I Have Loved the Beauty of Thy House

At 5:00 on Sunday morning I pulled a crying June from her crib and tucked her into bed next to me.  I have not done this– she has not asked me to do this— since the night before her first birthday.  I lay down with her and rubbed her back and prayed for her to go back to sleep.  She did, but I stayed awake.  And although I didn’t know it at the time, just a few miles down the road the church that I have loved for nearly 10 years was burning to the ground.  By 6 a.m. the church, in the words of our minister, belonged to fire.

The church was built 170 years ago by people who knew many things that I do not know.  They knew how to thresh wheat, and how to butcher an animal.  They knew how to mix a salve that would heal an infection and how to steep a tea that would end a pregnancy.  They knew how to sew bandages and how to ferment cider.  They knew how to build a church so that the morning sun would enter the windows in every season.  The people who built our church were the children of Revolutionary War veterans and the grandparents of boys who died in the Civil War.  They were people who loved their children and feared their God; people who spent their few precious hours of rest each week listening to sermons about serpents and demons, and fire.

Can I describe the church?  Can I conjure it for you?  I can’t.  And what would I say, really?  Beadboard walls, iron sconces, a wooden pulpit.  No cross.  I can tell you that you would have loved it, that you would have walked through the door and believed that this was what a church was meant to look like.  I can tell you that during the long and lonely years when I was waiting for my roots to take hold in the rocky soil of these hills that church was my salvation.  In that little room my life was made holy:  in May the flowers on the tiny altar were the same as the ones that bloomed by my mailbox; in March the congregants’ muddy bootprints covered the painted wood floor no matter how carefully they wiped their feet at the door.  These were people with whom I shared the same late  harvest and early frost, the same relief at the sight of steam rising from the maple sugar shacks in February, the same joy in swimming in cool lakes that we had skated across six months before.

On Sunday afternoon we gathered at the Parish House.  I parked on Main Street and walked toward the church.  There was bright yellow tape strung across the road leading up the hill, but I could still see what was left.  I cried loud tears at the sight of it, and kept walking.  During the service we prayed and sang and laughed; we clapped and we cried.  We collected an offering for Haiti.  I cried for all my Sundays there, and especially for our girls’ baptisms, and I tried to remember that they were baptized with water from a creek that still runs and by minister whose heart still beats strong in his chest.  So much remains.

There will be a new church.   And as a consolation prize, it might even have a bathroom.  But I hope it doesn’t have much more than that.  I hope it is one small and simple room nestled against that ancient rocky ledge.  We are a wild and creative, a holy and raucous, congregation.  We love big, we dream loud.  We stomp our feet and we laugh; we hold each other’s hands and each other’s babies and each other’s fragile hearts.  We are, dare I say, a bit undisciplined.  That church, that 170 year old building, held us.  It held us down and it held us up and it held us together.  It kept us quiet (sometimes) and it kept us humble.  That 170 year old building was built by people who loved these hills and who knew so many things we do not know. When it comes time to rebuild it I hope we bow to their wisdom which was, of course, born of necessity but also must have been born of grace, and of the prescient knowledge that nearly 200 years later we would need nothing more than a room filled with pews on which to rest our  bodies; nothing more than a dozen windows so that we might see each other’s faces in the morning light.

Twenty Four Hours Later

I didn’t know about the earthquake in Haiti until more than 24 hours after it happened.  Twenty-four hours in which I made dinner for my children and put them to bed myself because Chris was away on business; got up twice in the night to soothe said children back to sleep; made breakfast; dressed the girls in warm clothes; scraped the car windows; dropped June off at her babysitter; saw my therapist; picked Grace up from school; filled the entire trunk of my car with groceries packed in cloth bags; put said children to bed again; sat at my kitchen counter with a friend and drank a bottle of wine.

It was only after my friend went home that I sat down at the computer and called up the New York Times homepage and saw what had really happened in Haiti.

I looked at a photograph of a child with a bandaged and bloodied face holding a piece of bread in one hand and I could not keep my mind from turning that child into June.  But that child isn’t June.  I am not sure there is a child is this world that is further away from the earthquake in Port-au-Price than June is.  I do not have words for my gratitude for this fact, or for my shame.

I read Tracy Kidder’s book on Haiti a few years ago, and occasionally I check in with Partners in Health to see what new and amazing work they are doing there.  And today I will send them money.  But the truth is I don’t remember much about Kidder’s book, other than its guarded hopefulness and the bleak picture it painted of a country terrorized by war and destroyed by deforestation, corruption, and illness.  I read that book and for a few days, or maybe weeks, I though about Haiti.  And then I let it go.  I let it go the same way that I let the Lost Boys of the Sudan go a few weeks after I finished Dave Eggers’ What is the What, and the way I let the Hurricane Katrina refugees go once the waters had receded and the Super Dome had emptied.

I live a life in which terror and destruction, poverty and violence are all things that happen to other people in other places.  I do not respond as generously as I should to requests for aid.  I do not hold broken people in my heart and mind for as long as they deserve to be held, which is forever.  Instead I occupy that space with my children and my partner, with my work and with dinner plans and vacation plans, with music class registration and permission slips and the twice-yearly clearance sale at Hanna Andersson.

The child is the photograph is not June.  But this fact does not keep me from worrying about June and wanting even more for her than she already has.  What I realize now–on this very day when I woke to a gray sky and a warm bed and a five-year old who had climbed in next to me because she wanted to hear a chapter of a new book before breakfast–is that I only neglect that Haitian child more by conflating her with my own daughter.  That hurt and homeless child who lives an ocean away is not my daughter.  She belongs to someone else.  She belongs to another world.  Today I am going to try to hold her next to my own children, and not because I feel guilty that such a thing has not happened to my girls or scared because such a thing might someday.  I am going to try to hold her because she is a wounded child, and she deserves to be held.

Patron Saint

Winter, 1990something

My boyfriend’s cousin is having brunch. Maybe it’s New Year’s day, or someone’s birthday.  I have met this cousin and his wife and their two young girls before, although I don’t know them well.  The husband and wife are writers.  Maybe he writes mysteries novels or screenplays.  I can’t remember.  No one seems to know what she (I’ll call her Carol) writes; she has been working on a book for as long as anyone can remember, but makes little progress. Everyone talks about the book the same way.   She’s writing a book, they say, and then there is a little shrug or an eye roll, and a knowing smile.  I get the idea that no one is expecting her to finish.

I don’t remember what my boyfriend’s cousin looked like, but I remember Carol.   She looked happy, and tired.  She looked older than me.  She looked like a mother.  She looked the way I look now.

On the way to the bathroom from the kitchen I walk past a pantry with floor to ceiling shelves filled with books and notebooks and a desk no wider than an ironing board covered with papers.  Carol’s office.  Carol’s desk.

When I come back from the bathroom everyone is in the living room, and little girls are dancing.  Carol is laughing, and dancing with them, and then she grabs the video camera off the dining room table and starts to film them.  I remember her smile from behind that camera, and the way that she was still dancing with them while she was filming.

I don’t remember anything else from that weekend in the city, or how many months it was until our last weekend in the city together, or exactly how many years it was before I saw Carol’s book on the front cover of the New York Times book review.

What I do remember is Carol’s face, and the way she talked about her daughters, and the way she didn’t talk about her book.  I remember her pantry office, and the stack of dishes in her sink.

I do not expect to write a book that makes the cover of the NYT book review or wins a Pulitzer (Carol’s book did), but I do expect to finish a book.   I don’t know how, or when.  I am tired; my desk is messy; my daughters are dancing in the living room and I am dancing with them.

I think of Carol all the time.  I can’t even begin to know what it really took for her to finish her book, what and who she had to sacrifice.  But what I can know is that she held her book and her daughters in her heart and her mind, and that gave them each what she had, when she could.  For now I make her the woman I need her to be, the woman who, like me, stoked the fire for her children while managing to keep an ember of work alive because she believed that someday both could throw their own heat.  For now I make her my Patron Saint of Writing Mothers, and I sanctify her pantry office and her narrow desk, her video camera and her bare feet, moving fast to keep up with her dancing children.

Refusing Grace

“Don’t read this week’s Modern Love,”  Chris calls from the living room.

“OK,”  I call back.  I don’t need to ask why.  I have already seen the byline and recognized the name and know that I will not be reading it.  The essay is by Ann Hood, who is a prolific and talented writer I must avoid.  She is a writer I must avoid because several years ago her five-year old daughter, Grace, died suddenly after contracting a virulent form of strep.  I know this because I once stumbled upon an essay of hers in an anthology and for days I was haunted by the arrangement of her words.  Grace.  Death.  Grace’s death.

I do not read essays by Ann Hood.

Grace– our living, breathing Grace– has a friend whose mother died last year.  The little girl, I’ll call her Sylvie, is four now.  Grace didn’t know Sylvie when her mother died.  But this year they have taken a dance class together, and spent a few afternoons at the lake and at a weekly nature program called the Flying Turtles.  “Sylvie’s mother died,”  Gracie told me this Saturday night as we drove to a friend’s birthday party.  I had just told her I thought Sylvie would be there.

“She did die,” I say.  “I knew that.”

“Now they have a bench for her.  With butterflies.”

She is talking about Sylvie’s mother’s gravestone, which is a bench.  She is buried in the cemetery just across the road from Sylvie’s preschool.  Grace doesn’t seem to understand exactly what the bench is for, and so we begin a familiar yet painful conversation about death, about where Sylvie’s mother is now, and why there is a bench near the spot where her body is buried.  I do my whole routine about her body being with the flowers and the water and the air and her voice and her ideas being with God, and Grace listens carefully, as she always does.   And then we move on to something else, as we always do.  But soon enough we are back again.

“Do we have a bench we can use if you die?”

I tell her that I’m sure we do but I am not going to die for such a very very long time.  I tell her that we are not going to need a bench.

Grace does not try to avoid all reminders and portents of my death.  She does not refuse Sylvie’s playful beckoning the way I refuse Ann Hood’s beautiful prose.  Instead she plays all night with Sylvie, she leaps off the wobbly porch step again and again to take Sylvie’s hand, to run into the darkness while I watch and wait for their bodies to appear in the distance, illuminated by the fire someone has made to keep them warm.

Goodbye, Old Friend

The cover of the August 2004 issue of Gourmet is a photograph of a mason jar filled with jam.  The jar’s lid is off and its sides are shellacked with jam and seeds and gooey bits of berry.  The handle of a wooden spoon sticks out just above the jar’s lip.  I know this because the magazine is on the desk next to me, but I also know this because I read that issue cover to cover and back again while I sat in bed holding a sleeping newborn.  I can remember September’s cover too, and  also October’s.  I read those while Grace slept on me in the rocking chair, long deep sleeps that would only be long and deep if she slept on me and I did not move.  I kept the magazine on a table next to the rocker and sometimes I didn’t turn the page for fear of disturbing her so I read the same recipes over and over, the same beautiful articles about shrimp and tiered cakes and Corsica.

When Grace was three and I was pregnant for the second time, I let my subscription lapse.  I didn’t have time to read the essays; the photographs that usually fed my soul were making me nauseous; and my characteristic first trimester lack of all perspective and abandonment of all hope led me to believe that I would never have the time and energy to care about food again.  A friend suggested I try Cooking Light instead, that the recipes were fresh and healthy and easy.  So I tried it, and during my pregnancy and the first few months of June’s life I cooked lots of fresh and healthy and easy recipes.  But it didn’t take long before I grew tired of the magazine’s life-coachy tone, and of dinner recipes that called for 1/4 teaspoon of butter and recipes for brownies baked in a 8×8 inch pan with a yield of 24 squares.  It wasn’t Cooking Light so much as Cooking Little and it was getting on my nerves.

So I went back to Gourmet.  The truth was the even before Grace was born I was never cooking more than a handful of recipes from each issue.  I was reading smart and lyrical writing and losing myself in stunning photographs.  I was learning about street food and Polynesia and cocktails with names like Jealous Marys and The Waldorf.  I was learning how to toast seeds and cook custard in a water bath.   I was tearing out recipes for Christmas cookies to make with my yet-to-be-conceived children, and reviews for restaurants three states away.  But I didn’t care when I used those recipes and reviews.  I just thought it all looked delicious and exciting.  I thought they looked like things worth saving.

This summer I cooked an entire menu from the August 2009 issue.  It took me three days, but I made every last bit of it, from the red pepper walnut spread with warm pita to the cumin-scented beef kabobs to the lemon ice cream sandwiches with swirled blueberry compote.  I made the ice cream sandwiches one night when Chris was in Washington for work.  I put June to bed and Grace sat at the counter while I made the two cookie crusts and mixed lemon juice and zest into soft ice cream.  Grace licked the beater while I stirred blueberries and lemon juice on the stove, careful not to let the thickening sugar burn.  The whole thing was taking longer than I would have hoped, but even as the night grew darker and the dishes piled up around me, I was happy.  The windows were open and the air was cool; the radio was on and my oh-so-not-newborn daughter was beside me, her lips stained blue from the berries, and she was chatting and mixing and sneaking spoonfuls of batter when she thought I wasn’t paying attention.  The next day Chris came home and our dear friends came over bearing wine and salad and together we ate the food that I had made while our girls slept in their beds down the hall.

Yesterday a friend emailed to tell me that after nearly 70 years in print, Gourmet magazine is folding.  I imagine that in the coming days the airways and internet will be filled with people’s stories of their deep love for the publication, stories of how Gourmet taught them to cook and taught them to love food and taught them how to bone a fish.  I also imagine that people will be talking about how it was too rich, too glamorous, too much about fancy food and fancy wine and privilege.  For me Gourmet will always be about that sleeping baby on my chest and what I wished for then, and what I have now.

Stolen

This morning I swam at the lake.  Even though this summer has been wet and cool, I still manage to find my way there several times each week.  Swimming in open water is my version of putting up food: I store the water in my muscles and my memory so that I can make it through the seemingly interminable winter.  Some days I am lucky enough to go to the lake alone, and today was one of them.  I swam for a long time and when I got out of the water a boy, maybe six or seven years old, was standing in the shallows.  “You are a great swimmer,”  he said to me, “really great!”  His little sister concurred.  I thanked them both.

When I got back to my car I opened the trunk. The parking lot was empty, so I quickly peeled off my suit and put on my clothes, combed my hair, and laid my suit on top of my towel so that it would dry.  I went around to the front of the car and got in.  I turned to get something out of my purse, but it wasn’t on the seat next to me.  Had I put it in the back seat?  I turned to look and saw shattered glass everywhere.  All over Gracie’s car seat, and June’s, and the space between them.  Glass in the shoes Gracie always leaves on the floor below her seat; glass on June’s blankie and her pacifier.  And no purse.  A purse that contained my cell phone, five tubes of lipstick, an umbrella,and a wallet containing three credit cards, a driver’s license, a wad of ATM receipts, and eleven dollars in cash.  I could care less about the contents of said purse, it’s the purse itself that I want back, the Orla Kiely pear print shoulder bag that is mostly likely sitting in a dumpster somewhere in the Daughters of the American Revolution State Park in Goshen, MA.

I spent the rest of the morning and much of the afternoon filing a police report and calling the insurance company and the auto glass shop and the bank.  I also ordered a new drivers license and I thought about ordering a new purse.  I  talked to Chris a dozen times, and to my mother, and to several friends.  Karen, the girls’ babysitter and third mother, brought them home because the auto glass shop can’t fix the window until tomorrow afternoon.

Whenever something like this happens to me (and something like this–thank God–hardly every happens to me)  I think of a little boy I once knew, a boy I’ll call Jeffrey.  I knew him when he was four years old, and I was twenty-two.   I was his preschool teacher.  Jeffrey had a crazy life, a life filled with disorder and violence and sadness and loss.  His father was in prison and his mother was struggling to keep body and soul and family together.  He was a feisty and sweet boy.  Jeffrey loved the water table, he loved to wash plastic baby dolls and to fill and empty pitchers of soapy water.  He had trouble getting along with the other kids; he was aggressive and loud and easily frustrated.  When he was absent from school I was both worried and relieved.  One Halloween we took the children trick-or-treating to the stores around our school and when we got back to the classroom we insisted that the children put their candy bags in their cubbies.  Jeffrey refused.  He screamed, he kicked.  My co-teacher, Peggy, who was infinitely better equipped to deal with Jeffrey than I was, helped him to calm down enough to tell her why he did not want to take his candy home.  He couldn’t bring the candy home because his older brothers and sisters would take it from him.  Peggy took Jeffrey to the office and held him on her lap while he ate every single piece of candy in his bag.

Jeffrey would be nineteen now.  Maybe he made it though elementary school intact; maybe he was rare and diligent and lucky enough to graduate from high school; maybe he’s in college now.  Or maybe he decided that school just wasn’t his thing and he has a job that he loves and that gives him enough money to live a life that feels like a good life to him.  Maybe.

Who are you when you see something that you want behind a locked door and so you smash the window above a child’s  car seat so that you can get it?  Who are you when you don’t wonder if the child will be able to sit on that seat when she returns from the lake, or if that child will cut herself when she reaches down for her pacifier and it is covered in glass?  What, exactly, has been done to you?

I didn’t lose much today.  A fabulous purse, a cell phone that I think might have been broken anyway, and a half-dozen tubes of lipstick.  All of it, except the time I spent makes phone calls and signing papers at the bank, can be replaced.  Maybe I could say that I also lost some of the peace I feel at the lake, some of what I love about that place, but that wouldn’t be true, really.  I still love the lake. I still believe that it is mine.  But the person who broke my window, the person who shattered that glass all over my children’s car seats and their belongings just to get at that purse, well, I have a feeling that he has lost many, many things that he can never get back.

The Morning, The Mail

My annual social security statement came in the mail today.  I don’t usually open them, but this year I did.  This year  I opened the envelope and unfolded the paper and read that long column of zeros.  Zero eligible income in 2005; zero eligible income in 2006.  And 2007.  And 2008.  Zero income for four years of daily work.   I could list all the things I have done these past 4 (nearly 5) years; I could enumerate the hours worked; I could even devise some formula for what my time is worth and how much money I should have made, but the truth is I switched over to another metric a long time ago.  I know that those zeros belong to a world that isn’t really my world right now.  That said, I don’t think I’ll be opening next year’s statement.

*     *     *     *

We went to town this morning for June’s check-up.  We made it down the hill with some time to spare, so I took the girls to the park.  It was early, and there was just one other child at the playground.  She was two, maybe two and a half, and she was playing on the climber while her father sat in the grass a few yards away, reading the paper.  I stood close to the climber because June fancies herself quite the gymnast these days and sometimes I need to offer an assist.  After a few minutes Grace asked me to get her started on the swing, and I turned to dash over for a quick push before June attempted an aerial off the slide. I was almost to the swing when something told me to turn back around just in time to see that two-year-old walk over to June and push her so hard that she fell flat on her back, barely two inches from the climber’s edge.  I heard a scream and realized it was mine.  I ran over, scooped June off the climber, and held her while she cried.  The two-year-old kept playing; her father kept reading the newspaper.  I gathered up the girls and put them in the car.  But before I got into the driver’s seat, I walked back to the playground.

“Excuse me,”  I said.

The father looked up from his paper.

“Your daughter pushed my daughter so hard that she nearly fell off the climber.”

“I’m so sorry,”  he said.  And it was clear that he was.

“It’s OK,”  I said, and it– the pushing part– really was OK.  Toddlers push, everyone knows that.  “I just wanted you to know, so that if other kids come to the park, you’ll watch her.”

Silence.

I went back to the car.  I was angry for a long, long time.  I was angry because in the five years that I have been working at this job I have seen lots and lots of  mothers at the playground.  I have seen mothers who don’t watch their kids closely enough and mothers who don’t give their kids enough space.  I have seen mothers who do too much rationalizing and not enough reprimanding.  But  I have never once, in the five years that I have been doing this job, seen a mother read the newspaper while her two year old plays on the climber with other children.

It is one thing for this father to sit and read while his daughter is the only child playing (something I have actually done many times), but it is quite another to continue when another child comes onto the scene.  By doing so, he made me responsible for both our children’s interactions.  And why, exactly, was he comfortable doing that?   Because I am a woman?  Because my child is younger?  Because his child is as mild as bath water and needs no supervision?  Because  I didn’t have a newspaper and so must not want to read the newspaper, must want only to watch children, and so then, why not watch his while I’m at it?  He was tuning out from the action around him in order to tune in to the larger world, the world that had just sent me an envelope full of zeros.

Jill Lepore, in her recent New Yorker review of Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother and Michael Lewis’s Homegame, tells us that she, like the father at the park, prefers the newspaper to the playground.  I’ve got news for Ms. Lepore and Mr. NYT:  we all prefer the newspaper to the playground.   And  to suggest that those of us who dedicate our mornings to climber supervision instead of the op-ed page and busy ourselves writing narratives of parenthood instead of essays on the History of Art are engaged in lesser work, invisible work, work that can be panned for its subject matter rather than its literary merit, well, that’s an envelope of zeros I will never open.

Broken

When my sister was in nursing school she worked as a phone counselor for The Women’s Medical Fund.  The Fund, as she called it, provides low-income women and girls with the money they need to get abortions.

Sometimes she would tell me the women’s stories.  They were women who had other children they were trying to support and women with abusive husbands they were trying to leave and young girls who had hid their pregnancies well into their first (and sometimes second) trimesters.  I remember one story about a young girl (14 maybe?) who had been raped by an adult in her family and was in her second trimester.  I don’t remember all the details of her grim story, but I do remember that by the time she came to The Fund the only thing left to do was to sent her, on a bus, to Kansas.

The people in this country who, through both violent and peaceful acts, seek to bring an end to abortions believe that God does not want women to have abortions.  I think that they are not entirely wrong about this.  I also think that God does not want women to be raped, especially by men in their families.  I think that God doesn’t want women’s lives and bodies to be so devalued that they are continually and systematically denied access to reliable birth control.  I think God doesn’t want babies with profound disabilities to suffer, especially in this world that so deeply fears illness and disease and disfigurement.  I think God doesn’t want humans to turn their backs, again and again, on the poverty and abuse and violence that millions of children experience before they even learn to walk.

We live in a broken world, and abortion is but a part of that brokenness.

But because we live in a world where people like to keep things simple, abortion is the part of the brokenness that tends to get the most attention.  When you are trying to save a pregnancy, all you have to do is wedge yourself between a woman and her body, and we’ve been doing that since the beginning of time.  It is not hard to convince people of a fetus’ innocence (and therefore its right to life) but it becomes harder to convince people of much of anything about a child once it has been born.  Once a child is born there are so very many people and beliefs and systems and offices to blame for its struggles and eventual demise.  Once a child is born it’s not hard to forget about her.  We’ve been doing that since the beginning of time, too.

The pro-pregnancy people have made a movement out of dwelling in the promise.  But I don’t think God really wants us to dwell in the promise, at least not for too long.  God wants us to dwell in the here and now.  God wants us to roll up our sleeves and fix the lives of children who can draw breath and speak and who –if they could speak loud enough, and if we would listen– would tell us that they need clean air and food and somewhere safe to go while their mother is at work.

Dr.  George Tiller wasn’t wearing his bullet proof vest on Sunday because he was in church, and I suppose he thought he was safe there.  But as it turns out, he wasn’t safe anywhere.  When I heard about his murder I thought of that young girl on the bus from Philly.  And I thought about Grace and June.  What if they need a late-term abortion someday?  Who will help my daughters then?

Who will help yours?

To find out more about the National Network of Abortion Funds and to find a fund near you, go here.

Deciding to Run

Lately I have been running at Chesterfield Gorge.  A few weeks ago I started to grow weary of my normal running route, up and back on that same river road where I have been walking and wogging and running for nearly 6 years now.  I’ve been going to the Gorge for just as long, but only to hike and snowshoe and to see the mountain laurels in bloom, not to run.  The people I saw running at the Gorge were always wearing digital watches and teeny tiny shorts and those sunglasses that curve around your eyes like welding goggles.  Those people are not my people.

But I run there now.  Now, I am in love with running there.  I can’t really explain how beautiful it is.  Everything is somehow both ancient and completely new.  The old dirt road takes you into the woods but keeps you next to the river, so that on one side everything is green and smells of old leaves and moss while everything on the other side smells of water and warm rocks.  Right now the river is fast and loud and the fly-fishermen can hardly scramble over the boulders and into the current fast enough.  It is a pleasure to watch them cast, to watch their rods whip back and their lines spiral over the water.  It is a pleasure to watch them because you can tell, even from a distance, that they are having the time of their lives.

This morning I went straight to the Gorge after I dropped off the girls.  The parking lot was empty.  It was early, not yet 9 o’clock, and raining.  The car thermometer said 47 degrees.  I put my hair in a ponytail and fumbled with my ipod and tried to remember if they ever found the body of that woman who went missing on a mountain running path out west a few years ago.

I usually don’t worry about such things.  I don’t even worry about meeting up with bears, although it’s fairly likely to happen this time of year.  I just run with my car keys around one finger and let them jangle against my open palm to let the bears know I’m coming.  So far, so good.  But there was something about the emptiness of the Gorge today that frightened me.  I thought about what could happen to me down on that quiet road, what terrible violence could be done to me in those glorious and empty woods.  I thought about what that violence would do to the girls, and to Chris, but mostly I thought about what it would do to me.  I sat until the windshield was glazed over with rain, and then I decided to run.

I decided to run.  I decided that the Gorge was safe, and that I was safe.  I didn’t think in terms of risk; I did not hold the joy I feel when my heart and legs move me up those steep hills in one hand and the possibility of danger in the other, because no joy is worth that sort of danger.  I simply decided that I was not in danger.  I decided that I was safe.

While I ran I remembered that Andre Dubus story, “Out of the Snow,” and how in it, the protagonist LuAnn is attacked in her own kitchen by two men who have followed her home from the grocery store.  She fights back with a steel skillet and her fierce desire to live, and Dubus’s rendering of the scene is, as always, magnificent.  While I ran I remembered the last scene of the story, when LuAnn is sitting by the fire talking to her husband about what has just happened to her.  She tells him:

“I have to know this, and remember this, and tell it to the children:  I didn’t hit those men so I could be alive for the children, or for you.  I hit them so my blood would stay in my body; so I could keep breathing.”

I have loved this LuAnn character (who appears in several of Dubus’s stories) for many years, and I have carried her and her stories with me (both literally and figuratively) for more than a decade now.   Ostensibly she came to mind because of what I feared this morning, but as I ran and ran I realized that actually she came to me because of what she tells her husband (and here I paraphrase):  I did not do this thing so I could be alive for you or the children.  I did this thing so that my blood would stay in my body; so that I could keep breathing.

And that, I realized, is why I decided to run.

A Good Sale

One of the stores in town that I love has a sale twice a year and during that sale the owner puts out basket after basket of beautiful children’s clothes and sells them for what my friend Alisa refers to as “Old Navy prices.”  I wait all year for those two sales, often just casually stopping by the store when the owner (who I know) isn’t in and asking one of the Smith girls who work there if the sale will be happening soon.  I don’t like to ask the owner about the sales because I don’t want to admit to her how profoundly cheap I am.  Of course she knows how cheap I am, of course she knows how cheap everyone around here is, but still I like to pretend that I buy more than just wrapping paper from her at full price.  (OK, I’ll be honest.  I don’t buy the wrapping paper at full price.)

Anyway, the sale started last week so I arranged my day without the girls to allow for some shopping.

There is so much inventory at these sales (Did I mention how cheap everyone here is?)  that you could spend hours going through all the baskets.  It takes a long time to unfold each piece, hold it up to an imaginary baby, and refold it.  But the clothes are so soft and colorful and smell so good that sorting through the baskets is actually rather relaxing.  Soon enough the whole process becomes something of a ritual and it is easy to do it–to decide if this shirt has enough purple in it for Grace or if that dress will still fit June when she’s walking–while you are talking a mile a minute to the other shoppers.

This time I am chatting with the store owner and then a woman, who I will call Gaby, comes into the store.   It is clear that she and the owner are friends.  Gaby has some news to share.  Her baby, who I will call Rosie, has arrived.  She has arrived early.  She has arrived 16 weeks early.  Sixteen weeks.  Which means that Rosie was born at 24 weeks gestation.  Which means that even though she has been alive for nearly two months she is still two months shy of her due date.

There is much sighing and “oh my God”-ing and “Oh Gaby! How hard for you!”  And then there are pictures on Gaby’s iphone and questions about how much Rosie weighs (she is up to three pounds) and there I am, standing right next to Gaby, folding and unfolding while she folds and unfolds and tells her story.  And then she starts talking about the nurses in the NICU and I can’t help but say something.

“My sister was a nurse in that NICU,”  I say.

Gaby turns to me, a huge smile on her face.  “I love those nurses!”

“My sister took care of lots of 24 weekers,”  I tell her.  “Lots.”  This is my way of telling Gaby that I know something of what it means to have a baby at 24 weeks, that I know that 24 weeks is the edge of the cusp of possibility, and that her baby is as fragile as spun sugar.

Of course I don’t say any of those things.  Instead I hand her a 3-6 month purple sundress.  “My girls wear those all winter,”  I tell her.  “You can just put a long-sleeve onesie and some tights under it.”

She puts it on her pile.

Then she tells us about a trip to Boston for heart surgery, and about the four hours a day she spends holding Rosie.  She tells us about the cable channels at the Ronald McDonald house where she and her husband sleep, and about how she didn’t know she was in labor until just a few minutes before Rosie was born.  All the while we unfold and fold.  She tells us that her husband doesn’t want too much pink and I tell her I think it’s smart to steer clear of pink in the beginning because eventually it’s all Rosie will want to wear.  Gaby tells us that this is the very first time she’s bought clothes for Rosie, and I wonder what it is about this day that makes the risk of the grief these clothes might bring her someday worth the joy that choosing them is bringing her today.  Because clearly she is happy.  She is happy to be standing here talking about her baby’s body and her baby’s preferences, yet to be revealed.

Finally the time comes when I cannot in good conscience stay any longer.  As it is I have lost my chance to go to the grocery store or take a shower before I have to pick up the girls.  I scoop up my pile and say my goodbyes.  I thank the owner for the sale, and I turn to Gaby.

“I’ll be thinking of Rosie,”  I tell her, “and maybe this summer I’ll run into you on the street and she’ll be sleeping on your chest and we’ll remember this day.”

“Oh I hope so,”  Gaby says, and I know her hope is for the baby sleeping on her chest and not the running into me.  I think she knows mine is, too.

On the way out I grab something I have folded and refolded a dozen times.  It is a yellow onesie with a small green bird silk-screened across the front, sewn out of the softest cotton I have ever felt.  I hadn’t been able to think of a single baby in my life that it would fit, but I also couldn’t put it down.  I hand it to the girl at the counter.  “This one is for her,”  I say softly, pointing to Gaby, who has her back to me.  “Will you wrap it up and give it to her when she is ready to go?”

The sales girl smiles and tells me that I have made her day.  “Just for that,” she says, “I’m giving you all of this for 50% off even though some of it is only marked for 25%.”

But of course that’s not the real reward, even for a cheapskate like me.