4. CRY

Four cries that stay with me still:

1.I am small; small enough to think that my old feather pillow with the dark blue tick cloth can hide me. Small enough that when I stand I can rest my head against my mother’s soft belly, my arms stretched around her thighs, and feel her gentle fingers run over my corn silk hair. Not small enough, however, to offer her any of the comfort tiny babies give to their mothers, that snuggle-down kind of comfort where baby breath gathers into the hollow of the neck. Too big for innocence and ignorance. I lie there on my side, my twin bed just feet away from my sister’s twin bed.  We face each other in silence, our eyes wide open, staring into each other’s heartache as our mother weeps in the other room. Late into the night, after Libby’s eyes have fluttered shut, I listen to my mother’s cries, weakening into sputtered moans, muted by the doors and halls and years between us. I pull my bony knees up to my chest, yearning to be hers again, to hold her from the inside out. It’s a mournful cry that rises from a heart that must let go of something it loves.

2. I am wholly aware of myself. For three days I have lived in the center of a pulsing amoeba-like force that radiates all around me. General discomfort points its long-nailed finger toward my belly, the creature inside growing still and hard, then all energy focuses in from my protruding belly button and begins to clamp down, like a vise on balsa wood. I breathe, Lamaze style, my lips pursed into a tiny tube-like pipe which will only allow molecules of air to release in a steady flow. Sweat drips into my eyes. When the clamping releases I fall back into the stiff hospital pillow, closing my eyes and hoping for a minute of reprieve before the next wave comes. I am weary from the length of labor, yet determined to endure it without numbing the pain. The love of my life stands beside me, allowing me to press my anguish into his poor helpless hands. My body shakes with another rising cramp. The cramps come closer and closer to each other, until a gush of water sends them rushing as they wheel me into the delivery room. Finally the doctor tells me I can push.  Over and over we work, my child and me; pounding relentlessly.  We work in sacred silence.  I am strangely conscious of my desire to do this with dignity, to embrace the pain in some pseudo-religious ordinance-like manner, sensing the divinity of the process. I am wholly aware of myself and the spirit I have hosted. One deep breath, deep in the belly we usually forget we have, and I hold it in, trying to release it with that baby whose head has crowned. One silent, back crunching push, then the slip, and the cry. His first breath of earthly air, drawn in desperation, and released in a soul shivering cry, his presence known in the fibers of the Veil itself. I have never felt more one with the heavens, with my husband, with my God, nor with myself. That cry trumpeted my own birth as much as it signaled the birth of my son.   

3. We have gathered in a cluster of hope, our beautifully dysfunctional enmeshed family, huddled there in the waiting room of the LDS Hospital ICU. For eight days we have held vigil, praying that the swelling in Clayton’s brain will go down. He is just eighteen-years-old, too young to drink, but old enough to purchase a bullet bike motorcycle without his parent’s consent. His helmet sits unopened on the counter at home, so when he laid the bike down to avoid a head-on collision with the car that came unexpectedly around the corner, his head took the brunt of the blow. Now he lies on a hospital bed, his beautifully built body healing in those eight days, the road rash turning to scabs and finally new flesh.  How miraculously the body heals itself.  Except that his brain will not let go of the fluid, no matter how hard we pray, how hard the medical personnel tries. The monitors ignore the god-like beauty of his golden curls, keeping their cruel numbers high. We take turns sleeping in our little make-shift campground there in our self-claimed corner of the waiting room. One by one the others  patients who came in with Clay either succumb to their injuries or are released to regular rooms. We have grown so close so quickly with others who are living their crises that one day we make a full Thanksgiving feast and bring it down for us all to be nourished together. Later, the hospital will decide to no longer have couches in the waiting room, to discourage people from staying overnight. Shame, really, because there is comfort in shared sorrow.

Finally, on the eighth day, they take my brother George and his wife Cyndy, Clayton’s parents, into a small room down the hall. A while later they return and call us all together.  We cluster around them, our arms intertwined.  My brother tries to speak, but instead there rises from him a deep, massive moan. From the depths of the earth it rolls, up through his feet, past his loins and his tightened belly.  It pauses in his chest and then squeezes out of his throat as his head falls back, his shoulders rising and then falling as the cry releases its full weight into the sterile hospital air, the pitch rising slowly and sorrowfully until it runs out of air and his shoulders fall forward into mournful sobs. It is such an agonizing sound I still hear it in present tense.

Clayton’s beautiful, healthy, glorious body became the source of life for many people the next day. There was little of him to bury. He remains in the heart, the eyes, the skin and other healthy organs other people carry around to this day. Sometimes I see a stranger on the streets of Salt Lake City and wonder if perhaps they are partly our golden-haired boy, unawares.

4. He stumbled back against the door of the fridge, his right hand rising up to hold his head, his left hand holding the phone against his ear. “No, Dad. No!” David slid down the wooden panel and ended in a heap on the hardwood floor. His cry rose up gently and deeply, almost childlike. It echoed in the empty space of our new house. They had finished the wood floors while we were gone to Michigan for vacation. We had just left David’s mother at the Saginaw airport. I can see her still, blowing kisses to her grandchildren as we walked up the steps to the small plane. On the way home her car had collided with another, causing massive head injuries which she did not survive. When Kate heard the cry she ran up the stairs, into the small library, and called her Gram, the one who still remained. “Something is wrong” she cried, and before the words of his mother’s passing crossed David’s lips, Gram was there to comfort us. It has been over twenty years now, but still, on dark lonely nights, I can sometimes hear the echoes of his cry in the corners of this house.

3. WAX

Joseph’s little fingers could not resist. They picked at the side of the candle until all the drippings were removed, leaving a nice, clean half spent pillar and a little mound of beeswax piled on the table beside it.  When my mother, his Gram, discovered it, she shook her head, swept the waxy crumbles into the palm of her hand and retrieved a match from the antique match holder sitting near the candle.  She struck the chalky tip against the bottom of the holder, releasing a flame and a puff of smoke. She lit the candle, letting the wooden match burn down right to her fingertips, then blew out the match with a wisp of air through her lips, watching the smoke rise, knowing the power of carbon to clean out impure odors from the air.  My whole life there has been a cup of matches in the bathroom, rather than any kind of aerosol air freshener. When the flame on the candle had created a crater of hot wax, Mom gently tipped the candle, allowing the molten beeswax to trickle over the side, cascading in little teardrops, cooling as it fell.  She loved the look of beeswax waterfalls on the sides of her candles.  So do I.

When I was sixteen years old, and felt the weight of impending adulthood, I bought an old copy of Little Women at a garage sale and decided to read it by candle light, as if I were Jo writing it, I suppose, in the days before there were light switches and incandescent lighting.  Each night, frocked in my Lanz of Salzburg flannel nightgown, I stacked blankets and pillows against the wall at the head of my bed, lit the candle on the dresser between my bed and Libby’s bed, turned out the overhead lights and was gently lowered into the March home, up there in the attic where the girls enacted their plays and shared their secrets, with the sound of Laurie’s piano wafting through the small window in that holy space. The scent of melting wax and the flicker of the flame against the soft ageing pages of that book changed my heart, softened the stark black lines of reality, and allowed me to drift into sleepiness gently and kindly. I was a troubled soul at that time, weakened by what I now know to have been depression, and the sweetness of this blessed routine was a gift. 

Years later, when our youngest, Annie, was something like ten-years-old, her dad read Little Women to her, from that very book, every night at bedtime. They would squish beside each other on her twin bed.  When they came to the chapter when they knew Beth would die, they refused to read for two weeks, both of them unwilling to let their hearts break. They had to mutually agree to face it before they got through that chapter. I remember Dave coming downstairs that night, his eyes swollen and red.  I kissed him and smiled.  “Beth died, didn’t she?” A big old tear snuck out from the corner of his eye. (What I would have given to have had a father read to me at night.)

Now, down in what I call the “lower forty”, the lowest section of our back yard, where the scrub oaks grow freely, our friend Ross Burningham has placed a set of beehives.  We consider it a gift to our neighborhood to have bees to pollinate, and the honey we get from those bees is so sweet, and healthy, and medicinal to us who live here.

Ross gave me a nice chunk of wax from those hives, which I melted in an old tin can in a pot of water on my stovetop at Christmastime.  I invited all my Treasures, the children of our children, to come over. From one-year-old Gracie to thirteen-year-old Timothy, all ten of them lined up in the garage, holding a chopstick to which I had tied a piece of cotton candlewick. One by one they dipped their wick into the molten wax, raised it up while counting to ten, then marched like little soldiers around the perimeter of the garage while their cousins and siblings dipped theirs. The air, out there in the December garage, was cold, and you could see the breath rising from their little mouths, smell the sweet honey scent of the wax, see the color transform from liquid brown to shimmery gold to muted yellow. They repeated the pattern, singing as they went, commenting on the growing size of each one, learning how repeated dips into certain things eventually enlarge the product.  We poured the leftover wax into the antique Santa-shaped chocolate molds that sit on the mantle every Christmas. 

There is something magical, almost divine, about the aroma of candlewax and the mesmerizing dance of a candle flame. I think of those little bees, toiling away in that dark unknown, gathered there in their little white castle near the cluster of scrub oak in our back yard.  So much work, for so long, for a little honey and a little wax.  They nourish us, then give us light, those little winged creatures. No man-made scented candle will ever match the scent of God-made beeswax.  And, despite little OCD fingers that want to make spent candles look new, I will always want my beeswax to look all craggy and uneven as the candle shrinks.  It reminds me of my angel-mother.  And of old musty books read by flickering light. And of little hands dipping down and up, down and up on cold winter days, their laughter rising like smoke, up to the heavens.

2. RUMBLE (Word of the Day)

Yesterday, as I shuffled down the cement steps to Margaret’s School of Custom Dress Making, aka sewing class, I heard the whistle of a train in the distance, out to the west toward the lake; the familiar, mournful whistle, followed by the percussive churning of the wheels as it rolled along out there in the flatlands. It took me back to my childhood, back in the woody hills of southwest Pennsylvania. 

My 50-year-old horse,
minus his tail and mane.

Our family moved five times in two years, between kindergarten and second grade. One of the places we lived was on Jean Drive, in Whitehall. I don’t recall much about the house itself, except for the back porch where I fell on a patch of ice and spent a bit of time unconscious, my face ending up one large swollen chunk of green and purple and black and blue.  I missed a week of school after that concussion, and I can still feel the bump when I wrinkle my forehead.  I remember the woods across the street, which seemed massive to me as a little one, but which may have been, in actuality, a plot of undeveloped land the size of our yard.  But the trees in that part of the world are so thick and varied and lush that a little girl could get lost on ¼ acre of land. I still have a small wooden horse my mom and I glued together, gathered from the mulchy floor of those woods. We collected little pieces of fallen trees  and set them on the kitchen table. I remember Mom biting down on a dried pinto bean, urging it to split in half.  We used Elmer’s glue to attach those half beans to either side of the horse’s head to make his eyes. I see her thin-filed thumbrnail working its way through soft fibrous bark, creating a dark shaggy mane and a fairly believable tail.

What I recall best about Jean Drive, though, is the set of train tracks that ran through the gully just barely down the hill from our back porch. Nowadays we would panic as parents to think that our children had such ready access to live rails. I don’t presume to know how my parents felt about it, or if they even thought about it.  I’m sure they warned us to stay back when we felt the rumble. And since we all survived with our limbs intact I assume we had enough sense to follow the rules.

We called them pollywogs.

Back there, against the railroad tracks, there were puddles of water where I discovered tadpoles for the first time - maybe the only time. We visited them daily, watching as they morphed from tiny little fishes to fish with feet, then legs, then one day they were gone. It took till fourth grade science for me to know where they went. We laid pennies on the rails, and returned in the morning to see if any of them were smashed.  It takes some skill to know just how to lay a penny on a track so that the rumble doesn’t shimmy it off. Skill, and luck, I suppose.

Up in my bed, on Jean drive, my hair still damp from a late evening bath, I would scrunch my feather pillow under my head, lying there with both ears exposed, in position, waiting for the train.  I guess I never really thought about the fact that trains generally run on a schedule. Maybe that’s why the memory is so haunting.  It repeated each night, as the summer sun was setting. First, against the chorus of cicadas, there was the rumble. Deep throated, like the earth was humming. It grew to a groan, and then a pulsing howl, and the bricks of our house shook, and my bed with it. Then after it passed, some countable number of seconds after, the whistle would blow, the pitch falling as it turned into a ghost of sound. I don’t recall if this frightened me the first time I experienced it as a six-year-old.  But in the end, it became a comfort to me, that dependable snip of time when the powerful forces of life whizzed past and I was safe in my bed, my mom down in the kitchen, and the trees still growing in spite of that mighty rumble.

If you grow up near a train, then it just becomes part of the sensory landscape: the smell of tar in the hot summer sun, the screeching of metal on metal. The pulse and the rumble and the whistle, so loud that you missed a few measures of the muffled music on Lawrence Welk drifting through the floorboards from the television below. It moves from annoying to bearable to comforting pretty darn fast, in fact. So much so, that when you move away to Angelo Drive you feel a sort of loneliness. You miss something, but you’re not sure what it is, until years later and you’re walking down the steps in a place thousands of miles away and you hear a train in the distance. Then you feel, strangely, like you are small and weightless and, against all reason, everything is right with the world.

1. PANCAKE TUESDAY

Ten-year-old Parker pours the pancake batter from the side of a large-bowled spoon. He has that little knack for knowing just how much will make a three-inch pancake. He knows when the bubbles pop and the holes remain, that it is time to flip. One, two, three, four perfectly round, perfectly golden cakes evenly placed on the square griddle we dug from the shelf below the stove top. He lays them gently in piles on a pan beside the stove while the bacon squeals in the oven, simmering in its juices, filling the whole house with its woody aroma. Ruby, meanwhile, clamps her eight-year-old fingers around a small Idaho russet, pushing her weight into it as she guides it down the pocked surface of the silver grater, up and down she goes, like the rhythm section in a kitchen band, the shredded potatoes gathering in a pile in a deep red bowl.  Gumpa stands at the kitchen sink peeling the ridiculously small potatoes I bought last week, a ten pound sack for $3.49.  Next time I’ll spend the money for the bigger ones. I squeeze the juices out of the spuds and scatter them in hot oil in the massive heavy fry pan on the back burner. Ashley has taken ten blessed minutes to walk the dog all by herself, for once. Walter picks the one spot in the kitchen where all of us will be repeatedly stepping during our chaotically orchestrated Shrove Tuesday dinner preparations. It is here he plants his two-year old body, a broken Jack-in-the-Box, a Lightening McQueen Lego car and two train engines. We all try to step over him while he plays. Fearing I’ll trample him, I ask him if he would mind moving over to the stairs to play, but he is afraid I will not watch him if he goes “all the way over to there.” There is an out-of-season half a watermelon on the counter top with teaspoon craters dug into it. “I told Ruby she could just dig in”, Gumpa whispers when I discover it.  I’m fine with that, because I know in that deep-down place where I hold my treasured memories that this is a moment to keep.  I have this little cluster of love swirling all around me in my safe place: my kitchen.  It is the day before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten season, and I will sit at our dinner table with these people I love and pray, then partake.

After blessing the food I explain that today is Fat Tuesday, which makes the kids giggle.  Shrove Tuesday, which makes them scrunch their eyebrows and shift their eyes. The day before Ash Wednesday,…you know. We finally ask Siri to help us out with by finding photos of priests and ashes. We spend just enough time learning about Christian tradition, and holy practises, and our Catholic heritage to keep their attention. We feast on eggs and bacon and buttery syrup because, in the olden days good Christians did not eat any of those things between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday, 47 days later. So on Tuesday they used up all they had in their larders. Then the next day began the fast, designed to prepare their souls for the redemption represented by the holiest of all holidays, when Christ atoned, was crucified and was resurrected.

It is befitting of us as Christians to embrace such good practises that draw us closer to our God. Whatever we choose to forsake, or embrace, during the season of Lent, let us consecrate it to our spiritual welfare.

I am not one to make political comment on public stages, but I thought it was interesting that our new president’s first speech before congress fell right at the same time that we prepared our last feast of pleasure before Lent. I was reminded that we all need, especially now, divine guidance, reassurance, and hope.

We are Mormons here.  Dyed in the wool, true blue believers in the saving power of Jesus Christ. Gumpa, as a child, wore the white robes of a Catholic altar boy, carried the sacred beads of a rosary, and lifted his head before his parish priest to receive ashes in the shape of a cross on his forehead. And while he has since embraced what we believe to be a fuller truth, we still revere the faith of our forefathers.

And so begins the Lenten season. My sacrifice, once again, includes devoted and dedicated time and thought put down as words on paper for forty days of Lent. It’s not always pleasurable for me. I am often writing into the wee hours of the morning. I can't think of things to say. But I do it anyway. I find the repeated sacrifice to be soul stretching for me.