WOTD 43- LABORATORY

I had the unfortunate distinction of following my siblings George and Ann Marie in the classrooms of TJ High. Not to mention being the older and less brilliant sister of Libby. Goodness, talk about pressure! The thing that made things troublesome was that Mom had us so close together. We were the second batch of kids. I was so inattentive it did not even occur to me that some of my siblings had different last names than I, which would mean we were technically half-siblings. The first batch, Sherry, Sue and John, were the children of Cy Davis, Mom’s first husband; the one she married at seventeen. He went off to war for four years. Mom said when he came back they were both different people. I can’t imagine having a big horrendous war hovering over a marriage for four years and not ending up being different people. After their divorce Mom either fell for Dad or made him fall for her and she had four more children in five years: George, Ann Marie, me and then Libby.

I got this all the time: “Oh, you’re the sister of George or Ann Marie Hansen? I expect an A from you!” Their voices would rise in that smug teasing sort of way, like they thought they were giving me a compliment for belonging to a genius family. If Mom had given herself a half dozen years to rest before she had me, the teachers might have forgotten my brilliant brother and sister.

Alas.

George gets a big kick out of repeating a story about a faculty room conversation where the Chemistry teacher reportedly commented that he had the smartest student he’d ever had and the not-smartest student he’d ever had from the same family. Don’t you think that’s kind of a rude story to be repeating? Seriously.

Anyway, I have learned to live with it. I don’t hate myself. I know I hear different drums. I am not wholly uncomfortable being around brilliant people. I married one after all.

My genius brother, who I might add has his own flaws which I will not mention here, is one of those rare breeds who can understand complicated things on paper, but can also translate them into every day layman’s terms. He is as much right brained as he is left. Good logic; and strong creativity. He was artistic and ingenious as a kid. His favorite toys: the erector set, the chemistry set, plaster of paris and gauze, wax, and a set of paints and brushes. He plays mandolin and guitar very sweetly and has a lovely baritone voice. Well, let me recant that last phrase…he occasionally has a lovely baritone voice. Sometimes it is booming and over enthusiastic, usually followed by a rolling belly laugh and a witty little phrase or disclaimer like a curly Q at the end.

George is a chemical engineer. He practiced for this his whole life. Ask my mom. When he grew up he was torn between becoming a Geologist or a Chemical Engineer. Lib tells about being in Brother Bissel's Geology class at BYU. He read the roster the first day of class, last names first. When he got to Hansen, Elizabeth, he looked up from his paper, lowered the glasses to his nose and searched for her raised hand.

“You related to George Hansen?”

Lib nodded her head. He looked her over, took note of her sable colored hair, just like George’s, lifted his glasses back up to the top of his head, made a mark on his paper and said:

“You get an A.”

My brother George created this process by which he coats fabric fibers with nickel. Something like that. It’s a really cool thing, especially if you are into that kind of stuff. He worked for a large corporation in Colorado and then moved to Utah. He and Cyndy built a beautiful home up in Midway, gathered enough volcanic pot rock to cover the whole of their house themselves…one rock at a time. They both know and love the earth. Both are hard workers. Good solid people.

George rented a large warehouse in North Salt Lake and set up his Laboratory so he could produce nickel coated fibers. I drove Mom down I15 one afternoon to see what he was up to. What we saw was straight out of a Jerry Lewis film. Long church banquet tables lined the length of the warehouse, zig zagging like a crossword puzzle in this large high topped structure. George’s booming voice echoed his excitement to see us.

“Come on in!” he said, opening the glass door. He had two or three fellas working for him at the time, one in a lab coat, one in the front office crunching numbers or elements from the Periodic table or something like that. George called out to someone to turn off the gas for a sec while he showed us through. Nickel Carbonyl is highly poisonous. We would later almost lose my brother when there was a leak in that lab and he went back in to turn off the valve so the city would not be contaminated. They had to fly in an antidote from England to save him. He is the only living person on the earth to have survived Nickel Carbonyl poisoning, so I am told. He has a perpetual headache. I think it’s the nickel. But I am not…I repeat NOT… a chemist, remember.

Walking behind him in his place that day felt like someone got the chemistry lab and the Home Ec lab mixed up, like they ran out of stuff to use in Heslop’s AP Chemistry classroom so they borrowed some things from the Home Economics room. Atop the layout of long banquet tables were various crock pots, fry pans, teapots, and Bunson Burners under Mason jars with foil wrapped around the tops, an eternal roller coaster of tubes connecting them. You could see vapor rising; fluids flowing through the snakes of tubing between the various small appliances. Some mechanisms were behind glass shields, others hissed in the open air. We followed the tubes like we were in a game of Chutes and Ladders, ending up at the end, looking at a spool of thin threads the color of graphite.

“All this… for that?” I thought. But that’s not what I said.

“Amazing!” is what I said. And I was right to say that.

A few years later George sold the rights to his process to the world’s largest nickel company (something like that) and he took his family over to Wales for a year to oversee the building of a large factory which would officially manufacture those coated fibers.

Fast forward a bunch of years; a bunch of joyfulness and some piercing agony, and we are suddenly at today. His company, Conductive Composites, is his own. No more warehouse in North Salt Lake. He has his own official lab in Midway. This week I understand they are closing on a large piece of property on the banks of the Green River in Central Utah. They will build a much larger lab there. One with official machines designed just for them. They have in place contracts with entities I am not permitted to mention here. There are defenses and technological advances that are incorporating his genius in their upcoming products; things that will protect and prevent disasters we average people haven't thought about. It all has to do with how electricity travels or doesn’t travel. Like I said…it’s beyond me.

By the end of the year George will be addressed as Dr. Hansen, as will his son Nathan. They will wear those thick heavy royal robes and flick the tassels on their caps and hang gilded diplomas on their office walls. But I can tell you that this did not begin like chemistry teachers like to think genius begins. Nope. It began on the living room floor, with a set of gears and some wooden rods. It was poured down the kitchen sink, after which Mom had to unscrew that thingy and remove the gooseneck, cleaning out all that melted wax plugging things up. It bubbled over on her kitchen stove, and then again on the old church banquet tables in his first official lab.

Here’s to the mothers of Geniuses, and their blessed tolerance. And here’s to the Brains themselves; for making things happen in un-ordained places and in unorthodox ways. If we all waited for the perfect tools to make our magic,…well, where would the magic be?

Today, when I was wiping down the kitchen counter after browning the meat for dinner, I watched the steam rise from the little release valve in our rice cooker.

Made me think of George.
Always does.

WOTD 42- GUITAR

Some words are too large. Simple six letter words, too massive to describe well; too important in undefined ways. I have pondered what other small words have meant to me; words like mom and family and faith. I’ve allowed those words to hover over me while I examined them, the way I watch hummingbirds near the glass bulb feeder filled with red sugar water on Grams back porch. I have held very still and examined such things. But I am surprised by this word: guitar. It is so familiar, so every-day in my life and in our house. And yet I have not yet stilled myself in a purposeful way to focus on what this one thing has done in my life.

Christmas morning, 1971. I cannot recall all that was nested under the fragrant blue spruce arranged with beads and lights and tin icicles on the thin slatted wooden floors of our living room. Somehow Mom always seemed to find enough to make that moment magical, and, even if it was purchased on credit, there was abundant treasure to be found on Christmas morning. At thirteen I was no longer the girl who wanted Chatty Cathy or and Easy Bake Oven. And yet we had not discovered what it was that my maturing spirit wanted to grasp onto; what gifts or interest or talents were bubbling inside the cocoon of adolescence. So I suppose Mom guessed; and on that blessed holy morning I found under the tree a golden hued Yamaha guitar, cradled in its open case, angled to reflect the colored lights strung around the tree. Bright golden wound bass strings and virgin translucent nylon treble threads stretched from the bridge to the headstock. An exact replica sat nearby, with Libby’s name attached. We sat cross legged on the floor, holding them the way we had seen our brother do with his electric one. We muted the strings with our left hands and slapped the fingertips of our right hands back and forth across the strings, closing our eyes and pretending to be rock stars, our heads banging to some undefined beat, my unbrushed Christmas morning mop of hair flopping back and forth. The poor thing must not have known what hit it when my teenage hands took hold.

It was nearly a year before I actually tried to play it. Mr. Cameron had come to Pleasant Hills Middle School when I entered 8th grade. His office was in the back of the choir room. I can’t recall if he was a band teacher or an assistant choir teacher. He was a slight man, though sturdy enough. Young, with hip clothes and short cropped curly brown hair. When the school newspaper came out in September there was a notice that Mr. Cameron was starting a Guitar Club after school. My best friend Betsy, who sang with me in Mini Singers and also had a Yamaha guitar, tugged my arm when the sign up sheet came around in choir. On Tuesday’s and Thursdays Lib and I trekked up Old Clairton Road and down the steep driveway to school, our midi coats flapping against our calves as we walked, the black shapely cases of our instruments making us feel much more cool than we ever were. We sat three or four seats apart from each other on the multi-layered choir risers, our cases open at our feet, our guitars nestled against our budding breasts, our lengthening awkward arms stretching around their curved bodies. We willed our fingers to follow the patterns he taught us. Commanded our picking hands to do their thing. It reminded me very much of that trick where you pat your head and rub your tummy at the same time. Some people could not do it. But I could.

I could! I found that my left hand and my right hand could obey different sets of orders. I learned rather quickly what shapes to make my fingers take against the fret board; where to place my thumb on the back of the neck. I learned to make the fingers on my right hand dance in complicated patterns near the sound hole. Pivotal in all of this was the fact that Betsy learned at a similar pace, probably faster than me. We sat in the choir room long after the others left. We spent Friday nights at each other’s houses, learning tunes from Betsy’s Simon and Garfunkel album. We began going to school early, pulling the cold and heavy front doors of the school out into the dark early morning air, making our way down dimly lit empty halls to Mr. Cameron’s office. There in the tiny office about the size of mu upstairs laundry room he gifted us with Blackbird, and Stairway to Heaven; Dust in the Wind and If You Could Read My Mind and American Pie. Taught us to pluck our strings cleanly and succinctly. Showed us how to love the music in the way he played his own instrument. Betsy started calling him by his first name, Denny, when we jammed together. I just couldn’t. By the end of 8th grade, when we left the familiar space of the Middle School and entered the halls of Thomas Jefferson High School, I had learned basically everything I now know about guitar. There was no guitar club at TJ. No guitar class, and no Mr. Cameron.

Wherever you are, Mr. Dennis Cameron, I hope that the angels you brought to me are watching over you. Thank you. So much of my self definition involves what you gave me, unpaid, and likely underappreciated at the time. All teachers who give such gifts to their students…thank you!

I wrote my first song on that Yamaha guitar under the stairwell next to our apartment on East Bruceton road. “I Love You Mama”. I sang it, hesitantly, quivering with fear of rejection, for my mom on Mothers Day that year I was 15. She must have approved enough for me to want to try again. I wrote my second song in the same place, tucked there under the steps where someone stored their bike. The acoustics in a stairwell are fabulous. I have always had a need to compose in complete privacy. I sang so softly no one would hear me outside the thick firewall doors, and I kept one ear always open to the sound of a door opening in the ten stories above me. Then I would stop abruptly, nearly stop breathing as well, until the person had exited. My second song, Nativity, was a Christmas gift for Mom that year as well. That old Yamaha must have felt a sense of completeness when it was played on Christmas morning. My most recent composition, commissioned for the Clytie Adams Ballet School recital, actually uses the same chord pattern as that particular song written all those years ago.

There are many, many words that want to fill this space, telling about the places I have played, my first love songs; performances and late night rendezvous with my faithful wooden friend. She gave me voice, not just from within my throat but from the pit of my stomach and the inner chambers of my heart.

She took the anguish of my young girl life and let it swirl around inside, then spit it out of the sound hole and into the universe. She allowed herself to be held by that stunningly beautiful dark haired man who met me in the lobby of the dorms at Slippery Rock College. We took turns playing for each other, allowing the exchange of songs to fill the awkward space of flirting. We sat, just he and I and one guitar, until just before the sun rose. The next summer we both played that guitar for the people we love most in the world, all gathered around us, the layers of white lace in my dress cradling her like a cloud, the frothy net of my veil laying softly over her shoulder as we sang to each other, “I’ll walk in the rain by your side….” I found lullabies in her, and stories that came out in rhyme and meter with lilting melodies. My friend Merlyn found the harmonies from within her chords.

One year, when my third baby was newborn, David gifted me with a treasure beyond treasures. A 1953 Martin OOO18. Steel strings, with wood that had vibrated long enough to make her sing exceptionally well. David had recruited the help of my gifted guitarist brother, John. He found the perfect instrument in Boise and secretly snuck it down to Dave for our anniversary. It was my first beloved steel string acoustic. Like a child, I held her against my chest, feeling her heartbeat, aligning my breathing patterns with hers. Songs were born from her, songs incubated like chicks waiting to hatch, carefully plucked out and refined in my quiet places where only my guitar could hear as I stirred the simmering songs: The Builder, Heavenly Choirs, You Would Have Loved This, The Old Singer Sewing Machine, Pontiac Rocket. Songs of that place where I had first held a guitar: Sleepy Little Town and Is It Snowing Tonight. Like a faithful and tired grandmother, my old Yamaha found rest in her hard black case. Never to be sold or given away, though she has been lent to virgin hands occasionally. It was that old Martin that carried me up the stairs to the next level, who allowed me to stand before a microphone and risk my heart. That old Martin allowed herself to be used and abused by a young boy’s curious hands. She gave release to my boy, the sound of her drifting up to me as I laid in my bed at night. Later she released the magnificent voice of my Kate, easing the way with the safety of chords plucked from her strings. Sarah and annie, both gifted on the piano, also learned the basics on that old Martin.

I acquired new guitars from my gifted friend El McMeen; a massively lovely jumbo bodied Franklin, custom made of beautiful Koa wood. My shoulder struggled to fit around her large body and ended up with calcium deposits. So El took it back and sent instead a sweet little Collings that I use to this day. I found other songs in her: One Small Boy and Broken and Memoria and so many others. John also found my happy and dependable Taylor guitar for me. There are different songs in different guitars. I must remind myself of that. I love them all, my children made of wood and steel and bone.

I must make my way down to the basement and dig out that beautiful, faithful old Yamaha and see what songs she has been saving for me. I must find her, and free her from her tightly hinged case. Give her some air, and some light, and some space. Give her a fresh new set of strings and a reverential rendition of Blackbird for old time’s sake. Then maybe she will warm her wood, free the sweetly silent notes from her strings, and embrace me once again.

WOTD 41- NORMAL

I saw her once, stepping off the curb outside a department store in New York: Normal. She hailed a cab in a simple, pleasant, flowing sort of way. One stopped immediately in front of her, the fella stepping from behind the wheel and opening the door for her. I’m pretty sure it was her. I’d heard about her for years, since I was just a kid playing on the playground at Pleasant Hills Elementary School. Everyone there tried to be like her. I couldn’t figure out exactly what they were talking about, so I started paying attention, keeping an eye on the billboards lining Route 51 all the way into town. I pretty much saw everyone in those ads trying to look like her, but I was never really sure if any of those small-waisted, straight toothed, long lashed women were Normal herself. People generally don’t wear name tags around in public. What I ended up doing was taking the things that were similar in all those ads and making a composite in my head of what Normal looked like. So that day in New York, when we were having to go to dinner with some Law Firm humpty-whumps and I could not suck my tummy in far enough to feel adequate, I felt pretty sure that gal just about to get into a cab was either Normal herself or her twin sister. I thought about her all night. Totally ruined the delicate flavor of that Veal Piccatta I had ordered. I reprimanded myself through each bite, denying the poor girl in the mirrored walls the pleasure of cream and butter and white wine, telling her Normal would never indulge like that if she could not suck her tummy in. She would have smiled her brilliant white smile and ordered a green salad with vinegar. I ate it anyway. But I could not embrace it.

My best friend Cheryl decided that Normal was her new best friend when we were in sixth grade. She got some lipstick samples from her aunt who sold Avon and we tried them on in her bedroom one Saturday. We stood in front of the mirror and smacked our lips together like she said Normal would and I thought we looked really silly. But Cheryl liked it. Pretty soon her cheeks turned all pink and her eyelids bright blue and the boys started to make circles around her in the lunch room and that was that.

Later, when we were in High School, I started to feel more at home with the anti-Normal bunch. I wore football jerseys and my old Levi 501’s and a pair of hand beaded moccasins bought at the Fort Hall Indian reservation on the way home from Idaho one year. I wore my hair straight. No make-up. No nail polish. The closest I got to the pro-Normal girls was an occasional ribbon in my hair, flowing down the back in a semi-feminine sort of fashion. When the soles wore out on my moccasins I layered duct tape on the bottoms, extending their life by months if not years.

Every once in a while I flirted with the idea of Normal. Tried curling my hair, or dressing in something matching. Tried catching the occasional wave of confidence that wafted through my unstructured abnormal life, allowing me to stand in a circle of kids and think anything I had to say might be worth hearing. There were seasons when that confidence was healthy and vibrant. My whole eighth grade school existence was on Team Normal, but I think that was in large part because I was in the Mini-Singers ensemble choir and Mrs. Tucci allowed Betsy Gerson and me to sit in the hall and play Gordon Lightfoot songs on our Yamaha guitars. This was the early 1970’s. This was cool.

Cool was short-lived. Pretty soon I convinced myself that cool was too much like Normal and I would never be like her so it was not likely I could sustain the coolness. Instead I made myself responsible. Even though that was a show as well. When my classmates selected people to fit in arbitrary categories they did not select me as best smile or most likely to succeed. They voted me most dependable. This is not normal for high school.

You’d think a girl of the 1970’s would be quite comfortable not hanging out with Normal-ites. It was after all the age of free spirits, free love, people marching to all sorts of off-beat drummers. But I could never be that kind of ab-Normal or Normal; not with the back of my ears still wet from the waters of baptism. They never dried out, the divine water constantly trickling down my neck, reminding me I was designed to be peculiar. I could not hang with Normal, but I didn’t fit in with Funky either.

When I got grown up and thought I had comfortably found my place in line, a bit to the left of Normal, I realized that Normal was not exactly what I thought she had been all those years. She began to age, and the wrinkles that soften the tight brow of super models found their way to her and to me. She hated them. But I didn’t mind. I’d learned through the years to live with flaws. I didn’t mind them so much now. I don’t even try to suck in my tummy now. We are quite a ways past that. Now I think that I have the charge to be a missionary for diversity. I don’t so much keep my peripheral vision on the lookout for Normal passing by, worried that others will see us both and start comparing. Instead I push myself through the typical, hoping if I kick hard enough I will push through the thick jelly of average and pierce the membrane, rising up into fresh blue sky of individuality, my mouth wide open gulping in the freshness. Normal can’t kick like that. She had super high heels on, and tight skinny jeans, and she just can’t kick like she’ll need too to get free.

So in the end, it doesn’t matter if that gal getting into the cab those years ago was actually Normal or not. I used to like to say I thought I had seen her. Now I don’t really need to know where she is or what she is up to. This, my friends, is one of the beauties of being over baked and over weight.

It may well have been Normal I saw getting in a cab that day. She sure was beautiful. Not knock-out eye popping gorgeous, just pretty pretty. I salute her, wherever she is, and hope she has a nice ride.

WOTD 40 - UNIT

When I was 14 years old we moved from the old English Tutor house on Old Clairton Road to the high rise apartments down on East Bruceton. We had lived in that house from 2nd to 8th grade. That’s my perspective. George would see it that we lived there from Jr High through Graduation. Mom might see it as the time between hopeful denial and stark reality. We who lived there knew it as the charming but tumultuous era when Dad was there and not there; when you never knew if he’d come home happy or come home drunk or come home at all.

The walls of that old tutor can tell stories. They hint of Iron City beer and cigarette smoke in the basement going fist to cuffs with the April freshness of laundry soap. Dad sat in the chair in one room watching the Pirates in their hey day while Mom worked in the laundry room right next to it, forcing the cloth of our lives through the repentance process of baptism by water and fire, pulling pieces one by one from the dryer, warm and clean and innocent.

I don’t rightly know why we moved. I think maybe the landlord decided to sell the house we had rented all those years. Ann Marie and Libby would know this. I lived in my own little world. Still do, I guess.

I have a vivid memory of seeing my father for the last time in the parking lot of that apartment building. It followed a hefty argument on our way home from Idaho. He never spent one night with us in that place, just drove away in a cab without ever walking in. But that’s another story.

We four girls; Mom, Ann Marie, Libby and I, did the best we could to pretend nothing had happened. There was plenty of work to do, and school was just starting, so it was natural enough to push the piercing knife of rejection over to the side of my brain and just …just…exist, I guess. We had lots of stuff to deal with, shifting from a large home to a three bedroom apartment. In the week before we left for the west we made the trip from the house up and down the steep hill to the apartments countless times. It reminded me of a bouncy red rubber ball attached to a rubber band, which was attached to a wooden paddle. We bounced back and forth, back and forth- the same distance, the same motion, repeated and repeated. It quickly became obvious things were not going to fit in our apartment and the single storage unit assigned to apartment 101. In the bustle of volunteer hands moving things for us, Mom suggested people just put the stuff no one knew what to do with in empty storage units on alternating floors of the building. The units had simple padlock hinges. The apartments were fairly new, and many were unoccupied, so Mom bought a series of locks for the apartment numbers she knew were not yet occupied and we sort of “borrowed” the units until we got back from Idaho and could figure out what to do.

After we returned from the dry arid summer air to Pittsburgh smog and humidity; after we had hung the curtains and discovered what wanted to be where in the apartment; after Ann Marie had painted her bedroom dresser yellow; Mom needed something that must have been stored in one of those units. In the long search through the various closets, tucked in sections on every other floor, we discovered someone had removed one of the locks and replaced it with a new one. Turns out our cubby full of treasures had gone to Good Will, since the manager did not know to whom they belonged and new tenants were in need of the space. After that Mom negotiated with the manager to use empty units until new tenants moved in. Thus began the occasional Saturday scurry of shifting things between storage units. We’d get word that a certain unit was leased and we had a very short time to empty the storage unit. So we sorted and consolidated, shuffled and discarded. This process repeated until just about everything had to be given away.

In the end what we stored in the one storage unit assigned to our apartment was a couple hundred pounds of hard red winter wheat, a symbol of faith more than anything. It was awfully painful for me to sort through those storage units, not so much because I was a restless teenager who did not want to be sifting through junk on her day off (though there was no doubt a hefty measure of the grumps), but because I found everything to be useful, and desirous, and it was awfully painful for me to agree that something needed to go. It wasn’t until years later and I was standing beside my mother in the garage of her condo here in Utah that I figured out the psychology of letting go. Dave had loaded the old red truck with the dregs of our garage sale; all the left over items; things nobody wanted, even for a measly nickel. He picked up Mom’s old Singer sewing machine, hefted it into the truck bed, and turned to Mom, asking if she was sure she wanted him to take it to DI. She nodded her head, without hesitation, and said:

“Yup, take it. Someone needs it more than I do now.”

And so the truck drove off, up Sweetwater Lane toward Deseret Industries, where I hope someone wonderful bought and cherishes that machine and is currently sewing away all sorts of soft fabric delights for their family.

When I get that old panic, rising up from inside, at the prospect of giving some treasure away, I try to repeat Mom’s words. Like a mantra:

Someone needs that more than I do now.

I know, Dave, you are wondering when I am going to start using that mantra in a meaningful purposeful way! Sorry, Love. :)

WOTD 39- FRENCH

I wrap my fingers into the edge of the metal handle attached to the wooden door on my Sub-Zero fridge. It requires intentional strength to pull the door open, the air suctioning the cold inside. Finally it gives way and the door swings out, revealing layer on layer of leftovers stacked in Rubbermaid containers, two gallons of 1% milk, a carafe of orange juice and six pounds of butter. We have our priorities around here. I grab three brown eggs from their scooped cradles inside the door, and one of the jugs of milk. With eggs in one hand, and milk in the other, I kick the fridge door shut. I can hear the air sucking inside, like the thing has lungs. I set the milk on the counter and open the maple cupboard door to the right of the sink, lifting a vegetable bowl and pushing some dirty dishes off to the side making room on the counter near the sink. I set the bowl on the cold granite and tap one of the eggs against the stone. I lift the cracked egg with the flow of a conductor raising her baton for the upbeat, stretch my thumb and ring finger away from each other while still gripping the shell. The egg gives way and divides itself. I raise my hand again and let the liquid, all jelly like with a golden orb in the middle, fall into the vegetable bowl. As I repeat the process on the second egg I reach behind me, pulling on the wooden handle of the utensil drawer, and retrieve, without looking, a fork. I whip the eggs in a rolling motion, the yellow-gold swirling into the gelatin white. Soon it is all a frothy pale yellow. I place the bowl next to the sink, lift the gallon of milk over it, and pour a few tablespoons into the whipped eggs. As I continue to whip, my hand reaches into the narrow spice cupboard to the left of the stovetop. A waft of miscellaneous fragrance floats out as my hand reaches in, past the bottles of sage and cinnamon. It comes out victorious, with a bottle of Mexican vanilla. Still whipping, I tip the bottle and allow two drops to fall into the eggs.

At the stove I bend over, way to the bottom roll-out shelf, and pull out the square griddle. As my left hand places the griddle on the burner, the right hand twists the ignition knob. A yellow blue flame leaps out around the edges of the griddle, then settles into a slow steady hiss as the griddle heats up. I dip a knife into the ceramic container of butter, the one we bought in England years ago. The rectangular terra cotta butter box says Original Suffolk Butter Box – for Home or Safari. I slide the chunk of butter from my knife and lift the pan, watching the creamy oil disappear as it slides, singing, over the hot griddle.

Grandma Sycamore bread: soft, white substantial, fiberless and delicious. I pull it from the bread drawer, untwist the tie, and pull out four pieces. Fork in one hand, I dip the bread, a piece at a time, into the egg mixture, shake it two times and then place it on the griddle, one lined up next to the other. I have an instinct about things on the stove. When my cooking angel tells me, I slide the edge of a spatula under one of the pieces and flip it onto the opposite side of the griddle where the butter has turned brown, smells yummy delicious, right there on the edge of burnt. I listen to the egg sizzle for just a moment, then silently heat the mixture infused in the bread until it is slightly firm, the outer skin of the bread looking all golden brown and mottled. I slide the slices onto a plate from the cupboard, spread a generous chunk of butter atop and move it across the landscape of the toast until it looks like a golden swampy earth spot in early spring when the snows have melted. Atop the pond I sprinkle soft, virgin powdered sugar, straight from the bag, the sweetness falling like snow from heavy evergreen branches.

It is early morning, on a test day, and my boy or my girls scurry down the stairs. I bless the food myself, asking the Lord to help them recall what they’ve learned. I pour a cup of juice and set it before them. They inhale the toast and drink the juice down in three swallows; grab their books, call out a “Thanks, Mom”, and (depending on the child) slip over to the stove to give me a hug or a kiss. Then they are off to school.

In the fresh cold silence of my kitchen I find there is just enough egg mixture left in the bottom of the vegetable bowl for maybe one slice for myself. I dip the soft white bread in and slide it around like a dinner roll in the last trails of gravy on a Thanksgiving plate. It’s not quite enough to cover all the bread, but I make it anyway. Sit at the counter by my lonesome and sprinkle powdered sugar on top. Soft, white, sweet and buttery powdered sugar on top of French Toast.

WOTD 38 - BIRD

There is a day; a morning; a moment: Late in the winter when hope awakens with the rising sun. Our bedroom sits on our lot down near the wooded hollow, filled with ancient scrub oak trees and orphaned miscellany brought to the mulchy space by fierce Farmington east winds. Three purposeful columnar maples shade our windows in the summer, just outside the bay facing the mountains to the east. In the autumn I leave the blinds open all day and all night. The leaves provide privacy and the glorious golden apricot blend of color in those large flat leaves stuns me every time I enter the room by light of day. I close the blinds in the winter when the trees are bare, mostly to protect the private space between our window and our neighbor’s. All winter long the space is somber and silent; until that one morning when the sun has begun to rise earlier, the light of morning pushing through the blinds, appearing like a blank sheet of radiant lined school paper waiting for a story to be written.

I lay in my bed and notice, for the first time each year, the two toned melody of a bird in the trees. One simple song, by a single winged creature somewhere out there in the woody place where leaves have not yet begun to bud. I take note of the day in March, often close to my birthday, opening the spot in my heart where hope is kept.

I keep hope safely tucked in a rather organized cupboard, unusually organized for one like me. It requires certain keys to open the cupboard door; some distinct hard evidence to serve as a trigger to pry it loose. The song of the winged one is the key in the hand of spring, hope of seasons impending. So often I forget to recognize hope for what it is. So often I think it only appears as the elusive quest in our human hearts for things unseen and eternal. I forget that it shimmers in the distant lights across the bay when we are headed to Salt Lake City at night. At dusk, when the waning light confuses the landscape, hope tells me the city is there because it has always been there and cities generally don’t disappear in real life. Hope reassures me my Kate is alive and happy in Houston, and that Annie’s baby is growing in perfectly healthy ways with her belly. And it sings to me in wordless melody that spring is coming. I know that song. Each time I hear it hope throws its roots deeper and deeper into my soil of belief, so that soon hope becomes trust.

Spring is in the offing. My skin can feel the rising sun through the window blinds. The solitary bird is joined by other songs as the days progress; a cacophonous set of harmonies much like the Debussy choral piece we did in high school choir. I leave the window on my side of the bed slightly cracked open throughout the year, inviting fresh crisp air into our space regardless of the temperature. We are sheltered by the architecture of the brick structure, the large bay in the Living Room protecting us from wicked winter winds. Only on the bitterest winter days do I seal that window shut. In the spring the music of the birds echoes off the brick, rises to the Bailey house to the east of us and reflects back at us from there as well, the sound amplified as it travels. By the time summer comes there are flocks of small-beaked creatures nesting in those trees and the sound is so abundant that it awakens me in the early hours, often not too long after I have fallen asleep. There is a first chorus around 5 am. Still dark. Not even the hint of a rising sun. Like monks in a pre-dawn chant they gather their songs and offer them in an Avant-Garde chorus. The song is not long lived, maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty. Then the silence returns until the first rays of sunlight peek over the mountains. Then they sing unceasingly. All the live long day. I recognize their compositions, repeated like eternal musical stutterers. For seventeen years I have bathed in their songs and I do not know who they are. Sort of like all the years of my youth I repeated lyrics to tunes I knew by heart, though I cannot tell you even now who the artist was or the name of the band. I realize as I write this how narrow minded I can be, that I would drink the auditory flavors of three full seasons a year and not even attempt to know from whence the offerings come.

I have just spent the bulk of this Saturday morning searching the internet for the sounds of my hollow. I’m overcome with the ease of access; that I, a completely anonymous searcher, can find recordings of the songbirds outside my window tucked here in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains. I’m thrilled, and then moved to tears that the songs I know so well have names attached to them. I feel like the pauper who has just discovered the benefactor who has been leaving bread, mysteriously, at my doorway for nearly two decades.

We get so used to the ease of finding things on the internet I forget that someone has spent hours, weeks, months, even years collecting and arranging words and pictures and recordings, then making them available to Mrs. Anonymous. I type a few letters into a search box, click my mouse, and up come my options. This one from the WESTERN SOUNDSCAPE ARCHIVE has given face to the voices I hear every morning, calling me from the softness of my down pillow. Thank you University of Utah J. Willard Marriot Library Digital Collections, for lifting the blinds and swinging wide open the window to my woods, when my own feet are too feeble and my own blurry eyes cannot see through the trees.

I can now recognize the jack-hammer pulse of a northern flicker, followed by the crescendo of his song, the pitch rising in staccato notes then falling again.

The beautiful but brash-throated stellars jay, whose bright blue wings look stunningly brilliant against the crystalline innocence of new born leaves.

Swallows, and titmouse, and sparrows and robins. A whistling warbler, and the doves who make their way down my chimney on a regular basis. They combine to create a chorus I can hardly define but which I know so well. I’m an on-listener at my own bird convention.

And thanks to the Western Soundscape Archive I can now know exactly what to curse on a warm summer afternoon when I am trying to regain some strength through a moment of afternoon repose. Down in the hollow a song repeats, unrelenting, two notes, a third apart. Over and over. I pound my pillow into a new shape, lift my head and turn onto my other hip there on my bed. I cover my ear with another pillow. Still, the shrill notes pierce through. Now that I am educated I can grumble a nasty remark specifically to that black-capped chickadee out there. There’s only so much of two single notes, sung repeatedly, that is appealing to the human ear.

(BTW- in case you didn't already know this; when text is blue in a blog post that usually means you can click on the word and it will take you to a link.  The two colored texts above will lead you to sites where bird pictures and sounds can be seen and heard.  Click on the "black-capped chickadee" and you'll see the pretty little thing.  Then click on "listen" within the link and you'll hear the charming-annoying little thing.)

WOTD 37 - TOILET PAPER (The Truth in an Organic Process)

Warning. This post contains terms not approved by my mother.

(My friend, a fabulous writer named Kristen Randle, offered a challenge to write about something pivotal in our lives. I decided to write about toilet paper.)

My mom came from that old school; the one where things were not balanced; the kind of school where you might wear a nice Sunday dress with stretched out athletic tube socks and fishing boots. Some things are very earthy and raw; others are more refined.

OK, so I am going to just jump in on this one….

We were never allowed to say the word “pee” when I was growing up. I feel weird writing it. I can name people who will feel icky reading it. We didn’t say pee, and we didn’t say poop, and we didn’t say bum. It was “urine” and “bowel movement” and “butt” (as slang as we were allowed to get, for “buttocks”).

I cannot believe I am actually writing this.

There was no shame in any of this, my mom said. It’s all part of being human, a natural process of the body. But it was private and not all that pleasant and so we were required to use the medical terms, though we have used the term “tinkle” for…well, you know what I mean. And “potty, potty” is used for the other.

Oye Ve! Words can be delicate modes of communication.

We weren’t allowed to say Shut Up either. We got a nice lather of soap on the tongue for that one.

I don’t know how it happened; they didn’t learn it from me; but my kids say pee and poop. Not that it’s the topic of Sunday dinner conversations. They are in the process of raising little children and it’s a fact of life that we use some term to express what’s happening. It must be that the generation after mine just refused to use those medical terms. Little Ruby has decided she is done with diapers. So you can imagine we are talking a lot about this stuff. It is as simple a fact of her little life as eating Cheerios and watching Yo Gaba Gaba. She has taken to putting three or four or five pair of princess panties on at once. The layered look.

So I’ve been with my grandkids a lot lately, which is great. I am tired, though. My head is tired. And my bones. I was standing in the bathroom at John and Ashley’s yesterday, waiting for Ruby to go potty. Tinkle, to be exact. Pee, as she put it. “I go pee!”

She insisted that she had to do more than pee though, and she sat there on the toilet swirling her feet in little circles, humming a little tune, pointing to Mommy’s shampoo and Daddy’s shaving stuff and telling me what it was and to whom it all belonged. I stood there 15 minutes waiting. Tried to lift her off at least half a dozen times but she clamped her legs around the porcelain bowl and screamed bloody murder that she wasn’t done, so I relented. Over and over. It was nap time, and she had been zipped into the tent covering her crib once already. “Potty! Potty!”, she screamed from her room; and since I was on the team designated to help her learn, I went in her room and unzipped the net over her crib that keeps her from climbing out. She stood there in her crib, buck naked, her nose dripping from crying, with a victorious grin on her face. I gathered her clothes, including the dry pull-up she had been wearing when I put her down, and placed them on her changing table. I carried her into the bathroom and set her on the toilet, her little legs straddling that big bowl. Her knees just barely reached the rim. Ruby is only two years old. She is yet young to be doing this.

When Ruby decides something, watch out! So I stood there in front of her in the bathroom. Waiting. Waiting. She had already gone tinkle. As I repeatedly tried to remove her and put her back to bed she dug in her figurative heels deeper and deeper. That little beast that lives behind my right kidney started climbing up my esophagus, ready to burst out with some not so nice verbiage. I thought that monster had been conquered in my “maturity”. I realize now it just has not been beckoned forth by little childish demands. He is alive and well and living in ME! Sad. I have an image to uphold! I am GUMMY! I am thinking it is not good for our grandmother-grandchild relationship to have this much intimate time together, at least not when Gummy has an eternally throbbing headache. I finally pulled her kicking and screaming from the potty, forced her twisting hips to let me put the pull-up back on, and put the closest dirty shirt on her so she wouldn’t freeze. I wrapped her in her blankie, tucked her pale pink elephant “Ellie” in her arm, handed her her Bah-Bah and rocked her to sleep. Rocked us both to sleep.

I woke a few minutes later in the darkness of the room, the afternoon light barely diffusing from the edges of her soft pink curtains. I awoke with this image in my head.

The roll of toilet paper.

I woke thinking about the roll of toilet paper Ruby kept pointing to there in the Battle of the Bathroom. And this is what I was thinking as I shifted back and forth in that rocker in Ruby’s room.

I remembered years ago, on a hot summer afternoon, sitting in my own bathroom, tears streaming down my raw salt-worn cheeks. We had answered the call, the one we all have nightmares about receiving, on that sunny summer afternoon, having just returned from our family vacation in Michigan. We had sobbed and groaned and clutched our own empty chests; turned to each other and embraced, our pulsing shoulders throbbing against each other as we walked into the valley of the shadow of death and began the long painful process of grieving.

Mom Connors was dead. Grandma Connors. Helen. She had died in a car accident after dropping us off at the Saginaw airport. It was a truth that kept trying to chisel its way into our heads, but we could not allow it in. Logic told us to process it. Our hearts refused.

I found privacy and thinking space in the bathroom. I remember sitting there looking at the roll of toilet paper beside me. I remember distinctly thinking that the last time we used this she was alive and vibrant, her soft warm arms thrown out to her grandchildren, her loving eyes catching the gaze of her second son. I remember resisting using that roll of paper, thinking that if we left it the way it was time might have stood still where we left it before leaving for Michigan. I sat there a long time. Weeping. How dare the sun dip into the lake to the west of us, the world keep spinning, neighbor children keep playing out in the yard? The world should stop, out of respect if nothing else! Shouldn’t everything stop? For just a minute at least.

And yet I felt my body doing what it has done from birth. I got thirsty. And hungry. And tired. Just like it did when she was alive and well. And life-giving water processed through my body like it always had. The water I had ingested in Michigan processed through in Utah, just like nothing had happened. It just did not seem right.

Finally, I felt an overwhelming peace come to me. Right there on the toilet. God, I guess, is no respecter of people or places. I felt the warm embracing arms of faith come round me, like some angel had picked me up and wrapped me in my heavenly blankie and was willing to rock me to sleep.

It’s ok. It’s more than ok, it’s comforting to know this old earth will continue spinning, spinning, spinning. It will spin when I am gone, too. Indeed, we pause in the misty dusk of grief when we lose those we love. We pause sometimes for a long, long time. Still, the ebb and flow of life goes on around us. We think it disrespectful, when in fact it is wholly and completely respectful. We are only here for a little while. This is temporary. It is not an unimportant thing that we are here, true. But it was designed to be temporary. The earth will turn with or without us. People will drive past us when we go out to get the mail and they will have things on their mind that are important to them, but they will have no idea our world has just turned upside down. The same shows will play on TV; same clocks will rotate their arms at the same steady pace. All this says, in repeated choruses of daily existence, that we are meant to move on. We jump in, then we jump out, like Sophie in her jump rope games. The rope keeps turning, up then down, slapping against the days of all life. We enter, then we exit, and the rhythm continues without us.

I will one day jump out myself, and Ruby will take my place with her own grand-daughter. She will perhaps stand there as frustrated as I, waiting for her to go “pee”. And I, in the meantime, will hover over…up high….way high above her, and chuckle from my heaven place.

WOTD 36 - CHIEF

Thanksgiving, 1990-something, not sure of the exact date. My brother’s new wife, the second wife..the one unfortunate enough to have to follow the first wife whom we all adored... was joining us for the first time. We were all a bit nervous, no more than she, I suppose. They drove down from Boise the day before. Next morning she, (let’s just call her L.) jumped in to help with the Thanksgiving feast preparations. A risky thing for anyone, if you catch my drift. We have our "ways", established no doubt before the creation of time. I imagine our spirits hovering over a cluster of clouds, peering over the edges on a late November day, watching Pilgrim women stoke their fires and dress their birds and simmer their cranberries over open flames, long wooden ladles poking out from black iron pots. We watched again, much later in the history of the world, year after year, as the commemorative feast evolved from the late 1800’s until the day the Gatekeeper of Heaven called our names and told us to line up. We five women slid on down to this spot, under our mother’s wing, and started the earth-life journey.

I feel it each November, after the Trick or Treater’s have finished their quests, and the leaves have succumbed to the blast of snow that inevitably hits after an Indian Summer. I feel that familiar yearning to gather wood and check my store of spuds in the cellar, likely something I had imagined once upon a heaven-time.

So that Thanksgiving morning L. shimmies through the crowd of us in the kitchen, moves to the sink and lifts the turkey out of the basin of water it has been thawing in all night. She proceeds to rub it down and opens the seasoning cupboard at Gram’s condo. We glance at each other and hold our breath, wondering what in the world she thinks she is doing. Next thing we know she is sprinkling Lawrey’s Seasoned Salt over the sacred bird! I drew a slow deep breath and held it while I thought about what to do next. It just would not do to have seasoned salt on the turkey. I can’t even remember what we ended up doing, whether we opted to let it ride, or if one of us spoke up. I guess, thinking back, we must have spoken up, because I don’t remember ever tasting our Thanksgiving bird with paprika and turmeric flavoring. Chicken at Sunday dinner, crispy skinned with spicy flavoring; maybe. But never turkey!

So I suspect L. found out that’s not how the tradition went for us. I suspect she found out a lot about us that first day she met us. No one…seriously NO ONE…should meet their new in-laws while preparing a holiday feast. There is a secret sacred dance one must know on such occasions. Even we ourselves are not aware of the dance and wouldn’t know how to describe the steps. But it is a dance nonetheless and one is wiser to watch it a few times before jumping in. Sad, I know. But true.

So anyway, my brother asks L. when they are finally alone, when the meal is completely devoured and the dishes are done and our tummies are stretched beyond their natural capacity and everyone is settled into reading the ads for the upcoming sales; he asks her what she thought of his family.

“Well,” she said, “its sort of like being around six of you! All chiefs; no Injuns.”

And so it was.

And so it is.

(They’re not married any more.)

WOTD 35 - TRIGGER

Doug met us at the dock. We sat on our luggage washed in the light of a waning moon, one week after Equinox, wet from the spray of the water spewing from the speed boat that had brought us to the island. The light of a thousand stars danced their fairy dance over the waters of the Straits of Mackinac, the gentle drift of waves lapping against the sides of boats bound to the wooden posts jutting from the rim of the dock. The clip clop of hooves against asphalt pierced through the quiet of the night, moving closer and closer as Doug brought his wagon down the hill. He pulled the reigns in to his belly, calling a gentle Whoa as he leaned his back toward the wagon bed. The horse rocked his head back, his mane caught the breeze coming off the straits, his neck stretched tight, then released as he bowed his head, stopped, and tapped his foreleg against the dock.

“You two the newlyweds?” He asked, with a sort of tease in his voice. Dave introduced himself, then me, and thanked him for coming out so late. We had missed the last ferry, having driven eight hours from Pittsburgh after opening our wedding gifts with family that morning.

Mackinac Island sat in the distance, six or seven miles from the shore where we stood. I watched as Dave found a phone and made a few calls. Before long we heard a motor in the distance, coming over the water, and soon we were aboard a small private boat pouncing through the misty night toward the lights in the distance. As we approached the island Dave wrapped one arm around my shoulder and with his other hand pointed toward a string of sparkles along the shore up ahead, sitting higher than the rest of the lights on the island. A long steady stream of silver-gold specks: “That’s the Grand Hotel. Now count seven lights up from there…that’s the cottage.” I squinted my eyes, as much to protect from the lake spray as to focus on the scene. As we approached it became apparent that this cottage was nothing like the cottage of my childhood imaginings. I thought of a cottage as something from Goldilocks, or Red Riding Hood, or Snow White. Small and quaint and dripping with charm. I realized there in the water still a mile from the shore that this was no small residence.

Grand Hotel & West Bluff Cottages

 Doug lifted our luggage onto the wagon bed and jumped up to the buckboard, offering his hand to me as I lifted my foot onto the small step at the side of the wagon. Dave placed his strong hand in the small of my back as I rose into the wagon. I scooted over behind Doug and Dave scooched in next to me, wrapping his arm across my back and cupping his warm hand over the knob of my shoulder. Doug clicked his tongue against his cheek and flipped the reigns. The wagon started with a slight jerk, and we were off, the creature in front of us prancing at a pretty good clip to get a good enough steam behind him to make it up the hill to the West Bluff.

Front of cottage

We took the road back behind the Grand Hotel, back on that little one lane trail of a road situated between the mansions on the bluff and the carriage houses behind the massive shingled summer homes. Dave’s cousin, Pam (who would later marry Doug) was waiting for us, welcoming us to the cottage. Grandma and Grandpa Roy had left for the Tawas Cottage so we could have the place for our honeymoon; left us the whole stunning place, with an open tab at the grocery store in town and some money for a nice dinner at the Island House. This is the stock from which my husband came.

Grandma & Grandpa Roy in front of cottage at Mackinac

We entered through the kitchen door. Dave’s cousin Pam, who was working on the island for the summer, was staying in the servant’s quarters, up the small set of back stairs. Dave set the luggage on the floor of the kitchen and took my hand, leading me through the place like Prince Charming showing Cinderella his castle. The dining room, just off the kitchen, laid itself out like royalty, the eternally long table flanked by a matching set of 36 antique press back chairs. A fine walnut antique high chair sat in the corner. Through the other door of the dining room we came into the official entry hall of the house, beautiful massive doors set against a wrap around porch, arched entry ways and doorways going off the lobby to studies and drawing rooms and sitting rooms where Grandma and Grandpa Roy played cards or where Grandma knitted while Grandpa read the paper and smoked his cigar, the sweet scent swirling above his head and finally resting in the ornate tin work on the ceiling. A genuine Tiffany lamp sat next to an ornate antique table. The whole place was furnished with valuable, beautiful, dignified antique furniture, originally placed there when the house was built in the late 1800’s. Grandpa, who had made his fortune with Roycraft mobile homes, the first mobile homes ever commercially sold to the public, had bought the Mackinac Island home after a fire had damaged part of it. He was a carpenter, and a little hammering and sawing and building was no big deal to him. The home came intact, with all its furnishings. Grandpa was meticulous in his woodcraft. Grandma was tidy and diligent, keeping the place clean and friendly, hand washing every sheet used by the hundreds of guests flowing through the place, ironing the wide swaths of white cotton before she put them back on the beds, the aroma of starch and fragrant soap rising from the hot Iron Rite as she wiped her forearm across her sweaty brow, her breasts tucked snugly into the bib of her cotton apron, the thick beige stockings on her legs sagging around here ankles. She could have hired the work out. She preferred to do it herself.

Helene & Antoine Roy in drawing room

Swirling up from the entry was a large gracious stairway. The staircase on the movie Titanic very much reminds me of it. Up the stairs, lined with loomed wool runners, red and gold and taupe and blue woven into elegant patterns, we chose the Washington Room for our Honeymoon Suite. Its walls were covered with windows, tucked into the turret above the wrap around porch. The windows were graced with flowing draperies, elegant and timeless, with gauze-like under-curtains diffusing the light of the morning and dancing in the breezes as the weather shifted in the cool of the night. A striking antique bed waited, two little night stands and a pitcher and basin set on a wash stand. There was a secret passageway to the next bedroom through the closet. Indoor plumbing was added to the house years before, a real luxury at the time. I washed up a bit and then explored the house with my handsome prince of a husband, exclaiming and sighing at each turn. Thirteen bedrooms. All with matching bedroom suites. It was something from a dream.

Grand Hotel (photos by Dave's cousin Roy Chamberlin)

We spent nearly a week in the cottage, waking to the sound of horse hooves and wagon wheels. No cars are allowed on the island. We golfed, and biked, and swam and ate. In the evenings we sat on the porch and watched the light disappear around us; walked down the road overlooking the water from the bluff, stepped onto the long historic boardwalk of the Grand Hotel; stopping to watch Man of LaMancha in the small theatre at the Grand; making our way down the steep bluff to the sandy shore below, strolling arm in arm, counting the stars and doubling the number by the reflection in the rocking waves of the straits of water connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.

David had spent his summers at this cottage, and at the smaller one…a true cottage…on Lake Huron in Tawas Michigan. He knew the ins and outs. His name was pressed into wet concrete when Grandpa had finished the walkway up to the front porch steps. His name and those of his brother and sisters and cousins, remain there today, though Grandma and Grandpa sold the Mackinac Place not too many years later. Grandma and Grandpa were aging, and were tired, and I believe they wanted to alleviate any possibility of sibling tension if they died and the place was left to the kids. Besides the upkeep was very costly and they did not want to burden anyone with that. So, before we were established enough to even know they were doing it, they sold the place where so many of the grandkids had honeymooned and were so many babies had toddled across the wide porch; where night games and board games and card games facilitated laughter and warm conversation for so many summers.

For the rest of their years we gathered in the summers at the Tawas cottage, a warm and charming and loving place we all adore; not so much for the structure itself but for the people who lived there. There were never two more gracious and welcoming people that Antoine and Helene Roy.

When we knew the Mackinac Cottage was going to someone else’s future memory books, we cherished our last summer vacation there. I asked Grandma if she would mind if I looked in the carriage house out behind the main house to see if there was anything we could keep for a memento. She smiled and said, in her French flavored English, “Of course, though I cannot imagine what you might want out there.”

I walked out the kitchen door and across the road to the white carriage house. The horse stalls were cleaned and unused for many years now. I found a couple old tin toy cars, and a few jars and utensils. A piece of the wool runner that matched the one on the grand staircase in the main house. And a sign hanging above the first horse stall, with jagged edges cut out and the name TRIGGER written in paint across the front.

Dave came out and joined me. I showed him the Trigger sign and he smiled when he saw it.

“Trigger was Grandpa’s old white horse, the one we all rode from the time we were small. He was a gentle old thing, slow as molasses, and stubborn when he was worn out. You couldn’t come close to the Grand Hotel when you were riding him in the evening, because he always turned his head toward the carriage house, knowing he would get a treat. He was done when he was done, and no amount of prodding or kicking or hollerin’ would turn his head away from the road to the carriage house.” Trigger was as much a part of that home as the Tiffany lamp in the entry. He had died years before I came to the family.

Watercolor painting of the Carriage House by my daughter Sarah

I gathered up the toy cars and the glass jars and the roll of carpet and the Trigger sign and put them in a cardboard box. Asked Grandma if it was ok if I took them. She shook her head and giggled. “What in the world do you want them for?”

“I just do.” I said. What I wanted to say was that anything that carried the scent of a musty Michigan summer, that held the sandy grit of years of wear on a historic old resort island, that may have been held in the hands of a small boy grown to an old man by now…anything that spoke of these two beautiful people who gave life to my husband’s mother…I wanted that in my home. Not for any kind of show, but to remind us of what we love and loved.

We loaded that box onto the wagon bed when we left the Mackinac Cottage for the last time. I turned back as we hit the steep edge of the road down below the hotel, leading into town. Looked at the grand old lady of a West Bluff Cottage shrinking in the distance.

I’ve lost just about all that was in that box but the TRIGGER sign. When Sarah was four or five years old she and her friend Ashley decided to have an over-the-top lemonade stand where they sold who knows what from our pantry and basement. They set a play cupboard out on the lawn in front of Kensington Street. Placed their wares on a small table they had also dragged out across the grass. And on the front of the cupboard they hung the Trigger sign, to which Sarah had added the word “Restrot”. I’m not sure if anyone stopped at Trigger’s Restaurant that afternoon, but I sure cherish the sign from that venture. I have hung it in my kitchen for two decades now. It reminds me of that little girl who grew into a beautiful mother and sister and doctor and friend. And it reminds me also of the charmed past I have to pinch myself to believe was my reality: a cottage like a castle where I spent my honeymoon; a king and queen of warmth and grace and poise whom we called Grandma and Grandpa; a history of charmed summers where cousins chased cousins over grassy hillsides and raced them across sandy beaches, and the gateway to the larger part of my life with a man beyond my wildest dreams.

Trigger's Restrot sign hanging in my kitchen