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.

Nine Days Down, Twelve to Go

Twelve days from now will mark the three-week anniversary of the night we discovered that Grace had pinworms.  Pinworms.  Pinworms!  Pin.  Worms.  How did we know, you ask?  Oh, you really don’t want to know how we knew.

I am so tired.  I wash so many things these days.  I wash hands and I wash sheets and I wash car seat covers and legos and pacifiers and plastic animals and slings and dish towels and wool hats and anything I can’t wash I put in garbage bags in the attic.  I use diluted Clorox and full-strength Lysol and I don’t use any Seventh Generation.  I don’t even use Method.   Method is for sissies.

Did I mention how tired I am?  People whose children are grown tell me that their kids had pinworms and they didn’t clean as much as I am cleaning.  I am comforted by this, but I have not stopped cleaning.  And I don’t entirely believe them.  I don’t know if it would be possible to see what I saw coming out of my precious child’s tush and not want to spray the entire house with a fine mist of full-strength bleach.

If I didn’t know it before, I know it now:  I hate cleaning.  It is exhausting, demoralizing, boring, and endless.  Didn’t someone once say that cleaning when you have young children is like shoveling in a snowstorm?  I think it is more like blow drying your hair in the shower.

Nearly all the girls’ toys are in the attic because they are too soft to be washed.  I’ve left them with wooden blocks, a wooden doll house, a wooden play kitchen, and a few puzzles.  It is very Waldorf around here.  Which means that the girls are spending most of their time looking at the most recent American Girl catalog and playing with loose change.  June calls her stash “my moneys”, and she screams when you try to take it away from her.  She likes to count it:  “Two, two, two, mine!”

On Monday we will all take our second dose of pinworm medicine and the next Monday all the pinworms and their spawn will be dead.  We can stop cleaning, the dolls can come down from the attic, and I can go back to changing June’s crib sheet every other never.  That Monday cannot come soon enough.

The Numbers

During the first trimester of my first pregnancy I braced myself for blood every time I pulled down my pants to pee.  Day after day, week after week, I held my breath, told myself I would be fine no matter what, and looked down to see nothing.   And then finally one day I was thirteen weeks and suddenly feeling better, feeling well enough to cook a chicken and consider eating it, feeling well enough for a boisterous long-distance phone call that I didn’t want to end even though I had to pee and so I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear and pulled down my pants and did not, even for an instant, think of blood.  And there it was.

For several hours I could only assume that I was miscarrying.  But then the ob flipped on the ultrasound machine, swiped the wand across my belly, and found a flipping fetus with a smooth and fast heart, completely oblivious to a blood clot seeping out from the spot where the placenta was trying to knit itself into my body.

Subchoronic hematoma is the clinical name for what was happening then, and its common name is One Fresh Hell.  I was so frightened that I couldn’t even bear to look it up on the Internet.  I asked a friend to do it for me, and to give me an honest report.   “According to the numbers,” she said, “it could go either way.”

The way it went, of course, was the way of Gracie.  When she was an infant I used to think of that blot clot and cry loud tears into her curly hair at the thought of what I nearly lost.  Now when I think of the blot clot I think:  of course.  Of course she was not deterred, of course that bleeding did not stop her from getting to where she was going.  Who among us was meant for life more than this girl?

Grace and June had the flu last week.  They were careful to stagger their infections so as to insure the longest possible window of time we could spend together, as a family, without any contact with the outside world.  (If you are looking for a chance to really get to know your loved ones in the confined space of your own home, then I highly recommend contracting H1N1.  No one else will want to see any of you, from any distance, for a very very long time.)

I spent several nights sitting up holding the girls while they tried to sleep.  When Grace was sick, I propped myself up in bed and she slept with her head on my chest the way she used to when she was an infant.  When it was June’s turn, I sat up in the rocking chair.  They were both in some kind of terrible and unfamiliar pain with bodies so hot I tried to keep a thin blanket between my skin and theirs because the heat of their skin made it hard for me to believe that they were not destined to become one of those numbers I had been looking up when I shouldn’t have been: the number in hospitals, the number on ventilators, the number dead.

But the heat of their skin was nothing more than their smart and able bodies burning away what would harm them.  And they did, they burned for days and then the heat broke and they slept and ate popsicles and watched profound amounts of television.  Because they are healthy and lucky children.  Because they are not, and never have been, one of the numbers.

My Little Piggy. . .

has swine flu.  I’ll be back soon.

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.

Keepsake

When Gracie was a toddler Chris’s mother gave us a small bag of clothes that had been Chris’s when she was young.  The clothes were vintage turn of the 70’s–lots of terry cloth and smocking, short hems and mickey mouse decals.  The clothes were delicate and girlish and from what I know of Chris’s childhood, of her preference for jeans and baseball jerseys and spitting through her teeth, and her mother’s disdain for all three, it is no surprise that these are the clothes that became keepsakes.    Some dreams die hard.

There was a dress in the bag, a simple peach-colored shift that Chris’s grandmother made for her.  It is a beautiful dress made from a material that must have its own name but I do not know what it is, a material of large-petaled flowers edged and sewn together with white thread.  It has a high neck and no sleeves:  it is a perfectly made late-sixties shift.

I think that Chris loves to see Grace in the dress.  I don’t think that she has many fond memories of wearing it herself (if she remembers wearing it at all), but she does have enormous fondness for her grandmother, whom I am certain she remembers daily.

I didn’t really know Chris’s grandmother.  I met her at a few family gatherings, but she thought of me only as a friend, if she thought of me at all.  I was a secret then, as all Chris’s girlfriends had been.  She died one summer and we were married the next:  two summers later Grace was born.

The order of those events is part gift, part heartache.  I do not know what might have happened if we had married and had a child while Chris’s grandmother was still alive.  I like to think it would have been a profound opportunity for everyone, but I can’t be sure of that.  What I can be sure of is that Chris’s grandmother, whoever and wherever she is now, adores this golden-haired child in the peach dress.  I know that she is happy to see Grace in the dress; I know that she would agree with me when I say that our Grace is the child she made this dress for, those many many years ago.

The photo above is of Grace, I just played around with it here.  

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.

Past Due

Every month we get a bill from the reproductive biology lab at the hospital in town.  It is a bill for storage:  they are housing five vials of sperm that belong to us.  We bought six vials shortly after Grace was born, hoping that six would be enough to grow a sibling.  It turned out to be enough and then some, hence the storage.

Storage is $35/month, although the bill is usually for $70, or $105, because I often forget to pay the bill.  Or just don’t pay the bill, because keeping that sperm cold is so very low on my list of priorities these days.

“We should do something about the sperm,” I say to Chris every few months.

“Already?”  she always asks.  (This is a woman who has unopened mail from 2003 and can’t bear the thought of throwing away her textbooks from Brandeis which she attended circa forever ago.   I know that she is going to be of no help to me here.)

I don’t want another child.  I value my sleep and my marriage (not to mention my pelvic floor) far too much to put that sperm to its intended use.  But I keep paying the bills.  Straight friends have asked me if letting the vials go is the equivalent of getting a vasectomy and it might be, although thawing the sperm doesn’t mean we can’t have more kids, it just means we can’t have them with this donor.

Perhaps it’s more like giving away the pram June used to sleep in, or the Petit Bateau kimono-style sleepers that we bought in New York the summer I was pregnant with Grace.  And while there was a time when I would have said that I wanted no reminders of all the uncertainty and stress, the tortured decisions we made about which bank and which donor and who is available and who is in quarantine and who is identity release and whose grandfather has Parkinson’s, much of my suffering has faded in the persistent glow of our daughters faces, and I find myself left only with my affection for #5437 and all his attending logistics and details.  Perhaps this affection is why I keep paying the bills.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday I got a bill for $70 and instead of paying it I called the lab and asked them to send us a request for disposal form.

I would love to say that a deep feeling of calm came over me when I opened the bill, that a clear and true voice spoke to me when I saw the tell-tale blue envelope in the mail and  I knew that the time had come.  But the truth is that the bill came a few days after I bought an iphone and I had been trying to figure out what I could cut from the monthly budget to cover the $30 plan increase.

This is the truth:  when you buy sperm to make a child, when you read on-line profiles of potential donors and make phone calls to reserve vials and make phone calls to release said vials on ovulation day because you and the person you love want to grow a human being in your body and you can’t do that without the sperm, well then the sperm has both a preciousness beyond all known value and a fair market price.  And you must let it have both.  The sperm and its donor are the essential second half of your dream’s beating heart, but they are also a man you do not know and a frozen vial of jizz.  They just are.

This does not mean that I don’t adore our donor, or that when he comes to mind (conjured by a storage bill or bad habit that one of girls has developed that most certainly must be something they inherited from him) I don’t want to drop to my knees in gratitude for the alchemy of generosity and science and commerce that make our uncommon bond possible.  It means that in using his sperm to fertilize my eggs I have had to enter into one of the most absurd and holy and frustrating relationships I will ever have with another human.  It also means that I have to know when to think with my ovaries and when to think with my checkbook.

On the day that June was baptized, a older congregant approached me after the service to offer his congratulations.  “I am so lucky,” he said as he reached for my arm, “to be alive in a time when these girls could be born.”

I think I was holding onto those vials as a way of holding onto our bumper crop of luck, as a way of extending all the blessings that have been bestowed on us during these years of wishing and growing and  tending our children.  But I can see now that our luck and our blessings have traveled far from their icy origins and that those origins were never meant to be more than just that: beginnings.  And we are not beginning anymore.  We are on our way.