The Fragility of Family

It was growing dark when the phone finally rang. I had done my chores by then, and my homework, and taken advantage of unexpected alone time to sneak episodes of both The Electric Company and 3-2-1 Contact. But as the clock ticked past six thirty, my sense of freedom dissolved into unease.

“Yanna? It’s Charlie.”

I expected my mother. Maybe my aunt Candy. Not the shop pressman. 

“Your mom has been in an accident. I’m on my way.”

Charlie hung up. The shop was 40 minutes away. Charlie lived in town, 20 minutes in the other direction. I didn’t know which he was coming from. I watched as shadows moved down the walls. The wicker lampshade over the dining table threw monstrous shadows into the corners, like grasping trees in a dark fairy tale. Our usually cozy condo was silent. My legs dangled uncomfortably from the wooden chair, so I tucked them under me. 

Charlie’s arrival prompted a flurry of activity. He blurted out what little he knew -- the accident had happened early that morning, mom was at the Philpott’s, Candy was with her -- while his wife collected my toothbrush and a clean pair of undies and helped me into my parka. He shut the door behind us as I clambered up into their giant red pickup. New. Mom and Candy had speculated about how he could afford a new pickup on his salary. I didn’t trust Charlie, with his thick mustache. His wife was nice, though, and from my spot in the middle of the bench seat I leaned my head against her arm as we drove the dark two-lane highway toward Aspen. Charlie chattered. I imagined our little red Volkswagen Beetle, Brutus, crushed. I didn’t dare imagine what had happened to my mother. 

Suzanne Philpott, family friend and my bonus grandmother, opened the door to us. The hall light behind her was warm and yellow and her familiar smoky rasp was a comfort. 

“Yanna, your mom is okay. She’s pretty drugged up right now, but they took good care of her at the hospital. She and Candy are in the living room.” Suzanne reached down for my hand, and walked me down the hall.

There were adults scattered through the wide open space. All the lights were on, and the living room glowed with the same warm yellow, which reflected from windows now black with night. My aunt Candy and her friend Suzie were on one couch. Jim Philpott was perched on another. Someone exclaimed too loudly that I was there. My mother wobbled to her feet and looked vaguely around. Jim unfolded himself and took her elbow to steady her.

No Halloween mask has ever matched her face that night. A T-shaped plaster cast gleamed across her eyebrows and down her nose. Both eyes were black, and bloody gauze dangled from both nostrils. She glanced at me and asked, “Yanna?”

It was only a moment. She had been pumped full of narcotics after surgery, and her disorientation was understandable to any adult. But I was only eight and my mama, my one and only, didn’t recognize me. My world slipped sideways as I shuffled toward the monster before me.

“Hi, Beanie!” she exclaimed when I got nearer. Her words slurred, and she wavered, but she reached for me and my world righted. She was too damaged to embrace, but I sat on a blue cross stitched footstool next to her knees and ate supper at the coffee table while Suzie told the story of seeing my mother, face split open and bleeding, in the hallway at the hospital waiting for a surgeon. My mom groggily described taking off the shoulder strap to adjust the car radio, and rear-ending a pickup truck. Of her face bursting apart “like a tomato” from impact with the steering wheel. She didn’t remember much else.

Not long afterward Suzanne escorted us both to the guest room. My mother succumbed quickly to the exhaustion of trauma and drugs. I lay awake. Light from the hallway shone on the print of Picasso’s Bouquet of Peace above my bed. I listened desperately to each of my mother’s ragged breaths, for the first time completely aware of the fragility of our little family.

Love Notes

The stairway and break room both were decorated in cheap faux wood paneling and lit by long commercial fluorescent bulbs that buzzed and occasionally flickered. Employees retreated upstairs in staggered shifts for brief respites from the public. We hovered at the one-way windows looking down at the supermarket floor, gossiping furtively about management or flirting with our co-workers. Everyone had a locker too small to be useful; in winter coats and boots piled up in the corner.

I got a real job as soon as it was legal; answering phones and filing at my mother’s shop was somehow less alluring than sacking groceries. The money was good for a high school kid and the managers kindly worked around my school schedule. My shift ran from six p.m. 'til close. Small towns shut down early; I was usually home by 11. I worked the deli sometimes, until my age came up — state law forbade employees under eighteen from working the meat slicers. They put me in charge of the salad bar instead. There is a scar on my right palm from the night a vegetable knife cut my hand almost as effectively as a slicer blade would.

The work was drudgery but I liked my job. Perhaps it was the knowledge that it was short-term — I was a year from college and already looking at schools a thousand miles away. There never was any question that I would leave our little town; back then I had dreams of politics and the presidency. I sparked with joy and a hope that most of the lifers at the store would never have.

I sang as I stocked the milk coolers, frosting the glass doors with goofy renditions of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and anything else that came to mind. At the end of the night the sackers would have contests to see who could mop fastest, thwapping heavy cotton strands across the floor in carefully regulated arcs. If we goofed around too much, more ambitious managers ordered us to double mop. Between customers we had to pretty-up the store, facing the aisles by bringing products to the front (two tall, two deep) so the shelves looked full. Even now I re-face the shelf after putting canned goods in my cart.

We were a small team, and the camaraderie led to a couple of dates. The first was with a Mormon from the next high school over, who found me baffling. We went to a movie that had me in tears and he took me home right afterward, saying he had church early the following day. I asked the hot guy from produce to prom. My best friend danced with him the entire night, while I alternated sitting with her date and crying in the bathroom.

It was at the store that I learned girl power. Not the trendy rah rah girl! kind, but the deeper, scarier, primal power of flirtation, attraction, and manipulation. I helped the stockers just so I could bask in their attention. One grown man (in his twenties!) who worked the night shift was in a serious relationship, but I electrified us both with casual touches, drawing the connection out with over-the-shoulder stares as I walked away. At sixteen the entire world revolved around me and I sucked the energy from the men around me, shining ever brighter, like a star pulsing toward supernova. I was feral with power and too young to know shame.

* * * * *

The paper perched delicately inside my locker. It looked like parchment, and the words were printed in a thick, black gothic script that was almost unintelligible.

On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat

to the wolf with the red roses?

Nothing else. I couldn’t breathe. I clasped it melodramatically to chest, then tucked it into a pocket and biked home. Over and over I pondered who could have covertly slipped it between the sharp slats, thrilling to the idea of a secret admirer, savoring the mystery so much that I actually didn’t want to know. This was romance — dark and secret and just a little scary.

For the next week every young man in the store was especially intriguing (I was still child enough to blithely overlook the Lolita potential of the three middle-aged managers) and worth a smile. I wasn’t sophisticated enough to look at the schedule to narrow the list. Perhaps I preferred to think of everyone as suitors. With the next  letter my excitement bubbled over and I enlisted the help of a more sophisticated friend from the deli. Together we analyzed the paper, the words, the delivery. She watched the lockers on her breaks; we reviewed every candidate and discarded most. Our small town was suddenly more interesting than we’d ever thought possible. The intrigue grew with every delivery.

I don’t remember how I learned that the notes contained lyrics from a song by Meatloaf, or that they came from Simon. I do know he was exotic enough to satisfy all the drama. He was smart and intense, bitter and aloof, older and English, complete with accent. Nothing happened after the unveiling, except we managed to spend more time together at work. We shared tidbits from our classes (he was attending the community college) and had long pseudo-philosophical talks while prepping two different kinds of lettuce and laying out the six dressing options. I had already reached escape velocity — I would leave for an international boarding school in two months — but his path out of the valley was slower. We both were stifled by the mundane routines of small town life.

In the end, Simon and I never even touched. We did exchange addresses before I left, and for months maintained our connection through the mail. We were studiously friendly. He offered advice and support, encouraging me in everything. I wrote down every detail so he could live vicariously.

Simon was sort-of dating Paige from the deli, and she was infuriated. She had despised me from my first day. After numerous attempts to befriend her I gave up and sealed the deal by correcting her grammar. "That humors me!” she would say when someone told a joke. I lost patience and privately suggested “amuses” instead. Paige didn’t believe me, but a council of Bakery employees ruled that I was correct. She blamed her public humiliation on me. When his letters stopped not long after they moved in together, I imagined her finding a cache of our correspondence and making a dramatic ultimatum that ended our friendship.

I don’t know why Simon left those notes. I never asked, and though I came home for visits, I never saw him again. At the time the relationship made sense, given my careless abuse of girl magic that summer. Listening to the lyrics of that song now, I wonder if he was declaring more than I could then comprehend. Regardless, I am grateful. Those first months away from home were much easier with his words wrapped around my heart.

Third Floor

In response to a review by +Bliss Morgan of the scent Attic by Solstice Scents

The house was a grand old Denver square with a musty treasure-filled basement and fancy rooms like a den and and a pantry. The living room had huge pocket doors at either end which were open every day except Christmas. On those mornings I would creep downstairs to find the tree and stockings and presents barricaded. The hours until the adults woke were spent peering through first one, then the other, keyhole, trying to count and allocate the piles of gifts. Most days, though, I passed directly into the kitchen where I was greeted with wondrous grandparent delicacies like grape juice from the brown ceramic pitcher and raisin toast with butter.

Though my aunts and uncles had moved out, leaving plenty of bedrooms free, my mother and I still stayed in her old room on the third floor. It wasn't an attic at all, the third floor. It was completely finished with a couple of rooms -- two bedrooms, I think, and one sunny library walled by books. There also was funky bathroom whose toilet was on a raised platform about 12 inches high. My mom called it the Throne Room, and sitting up there I could look out over the roofs of Denver like a little queen.

The third floor was hot, far hotter than our home up in the mountains, and it smelled of sun warmed dust and books slowly burning from the inside. I don't remember much furniture up there, except that my bed was in the corner. I do remember the stairs, though.

Sometime in their teens my uncles had painted the walls of the stairwell black. The steps were white, I think, creaky wooden things. But the walls were a deep, flat black. There was a door at the bottom that was kept closed and the only light switch was at the top. Somewhere along the way I'd gotten the idea that there was a vampire who lived in the stairwell. I would say goodnight to my grandparents and mother, then head upstairs, alone. I couldn't tell them about the monster; he couldn't get them if they weren't aware. Each night I had to brave that gauntlet of darkness, racing through the darkness to the switch at the top, then rush into our room. Occasionally the dog would join me, but she made it clear that she was doing so out of a hostess obligation rather than love, and she'd retreat to my grandmother as soon as was polite.

The city was strange to me. At home our little town settled quietly around nine p.m., and aside from an occasional dog it was quiet enough to hear the faint song of moon and stars. Those nights, instead of going to bed or even reading, I would sit at the window overlooking the street. Sirens sounded in the distance. Cars drove quickly by. Sometimes, rarely, people chatted past, unconscious of the child drooping out of the window three stories above. I breathed through my nose, inhaling the scent of cooling asphalt and sun-blasted trees. The night was orange with sodium lights below which insects danced in dizzying circles, and their random impacts mixed with other city sounds to create a symphony of adventure and far away places.

Jam Don't Shake Like That

The alchemy of jelly is deceptively simple: combine nearly equal parts fruit and sugar, add pectin, heat, and put the hot syrup in jars. Days, sometimes weeks, later it will set into a sweet treat. If it fails to gel, which it sometimes does, the cook can boil again; if not, the liquid still can be used as a topping on pancakes.

At holiday get-togethers and after Christmas dinner this year I will casually hand out jars of spiced grape jelly, cherry jam, apple butter, mountain currant jelly, and fig confiture with honey, lemon, and thyme. Most will be eaten just as casually. Some jars will sit on pantry shelves for years. In rare cases a friend will return an empty jar, holding it like a chalice and asking for more of the same. No matter which scenario plays out, making and giving these goods is a ritual that brings me great pleasure.

My first jelly was Mamoo's spiced grape. The recipe came from my great-grandmother, and I copied it by hand from my grandmother's hand-written copy. My grandmother must have learned from her mother-in-law. I like to imagine the two of them forging a friendship over a sticky sweet boiling pot in a hot summer kitchen. My grandmother taught my mother, who then passed the knowledge to me. I don't remember learning, although I do remember my mother's warnings as she melted paraffin on the gas stove - the wax could ignite and engulf the kitchen in flames. She would pour a thin layer on top to seal each jar, and months later I would pry them open, then chew the grape-flavored wax. Today I use a boiling water bath to preserve, but the rest is mostly the same. I've now made spiced grape so many times I can do it mostly from memory, although I occasionally review the original recipe in case I'm missing anything. I usually am, but my variations have made it my own, so I don't go back. Like language, recipes evolve through the generations.

I can make spiced grape any time because the primary ingredient is store-bought juice. Fresh fruit, however, dictates its own schedule. This year I discovered that my uncle had a cherry tree with a good crop, and I was given permission to pick both his tree and the neighbor's.  Montmorency cherries are a rare treat since my mother's tree split along a fault line and was turned into sweet firewood. For many years the last week of July was harvest time, and I would clamber on the low moss-covered fence underneath, or ascend awkwardly placed ladders reaching for the ripest fruit, too tart to eat off the tree but unequalled for pies and jam. My uncle's tree ripened early, in mid-June, so while my children were at camp I spent a week's worth of mornings circling the tree. Looking up through the trees the sun was so bright that the fruit was translucent, glowing red against the deep blue sky. Sticky juice ran down my arms to my elbows and squirrels chittered at me from a nearby tree while robins scolded from another. There were so many that even after taking more than two gallons the tree looked as if I hadn't touched it. At home I commenced preparing the fruit. I washed and pitted and chopped, boiled and canned. After three days I had twelve jars of jam, and two pies in the freezer. My house smelled of sugar and cherries for days.

Apples ripen later, in September and October. I get mine through a school fundraiser, so the spicy scent of apple butter has become synonymous with the start of school. Apple butter is an exercise in patience. Forty pounds of apples take a while to prepare - washing, peeling, coring, chopping. The peels and cores go into the mix, too, for their pectin, but they are contained in a muslin bag to be removed later. When ready the apples are set to simmer over low heat for days, until they break down just enough. The scent of the harvest drifts through the house, growing stronger as the hours pass. Falling steam coats the counter with evaporated sugar, and the essence of cinnamon and cloves imbue every meal until the chocolate-colored mixture is pressed through a fine sieve, scooped into jars, and the aroma is sealed in.

The rarest, most precious, jelly comes from the currants that grow at Wellington Lake. The bushes are waist high; the berries smaller than the nail on my pinkie finger. An hour of picking might yield eight ounces of berries, and it takes 16 cups to make one batch of six jars. The arithmetic is daunting. Yet there's a certain satisfaction to the first dry plink of fruit hitting the bottom of a paper cup, then the deepening sound as the cup fills to silence. 

Last weekend I stood on a low hill, dry grasses scratching and tickling my calves as I picked, ducking to discover orange-red berries under tiny green fan-shaped leaves. The breeze came from the south, curving around the shoulders of Castle Mountain and gusting pieces of conversation from the campers across the lake to me. "Don't worry about . . ." "Did you . . .?" Dogs barked and radios sang intermittent love songs to me. It was comforting. This sun lowered itself as I hunted for fruit, and my fingers became increasingly sticky with the piney cologne of currant resin. I remembered walking the dusty road with my mother and grandmother, each with our own collecting cup, remarking on good bushes and chatting amiably as we worked them over, or relaxing into companionable silence, moving individually to the next spot. Other days we slipped down the rough gravel of the dam, looking for disturbed earth where raspberries grow best. When we found a patch we would wind our arms between thorns to find tiny magenta thimbles that fell into our hands. Ostensibly for mixed wild berry jelly, my raspberries usually were a snack instead. Entire afternoons slid by as we attained a meditative state of grace, the reward a full measuring cup in the refrigerator and the knowledge that this year we would have jelly.

This is a good year for currants, and my children helped with the harvest. S, as usual, chattered away. Miss Awesome -- like three generations of women before her -- focused on picking. During the week I left them at the cabin with their grandmother while I returned to the city for two days to work. When I returned there were quarts of currants in bags in the refrigerator. My mother should be able to make two batches this year.

The alchemy of jelly is deceptively simple: combine the fruits of my labor with generations of tradition, flavor with love, and share.

Crabapple

I remember
Sitting under dappled pink shade
Vibrating with the drone
of a thousand thousand bees
Intent on the work
of tasting every blossom.
I was as drunk as they
on the delicate scent.

The Politics of Remembrance

I joined Facebook a couple months ago. It's been quite lovely, catching up with people with whom I lost contact as much as twenty years ago, and keeping a near-daily eye on friends I don't call as often as I should. In turn I can apprise the world of my status -- although my stay-at-home life is dull enough that I can't really justify frequent updates.  The whole affair is simple and casual; it's an online cocktail party, no real intimacies required.

That is why I'm surprised by how self-conscious I am of each individual action online. People are so quick to count themselves as an online friend, but with none of the responsibilities I associate with friendship. There are even contests to see who can have the most Facebook friends. Fuddy-duddy that I am, I am more selective.  People friend me, and I hesitate to include them.  What if I'm having a bad day? If they are part of my circle, do I feel comfortable including them in venting my frustration?  What is the purpose of including them, if I don't feel any attachment?  And yet . . . 

Not long after I joined FB (so hip using the initials!) I was friended by the man I dated through college.  In counting all my loves, outside of my marriage that one was the most significant. I had occasionally Googled him, wondering where his life had gone after I left (wondering, really, if his life had changed as radically without me as mine had without him), but had gotten only glimpses of people who might be him -- a comment by a guy with a similar name on a photography forum, a listing on LinkedIn.  Then suddenly he was there, asking to be my friend.  He included no greeting.  It was like a wave across a crowded room to someone you kind of know, but with whom you aren't really connected. Impersonal. Cheerful. Almost, well, obligatory. "Hey, remember me? We went to college together."  There was no hint of the three years we spent together: sunrises watched and concerts attended, fights over politics and religion, creative late-night cooking, shared intimacies and explorations across several countries.

I accepted his friend request immediately. I eagerly read his now-open profile, admiring his beautiful children (they could have been mine!), unsurprised at his career (I helped him get started), mildy curious about his wife (isn't that the woman he once described to me as a "crazy stalker"?). I then spent the following week dizzy with memories and regrets, relief and confusion. Underlying it all was the question of why he had reached out.  I found I was self-conscious - exaggerating each update for effect, not sure what to say in front of such an audience. Finally I asked, got a bland answer, and have pretended to ignore his presence since then. But I still know he's there, and I self-edit because of it.

On the other side, there are marvelous people out there with whom I would love to reconnect, but I hesitate, unsure if they would remember me. How devastating - to have someone I admired so, who figured so strongly in my life, not know who I am.  Haven't books been written about this very subject?

So, I lurk.  I watch, and wonder, and think about these people I know, and am careful about what I say in this strangely public private forum. I, who am so very bad at politics, am learning.