children visiting us, this household is at odds. When they come they always look forward to playing with their big cousins, Ariel and Jonathan, and with Ilana who is ideally matched to the girls' ages, 10 and 11. They love Norman, whom Elan called No-No when he was a baby. But they walked into a funereal mood that has deepened since they said goodnight.
Ilana takes a more philosophical approach to life after death, something I learned when I lost my brother, Colin, two years ago. After days and days, perhaps weeks of Ilana questioning me about what happens when a person dies, to which I could only give her my own truth, that the ones we love live in us afterward, she announced that heaven is inside us, not in the sky.
That night, I left her room feeling certain she was right. And tonight, with the fallen tree amplifying our anxiety and punctuating our grief over a briefly beloved pet, I feel certain, too, that tomorrow if JT isn't with us anymore, that if she chooses to, Ilana will be able to comfort her older sister as she did me.
(Jordan Tikki, born August 19, 2006, died August 26, 2006)
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Fur in my Eyes
Our hearts have surrendered to a 4-inch blind newborn. Darla, mother to five baby bunnies just Saturday, which she seemed to be tending to busily enough when we peered into her hutch, taking bundles of hay into her mouth and laying them over her kits, did not in the end seem to be able to feed them. Now we have the survivor, named Jordan Tikki (Tikvah, the Hebrew word for 'hope' which speaks volumes), and all of us are enslaved by her extreme vulnerability, a captive, whimpering audience to her feeble movements and need for warmth. We cup her tiny body in our hands, have scarecely left her alone except for our first meal as surrogate parents to this newborn rabbit and even then she was only a few feet away on a countertop in her blue felt-lined, hay-padded box. Ilana spends hours a day holding her, belying her own ten years. She is doing all the things a new mother does, fawning, adjusting, worrying, kvelling.
This time last year, Ilana and I were quite literally engaged in a poetic struggle; she pleading for a pet rabbit, I resisting and turning my belligerence into a writing exercise to avoid hers. It worked and we produced a poem to which she added pictures and titled, "Other than a Fish," the title really a refrain at the end of each verse suggesting other insane ideas for pets. Each verse was a testament to her doggedness to have anything but a fish. A bunny was her uncompromised desire.
But let me start at the beginning.
Years ago I met a woman, mother of two sons then, pregnant with her soon-to-be third son and not yet thinking of the daughter she would also eventually have. When G and I met, I admired her busy household, made busier than my two child family because she had two dogs. And not only did she go onto have a 3rd and 4th baby - I was content to stop at the third child, but was held in thrall by her ability to manage 4, to want to in spite of an au pair who could do so much of the daily work of child-raising for her - she got a guinea pig and a cat, then another dog. Chickens, too, and a rooster which woke me up in the dark cold of a January morning when I visited G in her Chicago suburb and I sat up in bed and tried to remember where I was. I could harldly believe how smoothly it all seemed to work in her home; how the animals moved about with the people in the house, dogs and cats getting underfoot, being loved, rejected, fed, counted on, absorbed, ignored.
Eventually, we got a dog. Norman. My childhood was spent with cats, avoiding dogs, fearing them. But we went to the pound 6 years ago and I recall with some shame and gratitude that my unwillingness finally gave way to the bleeding heart I must have inherited from my mother. Norman stole my conviction. There he was, doomed. He'd been in the pound for 5 days and stood, stalwart, perhaps resigned to his fate, unbeseeching in the deafening corridor we wandered. All the other dogs campaigned hard to get out of there and Ilana, I remember, 4 at the time, beelined for the puppies. I would have, too, since we talked about waiting till spring and getting a puppy we could train and spend the summer getting to know on our terms. But Norman's mute gaze seemed to find us, and there I stood in front of his cage and wept for the dog we probably wouldn't take home because I had told everyone as we pulled away from the curb, "we are not taking an animal home today" only to see Joe and Ariel exchange a conspiratorial smirk they thought I'd miss.
We walked Norman in the little pet cemetery and he was trembling and unwilling to move much. We tried coaxing him out of a trauma we didn't understand and then had the keeper put him back, opting for a beautiful Nikita named Austin that ran us around as if pumped on steroids, too strong even for Joe. Smitten even as we knew Austin was probably bionic and out of our league, we put him back and prepared to leave, all of us weepy over poor, bedraggled Norman. But after the kids got into the car, I looked at Joe and told him, "I'm going back inside to see him" and asked the keeper what Norman would be like with a person he knows. So, she brought him out and he was all over her with happiness, the clever cur. We took him home. He had me regretting the decision for a good half-year as he chewed shoes, belts, brushes, and girls' panties from the dirty laundry! Early on I tried wrestling him to the ground and growling at him when he was out of line - a misbegotten piece of advice I got from a neighboring dog owner; I was lucky he didn't take a bite out of me for trying to tell him who his quavering boss was! But we called Willie in, a K-9 expert and he taught us a few tricks. Since then, with a few endearing and annoying quirks that are quintessential Norman (yes, underwear if it's dangling from the hamper), he has become a grateful and loyal pet. I've left the wrestling to Joe and the two go at it like a pair of lions.
Since bringing in the newborn bunny, Joe has come home early twice to aid in the feeding and care of this miniscule heartthrob, this robber rabbit, this tiny white hope. Now he's holding Jordan Tikki in his hand and cleaning her after a feeding that, if it wasn't vigorous, gave us hope that she was interested as she rooted around for more, craned her little head toward a warm space on Ariel's or Joe's shirt. I took a picture of her little mustachioed face, captioning it, "Got Milk?" but her features are practically embryonic even at 4 days, even at zoom-in range with my camera phone.
Norman has been a chap about it, truly, and getting extra treats because he's so good about not mauling the newest member of our family, not even sniffing around her box. He does as he always has done; following us from room to room and laying heavily at our feet or near them, waiting for someone to leap up and show him the way to the next room, his black-outlined brown eyes, doleful forever, finally beseeching, 'can I stay with you always?' He knows the answer, though it seems to be the question lingering there all the time, even before our tiny orphan came in.
A friend asked me if I resented Darla for abandoning her kits. At first I was stunned by the rejection of her flesh and blood. But no, resentment hasn't occurred to me mainly because Darla might not be mother material. She may, as this friend pointed out, need her freedom, love her emancipation now that Fletch, her hutch mate and the father of her kits, is fixed but good and no amount of surprises at her backside will yield more than a hind-leg warning from her or a lady-like skip toward a plump patch of grass. So, I look at it, as I hope the kids do, as a possibility, a cruel condition of Nature, a sly crook of Nature's finger that might have steered Darla astray, and fooled us all, not knowing she couldn't be a mother.
Last night, our first with Jordan Tikki in the house, Joe and I hardly slept. If I wasn't padding into Ilana's breezeless room to touch the tiny sleeping form in the blue box on her desk, to reassure myself of a pulse, then Joe was. I even drank water on one of those trips so I would need to waken myself to pee again before dawn and check one more time.
Tonight, someone sedate us. Stat.
This time last year, Ilana and I were quite literally engaged in a poetic struggle; she pleading for a pet rabbit, I resisting and turning my belligerence into a writing exercise to avoid hers. It worked and we produced a poem to which she added pictures and titled, "Other than a Fish," the title really a refrain at the end of each verse suggesting other insane ideas for pets. Each verse was a testament to her doggedness to have anything but a fish. A bunny was her uncompromised desire.
But let me start at the beginning.
Years ago I met a woman, mother of two sons then, pregnant with her soon-to-be third son and not yet thinking of the daughter she would also eventually have. When G and I met, I admired her busy household, made busier than my two child family because she had two dogs. And not only did she go onto have a 3rd and 4th baby - I was content to stop at the third child, but was held in thrall by her ability to manage 4, to want to in spite of an au pair who could do so much of the daily work of child-raising for her - she got a guinea pig and a cat, then another dog. Chickens, too, and a rooster which woke me up in the dark cold of a January morning when I visited G in her Chicago suburb and I sat up in bed and tried to remember where I was. I could harldly believe how smoothly it all seemed to work in her home; how the animals moved about with the people in the house, dogs and cats getting underfoot, being loved, rejected, fed, counted on, absorbed, ignored.
Eventually, we got a dog. Norman. My childhood was spent with cats, avoiding dogs, fearing them. But we went to the pound 6 years ago and I recall with some shame and gratitude that my unwillingness finally gave way to the bleeding heart I must have inherited from my mother. Norman stole my conviction. There he was, doomed. He'd been in the pound for 5 days and stood, stalwart, perhaps resigned to his fate, unbeseeching in the deafening corridor we wandered. All the other dogs campaigned hard to get out of there and Ilana, I remember, 4 at the time, beelined for the puppies. I would have, too, since we talked about waiting till spring and getting a puppy we could train and spend the summer getting to know on our terms. But Norman's mute gaze seemed to find us, and there I stood in front of his cage and wept for the dog we probably wouldn't take home because I had told everyone as we pulled away from the curb, "we are not taking an animal home today" only to see Joe and Ariel exchange a conspiratorial smirk they thought I'd miss.
We walked Norman in the little pet cemetery and he was trembling and unwilling to move much. We tried coaxing him out of a trauma we didn't understand and then had the keeper put him back, opting for a beautiful Nikita named Austin that ran us around as if pumped on steroids, too strong even for Joe. Smitten even as we knew Austin was probably bionic and out of our league, we put him back and prepared to leave, all of us weepy over poor, bedraggled Norman. But after the kids got into the car, I looked at Joe and told him, "I'm going back inside to see him" and asked the keeper what Norman would be like with a person he knows. So, she brought him out and he was all over her with happiness, the clever cur. We took him home. He had me regretting the decision for a good half-year as he chewed shoes, belts, brushes, and girls' panties from the dirty laundry! Early on I tried wrestling him to the ground and growling at him when he was out of line - a misbegotten piece of advice I got from a neighboring dog owner; I was lucky he didn't take a bite out of me for trying to tell him who his quavering boss was! But we called Willie in, a K-9 expert and he taught us a few tricks. Since then, with a few endearing and annoying quirks that are quintessential Norman (yes, underwear if it's dangling from the hamper), he has become a grateful and loyal pet. I've left the wrestling to Joe and the two go at it like a pair of lions.
Since bringing in the newborn bunny, Joe has come home early twice to aid in the feeding and care of this miniscule heartthrob, this robber rabbit, this tiny white hope. Now he's holding Jordan Tikki in his hand and cleaning her after a feeding that, if it wasn't vigorous, gave us hope that she was interested as she rooted around for more, craned her little head toward a warm space on Ariel's or Joe's shirt. I took a picture of her little mustachioed face, captioning it, "Got Milk?" but her features are practically embryonic even at 4 days, even at zoom-in range with my camera phone.
Norman has been a chap about it, truly, and getting extra treats because he's so good about not mauling the newest member of our family, not even sniffing around her box. He does as he always has done; following us from room to room and laying heavily at our feet or near them, waiting for someone to leap up and show him the way to the next room, his black-outlined brown eyes, doleful forever, finally beseeching, 'can I stay with you always?' He knows the answer, though it seems to be the question lingering there all the time, even before our tiny orphan came in.
A friend asked me if I resented Darla for abandoning her kits. At first I was stunned by the rejection of her flesh and blood. But no, resentment hasn't occurred to me mainly because Darla might not be mother material. She may, as this friend pointed out, need her freedom, love her emancipation now that Fletch, her hutch mate and the father of her kits, is fixed but good and no amount of surprises at her backside will yield more than a hind-leg warning from her or a lady-like skip toward a plump patch of grass. So, I look at it, as I hope the kids do, as a possibility, a cruel condition of Nature, a sly crook of Nature's finger that might have steered Darla astray, and fooled us all, not knowing she couldn't be a mother.
Last night, our first with Jordan Tikki in the house, Joe and I hardly slept. If I wasn't padding into Ilana's breezeless room to touch the tiny sleeping form in the blue box on her desk, to reassure myself of a pulse, then Joe was. I even drank water on one of those trips so I would need to waken myself to pee again before dawn and check one more time.
Tonight, someone sedate us. Stat.
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