home: part four

Today, I've been doing simple things--clipping flowers to welcome inside my kitchen space, going for my run, grilling a burger, showering catnip on my cats, writing two more query letters to accompany stories that are going out the door tomorrow. Everyday sort of things. I feel fortunate to have them to do, to have made the time to do them. But what I really know is this: that I'm avoiding getting into my Miata and driving to see Mom. It's not Mom that's keeping me away, but rather the growing sense that I have lost my life and I need to find it again. I want to be home again.

I keep a mermaid in my home--really I do. A life size talisman, reclining on my sideboard. She's ancient, some eighty-years old, but her paint's still intact, for the most part. Black beaded eyes, lips red, nipples brown and protruding, thighs and tail iridescent with scales of green and maroon. Having lived for all but the last year in a sailor's house on the Maine coast, she's a traveler, accustomed to breathing in the sea and what adventures can be found there. I wonder at times if she's bored with the tame life I can offer her here on the lake where there's just me and my cats and my written words. She's keeps company with my Kenneth Callahan--a horse and rider painting from the 1940s belonging long ago to my father; I have my naked horseback rider cozied up next to her, two nudists at heart. Mostly they are quiet together. But when she speaks, it's spectacular. Sometimes, when I come home, shuck off my shoes, I'm suddenly subsumed with her corporeal presence: there's a faint whiff of cinders and smoke that emits from her wooden limbs, seeing how she spent so many years gracing a sailor's fireplace mantel. This cinder and smoke travels my home, a small pocket of fire that's never in the same place twice, always shifting, always ephemeral. She's my ghosted woman. My pillar of fire. My cosmic genii of well-being. My home.

My Lady watches over me, and I over her. When I type at my keyboard, there she is, casting a glare at my near-dyslexic misspellings--how many times can I type "jsut" rather than "just." Infinite, it appears. She's there when I stay up long into the night, writing a blog, typing an email, grading a paper. Just there. Her fire smokes, my synapses fire.

Next to my computer is a growing pile of artifacts, small "pieces" of my mother's life. Random evidence. I can't help myself--their collection has become essential, obsessive even. True north on my compass, if ever I'm to get home.

One
My oldest brother Peter's baby anklet from Swedish hospital--blue beads with the name "Peter" printed in black letters on slightly larger white beads--I can't believe Mom still has this but didn't keep the other two, for Eric and I. Or maybe hospitals no longer used bead-work by the time we were born?

Two
A "good luck" charm made of tin, about the size of a silver dollar. There's a military star on the front with an American flag flying and inscribed around the circumference are both my mother and my father's names. On the back it says "Good Luck." I have no idea of its origins, except for the fact that it was loose in a box containing my father's armed forces memorabilia--his dog tag from WWII, his military ID card with his finger prints inscribed, his honorable discharge papers, his veterans administration paperwork, letters written between my parents during the war (and at least one of which is signed "Darling," one from my father, suggesting that perhaps they were not as disconnected as my mother would have me think). So I'm thinking this "good luck" medal was made during the war, perhaps when my father is on leave--a piece of fancy, of sentiment (uncharacteristic for my father?). He must have loved her then, don't you think, to have engraved her name with his?

Three
The original "Promissory Note" between my father and the sellers, G. Allen Henderson and Gladys L. Henderson, for the purchase of our family home in Medina (or rather the land) in 1951. It's signed by both my parents--they're married by then--and records the amount of $1600.00 being owed to the sellers, to be paid off at the rate of $50.00 per month. Handwritten, in the G. A. Henderson's hand, is a notation of "paid in full" on March 16, 1956--the date my parents retired the note. This document is the beginning of home for my family, a geography I will always associate with the best of Mom and me.

Four
Three letters from someone named Eva Anderson, who signs her name as "Your Anderson Friend" and "Good Luck From One Anderson To Another," presumably because Mom's maiden name is also Anderson. Eva lives in Chelan, Washington, an isolated spot back in 1945, when the letters date to. From looking through Mom's scrapbook, I discover that Eva is affiliated with the Associated Women's Students on the UW campus, though it could be that she is just invited as a speaker to one of their banquets, and not really a veteran member. Mom seems to have contacted her because they need a speaker; Eva agrees to speak about "Tomorrow's Woman is Here Now" for the 1945/46 Scholarship Banquet. While Mom claims she can't remember Eva, it appears from the letters that there was an ongoing relationship--a reciprocal admiration that flowed between them. Eva writes about everyday things--going to Spokane to "bring back a second-hand car that my man just bought over there." And she writes of her affection for Mom--"I kept wishing as I sat there [at the banquet] that I had a lovely girl like you, and I know that your mom is justly proud of you." Mom's mother must have died shortly after this. As a postscript to her letter dated January 18, 1945, Eva writes to Mom about the title she's chosen for her talk, explaining that "The scope of the job may change but the woman herself, emerging from war participation, has shown that she's equal to any emergency. Also, that she is perfectly capable of coping with men in any field of her talent and choice." Eva is a liberated woman, it appears--a PhD (her name appears as "Dr." on the program) and a (childless) working woman teaching in the Wenatchee school district. I want to know what Mom thinks of her, but the name continues to mean nothing to Mom, despite my asking. Did Mom admire Eva--was she a role model? If so, why did Mom give up her job so quickly when she became pregnant with Peter, particularly since money was so short (and she does remind me of this almost daily when we talk--that she and Dad had nothing and how hard this was)? Why did Mom work so hard in college--all the high grades and the scholarship recognition--just to spend the rest of her married life as housewife and mother? Not that mothering was a bad choice, I'm grateful for it...but rather that she seems to have closed the door to the outside world after having my oldest brother. Home is all she knows. No one is allowed in. She looses track of her friends, becomes Mrs. Paul Schuler, just as so many women were expected to do. Was Mom as conventional as this? Will I ever know?

Five
The white ribbon bow from Mom's wedding bouquet--definitely yellowed and worse for the wear. The beginnings of her "home" with my father.

Six
A small slip of paper with the following typed on its face: "Anderson, Dorin, 3915--39 Ave. S.W. Seattle." Was this the address for the Sigma Kappa house off campus--mom's home during college days? Or was this the address for her family home in West Seattle?

Seven
A very small business card--1"x 3"--with the name of Dr. J. Edward Clark printed on its face: "Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat." This must be the eye specialist Mom takes me to see annually from the time I am seven--the only doctor she can find who will equip her daughter with contacts at such a young age. Every morning and evening Mom and I stand at the scrummy blue counter in the back bathroom (the bathroom us kids are relegated to), Mom leaning in close behind me, her breasts and belly snug to my back. With her fingers carefully affixed to the lids of my eyes, we blink the hard disks of plastic in and out of my eyes. I remember the feel of her breath sailing the nape of my neck--damply intimate, flooding with moisture. Her body seems comfortable, necessary to me, like just-slept-in-sheets or a favorite T-shirt that doesn't get washed often enough. My home. And I think, we are always meant to be this way--skin-tight, umbilical. Just the two of us. Sometimes I cry. Always I question the need for these uncomfortable procedures, even while knowing Mom will never give up. Mom is determined. Always has been. No daughter of hers will wear glasses in third grade, no matter what anybody says. And I'm grateful. Now, I no longer wear contacts. I love my glasses in fact--have eight pairs--and only curse them when I can't read the fine print on a bottle of Tylenol, which is more often now than I can admit.

I've been collecting "pieces" of Mom, broken off artifacts that could become my mother's life if I can scavenge enough of them. If there's enough time. I feel like a thief--Mom doesn't know I'm gleaning the rubble of her life. And I'm not going to tell her.

"Thief?" I blurt out, all of a sudden, a question for my mermaid muse. I'm trying the deceit on for size, wondering if it fits.

My Lady's silent, not even a smoke of a breath.

There's some things Mom doesn't need to know.
Some things I just can't explain.

So, I'll shut down my laptop, nuzzle goodbye my cats--Cougar and Lexie--and turn the key in my ignition. It seems I can't stay away after all.

Deeply, a mother's daughter
--this is alifewithmom--