Do you want anything?

 August 2020  My phone rang one evening a week ago.

“Do you want anything?”  Mom asked.  “Someone’s coming in the morning to take the rest of the stuff we don’t want before the house sells.”

Hmm…  What would I want…

I want a piece of siding, so I can remember what color the house was.

I want the window my brother broke with the back of his head (that's a funny story).  

I definitely do not want the light fixture from my old bedroom.  I still have nightmares about it.

I want one of the bathroom sinks that I cleaned so many times, but they never looked clean, so I can show my grandchildren that bathroom fixtures should never be mustard yellow.

I want the bank that I used to shoot arrows at and sculpt mud on.

I want the big picture window, where I would stand for hours watching for my siblings to arrive home from college.  And we would watch magnificent sunsets through it.  On spring mornings we would watch for the spray planes to dive over the orchards. 

I want all the memories that only come back to me when I turn a corner or glance out a window.

I want the wildflowers.  Ookow, soap bush, hound’s tongue, buttercup, Howell’s lily, dogwood, bitter cherry, chocolate bells, hawthorns, wild roses, trilliums…  They were my friends.

And, of course, I really want the fantastic hearth.  But I just don’t have anywhere to put it. 

“No, Mom, I don’t want anything.  But thanks for asking.”

**Two years later, the house has been leveled.  It seemed so cruel, until I realized that my memories are still mine.  Everything my family has become, and how that place influenced us, can’t be taken away by the new owners.  The important things are in my heart, in the present, and in the future.**

Sandwich Box

 My mom didn't use Tupperware or other such containers.  I don't know why.  We used Saran wrap (plastic wrap) or repurposed containers (cottage cheese, sour cream, etc.).  At some point in high school I started making my own lunches, consisting of little more than a peanut butter and jam sandwich.  Eventually it was nothing but the sandwich.  I ate a lot when I got home.  

I didn't like how my sandwiches got squished in my backpack everyday.  None of the old containers my mom saved were the right shape for putting sandwiches in.  One day I came across a greeting card box that was the perfect size and shape.  (I had probably used all the cards; I wrote a lot of letters in those days.)  I painted the box with some old acrylics and used it to protect my lunch.  

Several kids commented on my sandwich box.  They were confused why I would put food in cardboard.  I did wrap the sandwich in plastic first, I'm not a savage.  I was confused why other people found it strange.  I had made a solution to my problem, isn't that perfectly normal?  So far as I knew, no one had invented Tupperware for sandwiches.  I'd never been in that part of Walmart.  

Today, I have lots of sandwich boxes.  The store-bought, purpose-made, plastic kind that snap together.  Pink ones, green ones, clear ones.  Such luxury.  Have I mentioned that my kids are spoiled?

Relationships with Pets (CTTWWS)

 

There was a dog.

She hung out near the middle school when I was in 5^th or 6^th grade.  My friend and I named her Butterscotch, because that was the color of her spots.  We assumed she was a stray, and we would bring her scraps from our lunches.  Eventually, my friend found better things to do, and it was just Butter and I. 

I’m sure I asked my mom multiple times if we could adopt this dog.  I’m sure she figured this dog had an actual home, or wouldn’t stick around, or some other sensible reason.  None of it made sense to me at the time.  Eventually Butter stopped coming.  I heard that she had been adopted by someone I didn’t like, but that’s probably not true.  Then Mom got me a puppy, a beautiful Labrador.  She was adorable and chewed on everything.  Unfortunately, she only lived a couple months before she got sick and died.

She was just an animal.  I got over it.

At one time we had as many as 30 cats.  I remember one of my classmates was horrified when I told her that we kept our cats outside and only fed them once a day.  Her father was a realtor.  Our cat population was eventually wiped out by disease.  I recently googled the symptoms; they resemble feline distemper.  I remember going to pick up a kitten I was fond of and finding it stiff as a board.  I still remember how it felt in my hand, how it felt when I dropped it.  I ran in the house, unsettled and upset.  I told Mom, “Fatso’s dead,” and one of my brothers turned and said, sneering, “You’re not crying, are you?”

It’s just an animal.  Get over it.

I vaguely remember, when I was about 7, finding a large black dog sitting on a blanket in the kitchen, and my dad sitting at the table.  I was upset because I wanted to keep the dog, but it had been hit by a car and Dad had brought it home so he could “put it out of its misery.”  I asked why we couldn’t take it to the vet, and Mom said something about animals being too miserable not being able to walk, it was better for them to die.  I think the dog had broken at least one of its hind legs, perhaps its spine.  Dad was probably preparing his pistol at the table.  That was not the last time I remember Dad using the lead painkiller on an animal.

Over a decade ago, one of my brothers brought his family to visit, and took his oldest daughter fishing.  He told us that they would be doing catch-and-release, since his daughter couldn’t stand the thought of killing fish.  I was astounded.  The same guy who told me to “toughen up” and “get over it” was allowing his daughter to have feelings.  I shouldn’t have made such a big deal about it, because I probably made him feel bad for the things he said when he was just a kid.

When I was 12, we got Zeke.  He was a mutt of a puppy.  One of my adult sisters was living with us at the time.  She, being very modern, insisted that he get all his shots and get fixed.  I think she paid for it, too.  He lived a long life: he was my buddy all through high school, welcomed me home after every term of college, even got to meet my first child.  When I was pregnant with my second child, he was so miserably old that we decided it was time for him to go to the big doggy park in the sky.  Once again, my sister spoke up, insisting that he be put down by a vet instead of by Dad.  I miss Zeke’s floppy little ears.

Muddy Chickens (CTTWWS)

 We had a flock of chickens for a while.  I think I was around 10 years old.  There might have been as many as 8 chickens, maybe more, maybe less.  Two roosters, the rest hens.  The roosters I could catch without much difficulty, but the hens were too fast.  

I had a favorite puddle in the driveway.  It filled up from a leak in the hose faucet when we watered the front garden.  I played in that puddle a lot.  

There's this thing you can do with chickens.  When they're upside-down, they kinda go into a trance.  You can hold them by their legs, their wings go out, and they go stiff.  

Now, dropping a chicken into a mud puddle onto its feet isn't very entertaining.  It doesn't make much of a splash, the chicken has no emotional reaction, it just walks away the same as you dropping it anywhere.  But if you hang the chicken upside down first, then drop it into the puddle, you get a big splash and lots of clucking and a flustered, shaking chicken runs off.  

I tell my children that this is what I did as a child because there was no YouTube.  

I don't remember which came first, the roosters attacking me or the puddle torture.  But I got quite scared of those roosters after they flew at me with their sharp parts a few times.  It always happened when the hens were around, so it was likely a protective move.  It wasn't until recently that I made the connection between my treatment of the roosters and their aggression towards me.  

Please don't think that I was an evil child.  I don't think I was.  I never mistreated people or misbehaved at school.  My parents had old, farmer-type opinions of animals (although my mom was certainly displeased when I told her about the game I played with the chickens and the puddle).  They were even more dismissive toward emotions, so maybe this was my way of acting out my feelings.

Sleeping on Mom's hospital room floor

 In early December of my senior year, my mom got her second hip replaced.  After school I drove ten minutes to the Hood River Hospital to visit her.  She was almost recovered from the anesthetic by then, but she didn't say much to me other than, "You didn't need to come, I'm fine, go home and do your homework."  My sister was also there.  I felt unusually sleepy, so I laid down on the floor and dozed off for 10-20 minutes.  At the time I didn't know why I was able to sleep on such a hard floor, during a time in my life when I hadn't napped for well over a decade.  In retrospect, it might have been because the hospital room was warmer than anywhere I had been since September.  Our house was impossible to warm up with Dad and I gone all day, and my high school wasn't well heated, either.  When I got up, Mom urged me to go home.  She couldn't bare to be a burden.  Plus, it was starting to snow, and she got very nervous about people driving in the snow.

It's beautiful to drive while snowflakes fall.  The snow wasn't sticking so I wasn't nervous; I knew I had time to get safely home.  I was deep in thought.  When you get to the western edge of White Salmon, leaving town on SR 141, the road is flanked by oaks that arch over and form a sort of tunnel.  I was awe-struck by this picture, with the snowflakes pouring down, and I began to cry.  I didn't know the reason, but I was feeling something and it needed to come out.  Perhaps it was the strangeness of seeing my mother in a hospital, or the prospect of going home to a cold and empty house.  Despite how much I had hated the way my mom's anxiety had limited my options so much throughout my childhood, I think this is when I started realizing how dear to me she was.  This is when our relationship started shifting, when I started feeling anxious for her.  

Sunsets in the valley (CTTWWS)

 Sometimes the wind blew hard enough that I could sing as loud as I wanted.

My siblings and I called my mom a "worry wart."  There was so much that she wouldn't let us do because she worried what might happen.  Until I got near my teen years I wasn't even allowed to go outside without permission.  Every once in a while she would yell my name, just to find out where I was.  It's an eerie sensation, as an adult, to imagine I hear her call me.  

When I started "pushing my boundaries" successfully, I would run up the hill behind our house (barefoot, of course).  I kept at it until I could run to the first peak without stopping.  There was an incredible view from there, facing west.  I probably watched hundreds of sunsets from there.  I felt like royalty, looking down on my little valley, out at the mountains, the colorful light show.  Just me, my dog, the wind, and God.

I miss having that quiet, beautiful place to go and settle my thoughts.  Anywhere I go here, there are people.  Except my closet, and that's a bit cramped. 

Winter nights (CTTWWS 2)

 It was so cold on winter nights when neither Joel nor Kevin were living with us.  They knew how to stoke a stove.  I would stack as many as six blankets on top of myself, only to find I had kicked them in different directions by the middle of the night and I was shivering.  I dreaded showering.  I would swing my hair against the side of the woodstove to try to dry it faster.  Didn't seem to make a difference.  It was a dreary existence with no warm escape, no sympathy.  My brother was mean, my mother was in pain, my dad was at work.  The wood was always slightly damp.

There was one winter when the windows started freezing on the inside.  Beautiful patterns of thick frost covering the kitchen windows, parts of my bedroom windows and some of the other windows around the house.  Our house was built in the fifties.  Some of the window frames were wood, some aluminum, none were well insulated.  The frosted windows happened several times that winter; it was unusually cold.  After that it only happened a couple times in subsequent winters.  I think my blankets were frozen to the window one of those mornings.  I know that happened to someone else at school.