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.

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)

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.