Published Writing
FICTION
Holding Fast, North Coast Squid No. 4
Jesus Loves Me, Timberline Review, No. 2
Cherry Red, Surging Tide, Issue 5
Jeopardy, Timberline Review, No. 13
People Who Fish, North Coast Squid No. 8
CTEATIVE NONFICTION
The Bereaved, Rain Magazine 53
Powell’s Defines Category, 3550 Magazine
Musings
ALWAYS THE WIND
“This infernal wind!” Mother complains between her teeth. She shakes her head, her entire face a frown as she looks out the kitchen window at tall summer grasses lying flat, so beaten they no longer rise up against the relentless, ruinous wind. Tumbleweeds roll and dance through the farmyard. They whisk inches off the ground, restless and unstoppable.
Mother’s eyes skip across the grasses to the clothesline fifty feet from the house. She tells me to help her bring in everything -- the dishtowels, shirts, sheets, skirts, slacks, socks, the rags used for scrubbing, dusting, and wiping. It took only fifteen minutes for all of it to be whipped dry, as dry and stiff as old barn boards, and now the wind has wrapped everything tightly around the lines, once, twice, three times. The wind at our backs and then in our faces, we find the shirts and sheets are wrinkled into accordions. Two socks, a rag, and a baby kimono are missing, have escaped the clothes pins.
“Renegades! Escapees!” I yell in Mother’s direction, cupping my hands around my mouth like a town crier. I hope she will smile but she doesn’t look my way. I yell that I will look for them later. Perhaps the wind will die down at dusk. It often does.
Mother’s face remains grim. Her hair is a wild halo and her thin, cotton housedress sticks to her thighs as she hands me another pair of underpants. I thrust them into the laundry basket before they can fly to Mars.
In the bleak midwinter Mother uses her fingertips to clear moisture from the kitchen window and frowns at the dizzying scene of drifting, swirling snow. It is as if the wind is telling the poetically inclined snow that the wind is in charge. You have only winter, it says. I have all four seasons. I am tough, indelible, humorless. Mother considers the drifts, how they’ve gotten taller in the last hour. She wraps her arms around herself and shakes her head.
Today’s laundry dried on the clothesline in minutes, frozen solid, as stiff as corpses. Mother and I fought the snow and howling wind to bring everything into the house. That was hours ago. All through the afternoon the clothes and linens thaw and drip from thin lines strung back and forth in every room of the small farmhouse. My sisters and I duck under overalls, brassieres, and pillowcases, careful not to dirty anything, for Mother’s patience is brittle. Frost creeps up the window late in the afternoon and now it is dark. The kitchen window becomes a mirror while the wind sleeps for a few hours.
Isolation and desolation framed Mother’s days. I was two when our farm got electric power, ten when phone lines finally came to our township. Mother, a town girl who married a farmer, must have often felt the sharp pangs of isolation and loneliness. Yet I don’t remember her speaking of it. It was the wind. Always the wind.
A MOTHER’S STORY
Some years back, a friend recommended the memoir, When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. “It’s poetry,” she said. “You’ll feel her words and understand her voice.”
I wasn’t familiar with Terry Tempest Williams and the title was frankly off-putting (I pictured witches on brooms or raptors with the faces of goddesses), but this friend’s infectious spirit of wonder always delighted me. I purchased the book and found the small, beautifully printed volume a joy to hold in my hands, and the author’s musings and introspections to alternate between stunning and soothing. Poetry and so much more.
Williams tells the reader that her mother left her journals to her to be opened after her death. Williams found they were all blank.
No matter how many times I read this memoir, I’m stopped short by this mystery. The author goes on, “What my mother wanted to do and what she was able to do remains her secret.”
What do we know of our mothers, let alone of ourselves? How do we convey to our offspring who we are, what our dreams are? Do our actions alone tell our story or do we write it?
A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN
At fifty-seven I found what a beautiful woman looks like. I am still grasping the marvel of it.
I grew up around many women. My mother, two grandmothers, and eights aunts were early and steady influences. One aunt was a free spirit. One rarely smiled but her hands were soft and welcoming. One sang like a songbird late into her 80’s, two had nursing careers, all volunteered in their communities. They were strong wives and opinionated mothers. I didn’t see any as beautiful, although Aunt June came close in an Audrey Hepburn fashion. She flirted with her eyes, smoked, and wore trousers that were out of place in our little prairie town.
Beautiful women were the thing of glossy magazine photos and movies. I studied their square jawlines and long, slender legs, their stunning smiles supported by straight, white teeth. Beautiful people were attractive and wealthy. They and all their friends dressed well. Men adored them.
It was at a weekend women’s retreat in a campground snuggled within massive fir and cedar trees that I discovered the beauty of women. The average age of campers was at least seventy. Of the twenty-five, I knew perhaps twenty by name and considered ten of those to be friends. Not close friends, not bosom friends as my mother would have said. But we had things in common, including this annual retreat called Eve’s Circle. Named for the first woman, of course.
The camp’s lodgings were adequate. Old cabins were unheated but featured hot showers and electricity. Narrow bunks had stained mattresses and floppy pillows that held the age-old aroma of campfires. We provided our own linens; some women were clever enough to bring their own pillows. We brought bags and boxes of groceries according to a predetermined plan, and signed up for shifts of cooking and clean up in the so-called kitchen cabin that doubled as a gathering space.
I arrived early that Friday afternoon and headed to the cabin that traditionally beckoned the more spirited of the group. Last year I arrived too late to claim a bunk there; I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I was making up my bed when Margaret, the eldest of us, appeared, aided by Suzanne. I was surprised she would choose this cabin but said nothing. Margaret was ninety-one, mentally eager and emotionally confident. Her short, gray hair was an afterthought to style, but her eyes were bright with life. She carried in her left hand the plain walking stick she used for pushing and prodding and sometimes for balance. Suzanne plopped Margaret’s bedding bundle, a satchel, and miscellaneous bags onto the bed nearest mine and excused herself to unload the rest of her car. She would be staying in a different cabin but promised to check on Margaret later.
Margaret brushed off my offer to make up her bunk. Shoo! She laughed, a mirthful combination of a musical cackle and a child’s goofy giggle. I backed away and averted my eyes as best I could from her haphazard bedmaking. She fussed around, bantered with the other women who were arriving one by one and hummed to herself. Clothes spilled out of her satchel and twice in fifteen minutes she misplaced her glasses. She sniffed noisily and wiped at her nose with a man’s handkerchief she pulled from a pocket of her baggy athletic pants.
After dinner that first evening – vegetarian chili, green salad, cornbread – we congregated into a lopsided oval around a makeshift altar where we placed tokens, mementos, or keepsakes that carried our stories. Some of the stories were spoken aloud. I was moved by what several revealed about their object and themself. We were reminded that the stories stayed in the room, but I will say that we wept at Margaret’s story about the black and white image of a young man she had set on the altar.
I slept restlessly that night, as I am inclined to do when my husband is not next to me. The mattress was lumpy, the cabin deeply dark, no city lights seeping in. Somewhere in the night I heard a body moving around. A plastic case was snapped open and closed. And again. Things rustled like someone was trying to find an item in a bag or suitcase. More clicks and snaps, then the sound of light footfalls. I heard breathing near to me and indistinguishable sounds came from the angle of the floor. I sensed that someone was crawling and decided it was Margaret. Was she ill? Did she need help? Should I ask? But I remembered her independent bedmaking and knew she would ask for help if she needed it. I feigned sleep until the room went silent.
When I woke hours later to muted, morning laughter, the first person I saw was Margaret. She was changing out of flannel pajamas, her breasts loose and long, her belly white and round. For a moment I thought to look away and spare her embarrassment, but something held me.
“Morning!” she said to my staring eyes. “Sorry if I woke you in the night. Dropped my pill case and had to crawl around to find those little critters. Got ‘em all and what fun that was.” I joined in her laughter as she dropped her breasts into the cups of a once-white bra and announced, “Voila!”
Here was a beautiful woman.