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Merrimac, Michigan

Across the bay, afternoon sun illuminates the north end of Plum Island, where we walked this morning and where fresh water meets salt. In this harbor town of Newburyport, my friend and I sit on a third-floor deck overlooking the intersection of the Merrimack River and the Atlantic. A lull in conversation announces that after half a year, she and I have just about caught up. We open long-neck steamers one by one and eavesdrop on other tables.

As rain pours down day after day in Denver, I rest my eyes on the kind of green that just doesn’t grow there, regardless of how much rain we get. Here is the emerald green of coastline marsh, a weighty green edged by black mud. This serrated shore abuts year-round water that goes on and on and on.

The next day, I’m at 30,000 feet looking down at a Great Lake, but which one? All I know is that it isn’t my great lake, not Michigan. The south shore of this other fresh-water ocean is almost touching farmland, near wide-open countryside. A little later, big water gleams below again, and I look for the Indiana Dunes lakeshore, bracketed by the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant and the vertical stacks of steel mills. This next great lake is also not my lake, not where my body learned to be a body in water, a body at rest. Just inside this other lake’s curved edges hangs a long border of brightness–not beach, not yet, but submerged sand waiting for small summer waves to lift it ashore.

If we do fly over the lake of my life, clouds block it from view. Finally, I see Colorado’s eastern plains. Vapor mountain-shapes on the horizon slowly give way to the line of jagged, white-tipped peaks telling me I am almost home.

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Memoir mental health

Dunedin Part 3

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The Light and The Dark

On the eightieth or ninetieth or hundredth day of my mother’s hospitalization, in the fall of 1980, I sit in the chancel of St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, wearing a youth choir robe. Palm trees sway outside the sanctuary windows. I feel like a soft-limbed robot, and whatever I sing with the other altos, I sing with fear in my throat. I don’t know the word “sepsis” or that my father and oldest sister in Washington have been told to prepare themselves for Mamma’s death. I do know about fear. I know about having been bad, and about wanting another chance to be good.

On that morning, as I try to pray, my thoughts are shards of porcelain, sharp behind my eyes. Then, all at once, a bright warm light comes into my mind and lifts me out of broken thoughts. The light surrounds me, telling me without words that I will be all right, that I don’t have to be afraid. Warmth moves from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. This lifting up and calming down happens in an instant.

It could be that this exact light extends from my mind and heart and body to the mind and heart and body of my mother. Maybe you believe in something like this light, or in coincidence, or in a traumatized girl having a delusion. At different times in my life, I consider all of these. What matters is this: on that Sunday morning, my mother wakes up asking for food, for someone to please wash her hair. Instead of dying that day, she begins her recovery. And as soon as she is strong enough, my father brings her home to us in Dunedin.

Maybe because she is so skinny and pale, her eye sockets huge, that my mother seems to glow with life, to look at Florida and each of us with wonder. A snapshot of her in a wicker chair on my Aunt Barbara’s porch shows her with bony arms akimbo and legs crossed under a draping skirt. Her face is turned sideways, her cheekbones shadowed.

As her step steadies and her eyes soften, the mechanical in me recedes. I settle into her presence and into her touch. She smooths the hair from my face when I worry at night. I feel her hand and I feel her warm arm like a shawl around my shoulders.

One night, in the moist air of early winter, my parents dress for a party, he in a white shirt and dinner jacket, she in a rayon dress and low-heeled sandals. As they get into the car, my father hands my mother a cocktail. She looks down into the plastic cup filled with vodka and 7up and raises it—unsmiling–to her lips.

Panic lifts me from wherever I am standing to a view of the drink from just outside and above the car. What must that moment have been for my mother?  I imagine her having held those months of sobriety like an anchor rope growing heavier every day, until she had no choice but to let it go. 

Once again, she sits alone in front of the television for hour after hour. And once again, I start sitting with her, determined to help. On random nights, she drink-talks to me about her father not letting her go to college, because education is wasted on girls. Her voice slurs telling me how terrible it is to depend on a man: Never be stuck like I am! And tears streak her mascara into half-circles under her eyes.

Trying to save her from the shadows becomes my own night-time compulsion. I listen to her, and I shush her. I help her to bed and pull a sheet up to her chin as she tells me how sweet I am, how much she loves me. Rescuing her is my penitent duty, a chance to make up for every cigarette I ever stole from her, every lie I ever told, and every time I hated her. Like the hangovers and blackouts she must have suffered, I feel the after-effects of self-martyrdom like a slow, blistering burn. I am exhausted and increasingly confused. How, when she gets up the next day, can she not thank me for taking care of her?  I redouble my efforts to help and be good, to distract myself from the accumulating darkness of my resentment.

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Memoir mental health

Dunedin, Part Two

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Must Remind Myself

Wild parakeets land between the heavy oval leaves of Nanny’s grapefruit tree, the tree whose strong branches hold late winter fruit full of bitter juice and sharp, white seeds. “Oh, the parakeets were pretty,” she tells me in her husky voice, “Florida is such a special place!” The flock of birds with gleaming green heads and pale under bellies, chattering away in pairs as they rested and preened, produced a combined mini-roar like nothing Nanny has heard before. I never see the parakeets, only feel the joy of their flight as she describes it to me.

The most alive place in Nanny’s house is her Florida room, with three walls of Jaoulosie windows in rectangular aluminum frames. Against the west-facing wall is a wooden table where Nanny sets down her orange juice, her pastry plate, or her cup of coffee, clearing space amid a shifting clutter of drawing pencils and paint tubes.  Alone, she often spends the day painting, delighting in the bright plumage of migrating cardinals or blue jays as she re-creates in oil and canvass a perfect Indiana Dunes sunset or a bouquet of pink carnations.

 A long, padded bench is heaped with pillows that I would curl around when I was four, when Mamma and I extended a winter visit that seemed to stretch forever into a long horizon of calm. Nanny’s house overflows with a gentle messiness. Each surface has a small stack of books, a “Cornerstone” magazine or “Reader’s Digest”. Her Bible sits on a table by her easy chair, across from the TV where she watches Jim Neighbors sing on the Laurence Welk show. She has an old-fashioned record player and opera albums.  To her, stereo speakers are a modern marvel.

Nanny is 85 and a widow ten years when my sister and I arrive at her house to start high school, in 1980. Twin beds in the guest room are covered in green polyester spreads. When we open the closet to hang up our ironed jeans, our shirts and church clothes, we are greeted by the smell of mothballs. Nanny’s kitchen is narrow and shadowed, its counters littered with rye breadcrumbs, the fridge stuffed with small plates of leftovers, with jars of rhubarb jelly and mold-frosted applesauce. There are none of my mother’s scrubbed surfaces, her bustling cleanliness, no windowsills filled with carefully tended cuttings. My sister and I bring our arguments, sometimes whispered, sometimes not. We slam doors without thinking, and we take long, hot showers that fill Nanny’s small bathroom with smoky steam on ninety-degree days.  We burst the seams of her small house with the expanding uncertainty of our lives.

In 1980 I am in Dunedin, but not happy, there but not there. Listening to Nanny’s story about the parakeets, yearn for her serene appreciation of Florida, and I want to believe in my own innocence again. The two or three weeks we expect to wait for our parents to come to Florida and move with us into our new house stretch to a month, to six weeks, to eight. We move over to Aunt Barbara’s house on San Mateo, where we use a different set of beds, push our clothes into another closet. The backyard here is overgrown with lush fronds tended by Uncle Jerry, whose feet are calloused from walking barefoot whenever possible. My uncle is working on a translation of poems from Spanish into English. His typewriter sits facing the screened in front porch and the small, rust colored car he calls the “Wankle,” where he leaves his car keys so he can always find them when he needs them.

Years later, I learn that our mother developed sepsis that fall, that our sister and father were told to prepare themselves for her death. At fourteen, I only know that our mother’s voice has become a faint whisper. For many days, she has not been able to talk on the phone with us at all. Day after day her strength recedes as a tide might that can never fill its former pools.

At Nanny’s house, at Aunt Barbara’s house, I keep a green notebook. I don’t write about my mother or the precariousness of our family. Summer entries are about kissing boys and smoking pot, about trying to not be mean to my nephews. The addresses of two friends from Junior High are scribbled in childish block letters, oozing with sincere plans to write, to stay in touch, to be a better person, at last. One September entry, I start to write “Aug,” but disappear it with three very hard, dark lines. Amid a jumble of fragments is this: “Everything will work out. Must remind myself.” My pen presses hard into the paper. I am trying to make the writing look good, look legible and even.

Then, crossed out in black ink, and later lined over in red, is the address where I could send letters to the hospital:  Mamma (temp) 201 23rd St., Wash DC 20027.

After that, I mostly write prayers, no dated entries for a long time.

Categories
Memoir

Dunedin, Part One

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San Jose Circle

Just south of Palm Harbor, on Alternate 19, a two-lane highway running along Florida’s central Gulf Coast, a sign features a cheerful Scotsman wearing a kilt and holding a bagpipe.  “Welcome to Dunedin: Delightfully Different,” it reads. As a small child, in the early 70’s, this town where my grandmother and great-aunts lived filled me with wonder. When I was fourteen—uprooted and deeply afraid—I arrived there with my older sister to start high school while my mother languished in a hospital up north. My sense of wonder had been displaced by the slow creep of understanding: I might never see her again.

The youngest in a combined family of seven, I was both spoiled and anxious. I could often forget the unpredictable violence that punctuated my early life.  In a world where children are at the mercy of their parents, and where mercy exists, Dunedin’s San Jose Circle– a traffic ring fringed with swaying palms and fuzzy-needled evergreens–became my compass.

On childhood visits to Dunedin, I rode in the way-back of a loaded station wagon as my father drove south from our home just outside Washington, DC, away from winter and to this small Florida town known for oranges and pelicans and old people. Daddy turned left from Alternate 19 onto a wide street paved with red brick. As car tires thrummed over the rough surface, our mother gazed out the window, then looked back at us and smiled. Spanish Moss dripped from the boughs of trees like living tinsel, and a warm breeze carried the scent of orange concentrate from a citrus grove and nearby processing plant.

Daddy navigated slowly around the arc of San Jose Circle. A solitary wooden bench faced west, where the afternoon sun angled over the water of St. Joseph Sound. East of the circle was an elementary school, and directly south, a small pond where raucous ducks clamored for pieces of stale bread. Daddy turned left, pointing us north, then parked in the driveway of my Nanny’s house. When she came out to greet us, she opened her arms wide, her face aglow. She smelled of fresh-baked bread she had waiting to slice for us.

After dinner, we would walk to the end of San Jose Street for sunset. Across St. Joseph’s sound, shadows lengthened the tips of mangroves edging Caladesi Island, the protective strip of land between Dunedin and the open Gulf. I waded in chill December shallows next to old wooden pilings and sank my toes in low-tide muck. When the salt breeze turned cold, I snuggled in between my parents and basked in the gentle raspiness of Nanny’s voice as she pointed out a pelican flying close to the water or marveled at the close of another beautiful day.

On sunny winter mornings, my great Aunt Ruth watched me place pennies on the railroad track behind her house on Douglas Avenue, just a block from Nanny. I’d wait with my hands pressed over my ears for the train to rumble past, feeling the ground shake under my feet. Sometimes a muscled arm waved from the conductor’s window, and a friendly smile shone out for this blonde little girl and the elderly woman standing with her. After the caboose went by, Aunt Ruth, lean and straight where Nanny was round and soft, helped me search for the flattened copper ovals I would later show my big sisters.

Aunt Ruth lived with her own big sister, Dora, called DoDo, an oddly childish nick name for someone who seemed to me old beyond time. On late morning visits, as we filled their small house, I sat on a wooden stool that exuded a faint and friendly scent of dust. I drank sweet, fresh orange juice that Aunt Ruth poured for me into a jam jar. After the grown-ups finished their coffee and talking, Aunt Dora would play a hymn on the slightly out of tune upright piano that she had only recently learned to play. She answered our applause with a girlish smile to each of us in turn.

Over the following decade, two of my father’s sisters also moved to Dunedin, adding points of contact to San Jose Circle. The winter I was fourteen, my father decided to sell our house in Washington and move our family south, too. My mother’s lover–her best friend, Michael—was dead. The basement bedroom he rented from our family sat empty and cold. Before my father typed his resignation letter at the kitchen table, he had seen my report cards riddled with failures; he had smelled the pot smoke lingering on my jacket when I came home from junior high school.  

When he took early retirement, Daddy could not foresee that my mother’s long-delayed ulcer operation would lead to infection after infection, to two additional surgeries. He would drive from his temporary job in Virginia to briefly visit my mother in the hospital, as all of us prayed for her unlikely recovery.

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humor mental health

Him, Me, Him, Me

Its 5:40, I can get coffee!

No, it’s 4:40, your phone is messed up. We have to go back to sleep. Let’s curl up. Ooof, if I’m on my left side, my knee hurts, if I’m on my right, my shoulder hurts and my vertigo turns on.

You are a wreck.

I am a wreck. I need to call Frank Azar. Remember? Been in a wreck? Call Frank Azar!

[snoring]

[aching]

5:40. Actual 5:40

I think I went back to sleep.

Yes, you did. I had an imaginary conversation in my head with a holocaust denier. That took a long time, so you definitely slept.

Coffee!

All night, the full moon poured itself in the windows. All night until the sun came up. My friend has told me it is an agitated full moon, with mars snuggled close. I say, not sleeping, if it weren’t so cold, I could sit outside and knit in the moonlight. I say, to me, standing by the propane stove at midnight, clouds scuttling north at high speed, covering the moon to reveal a pocket of dark sky dotted with stars: Dear God, how is so much beauty possible?

Did you see the moonset from our bedroom window?

No, I’m watching the sun come up.

Categories
Memoir

Knees

Florida circa 1982

1981. She walks on the grass next to the sidewalk, on her way home from high school. Every step is taken gingerly, a limp on both sides. Her hair is long and blond, her geometry book under one arm. The faint breeze brings cool salt from the Gulf of Mexico, only a mile west. She is fifteen and her knees hurt, again.

Her father is fifty-six. Less than a year earlier, he took early retirement from the weather bureau to move his wife and two youngest daughters to Florida. They are running low on money. His most recent job was as an insurance salesman, and he sold one policy. Today, he is on his way home from some errands—bank or library or liquor store. He’s in a blue short-sleeve shirt and polyester pants sandy at the cuff. His old station wagon moves slowly over a curb onto the doubled dirt tracks connecting one section of San Salvador Drive to another. This short cut ups the chances of surprising one of his girls with a ride home.

The baby of the family grins and gets in.

I saw you limping. What happened? 

Nothing happened, my knees just hurt, and the grass is softer.

Oh. He frowns down at the steering wheel, then turns right onto the short block that ends at their small house on Saint Anne Drive.

The girl has complained of her knees hurting for weeks. They both remember. They talk about it a bit more.

A week later, he drives her to the doctor. His wife isn’t well. For a few hours almost every day, the girl’s mother is both sober and strong. Almost every day, she drives to Publix and buys food that she can’t feel in her tiny, scarred stomach. She serves them dinner every night as she slowly learns to eat again, without ulcers, and without sensation. Nine months after her first stomach surgery that led to infections and two more surgeries, the bones of her arms appear less skeletal. When she smiles now, cheerful lines star out from her eyes above softening cheekbones.

The doctor’s office is close-by, but the girl takes the whole day off school. With a clear, kind voice, the doctor talks to them about patella’s, about misalignment and tracking. The girl lies down on the exam table as her father watches her learn to do a straight leg lift holding each kneecap still—centered and supported. At home, she does this exercise on the living room floor until it becomes easy. Her father reminds her if she forgets, and her knees gradually stop hurting.

2022. She stands looking out her cabin window toward where his ashes are buried between young aspen. She is fifty-six, retired. She has stopped counting how many years since her mother’s ashes were scattered in the Gulf. Her own belly is easily irritated by juicy apples, fragrant asparagus. A nutritionist—consulted in the third year of IBS–recommends gentle meals, carefully timed.

Her knees have hurt for weeks, and ibruprofen inflames the lining of her gut. Waiting and waiting to call the doctor, she complains as if she will never hear herself, as if this body does best unseen, unfelt.

Finally, a physical therapist hands her a green elastic band to pull above her kneecaps, to add resistance while she strengthens the muscles around her patella. The pain fades slowly, slowly. She sees her mother serving those meals and remembers her father’s delights that some problems can be so easily fixed.

Categories
Memoir Writing

Toad, or, Doesn’t a dream sometimes cross over into a prayer?

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Early fall midnight at ten thousand feet, and a lot is happening. The stars are out. Their glimmers make me sit up and put my glasses on, then stand and look into the night at the half-circle of changing aspen. An owl is also wide awake and who-who-who’ing. I’ve never seen this owl, but my mind’s eye tracks her season after season. I lie down again and listen hard. After all, it’s not as if I can really expect to really sleep, anyway.

A few who-who’s later, I drift off, then wake to a soft mammalian whistle. What animal is making this snurfling sound. Elk? An elusive bobcat? Ah, just the husband’s breath, sighing him in and out of a dream. My favorite animal, this man who, like me, will one day take a last breath, and maybe in this very cabin. A wakeful thought, that.

And a part-time job, this sleeping, and not sleeping.  

I move to the couch at 4 and stargaze, waking to the whoosh of moving water. I think, rain, rain, rain! and am dunked in gratitude. Alas, only the coffee maker gurgling, telling me it is 5:30, officially morning. I close my eyes again.

Then. Three women doing dishes in semi-darkness. I pick up a big ceramic bowl and see a hefty toad there—lumpy, wide-eyed, and miraculously ugly. I lift the bowl and walk to the door. I want to set him free, but his container is empty. I understand the toad will be back. All I need to do is keep his water fresh. Later, this writing dream has me christen a fresh black notebook Toad. My pen drops blue ink on page after page. I remember, and deeply, the stillness and clarity of the silent creature and the harmony of the night-time women. Doesn’t a dream sometimes cross over into a prayer?

A month later, flakes fall fast in the city, where I write under a down comforter, struggling to stay awake after a solid night’s sleep. This old house is full. I can almost hear my young people all breathing the hush of their own dreams. All the beautiful ins and outs, all of the dreaming that will go on after me.

City aspen staying bright after the snow.

Categories
Memoir Writing

Creative Nonfiction: Girl, Alone by Jenny-Lynn Ellis

My mind swirls at the distance I am covering.

Creative Nonfiction: Girl, Alone by Jenny-Lynn Ellis
Categories
Memoir mental health

Son, to Part Shade

Where bold sun once beat down on hard dirt and where fresh lavender stalks pushed purple blooms toward our bright star, here we planted a tree in honor of his birth. I kneel in its dappled shade, hands coated in black soil. The sheltering arms of his skyline honey locust touch our high roofline now. Its long, brown seed pods litter the ground every summer. In the dappled shade of its yellow leaves, I seek patches of sunlit ground for pollinator plants.

This flower bed is supported by a rough line of heavy mountain stones, white and gray-veined chunks with sharp, angled corners. From the crook of one stone’s elbow, I lift a small gray rock and rest it smooth and flat against the palm of my hand. Too small to hold back dirt, too warm and smooth to throw away.

How is any rock much different from the smaller specks that clump together to make dirt? How different from molecules of air, for that matter? We move through gas particles. We inhale and exhale every day.

I need this garden like air. Its beds surround the place where I planted my adulthood, where I pulled toddlers’ jackets tight against the wind. In this yard, we turned rocks upside down to see rollie-poly bugs, to marvel at worms and centipedes. We strolled the block to gather red maple and oak leaves, then we ironed them between sheets of wax paper. Day after bright, shining day.

My hands, so much like my mother’s now, have lifted and turned this soil for thirty-three years. These palms once cradled three infants in turn, held close the start of three lifetimes. One life nearly cut short by despair and a handful of pills.

Still breathing. Still breathing. Still here. Bee balm. Astagache. Butterfly bush. All compete with weed after weed after weed. I will work this flower bed, mixing compost into clay, planting everything bright thing I can. Until the snow flies, until bitter cold casts mist from my mouth, then, when spring lures colors from these tender plants, I will kneel down once more.

Back yard astagache bush, also known as hummingbird mint.
Categories
humor mental health

Crankxiety

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Dry means dry, I think to myself, as I watch a big metal cylinder flip my clothes around and around. I’m frowning, arms crossed, in a July-hot laundromat in Chesterton, Indiana. The husband thinks that dry means done, which means he takes clothes out of the dryer when he’s tired of waiting for them, even if the necks of my t-shirts and the toes of my socks are still damp. How wrong he is to not understand that dry means dry! How frustrating when he does things wrong! I watch myself agitate, feel my shoulders and jaw turn to gravel. At that moment, dear reader, the husband is six hundred miles away. His laundry misdemeanor occurred a week earlier.

Cranxiety: the crunchy combination of grumpiness and worry.

Everywhere I go, cranky mixes with anxious into a new kind of miserable. On a hushed mountain morning, the husband walks by as I write, on his way to the kitchen for a cup of tea. His footsteps and the kettle’s hissing jolt me into worry that I can’t write, not now, probably not ever again. Why can’t he just be in the other room until I’m done? And why must I be so ill-tempered?

Crankxiety is what happens in my head when the wifi goes out. Where does the wifi go when it goes out? When will it come back? I ruminate on how wrong I am wrong to focus on what is wrong. I am supposed to be sweet, happy, and productive. I am not supposed to flip out when the husband makes tea or the wifi goes for a walk.

Cranxiety is part of what led me to re-start therapy last spring. A few weeks in, I got into an argument with my therapist. Jenny-Lynn, he said to me, so kindly that you would have thought he was a nice person. Hot tears were streaming down my face. Damp tissues were wadded in my left hand. Jenny-Lynn, he said, it is all right to feel. My objection was immediate and visceral—opposition from my toe joints all the way to the hardest part of my skull. I only wanted know why I was crying so I could stop. But I didn’t know why, and I couldn’t stop, and for some reason, I hated that he told me it was okay.

For me, anxiety is a despairing and physical need for everything to be different, inside and outside myself. It is a belly churning worry over the past and the future, including how much worse the anxiety might get, and how much crankier it might make me.

A few days after my laundromat diatribe, I tell my doctor, Crankxiety is a new circle of hell. She nods sympathetically as she fills my first-ever prescription for an anti-depressant. I’m not depressed, I report, I am just miserably irritable. Eight weeks after starting a low dose anti-depressant, crankxiety still rears its ugly head, but its talons don’t grip my belly for hours or days at a time. I can shrug and go on with my next, more helpful thought. I don’t have to be different, and neither does anyone else. These days, I say to myself, Jenny-Lynn, it’s all right to feel sad. It’s all right to feel anxious. More than anything, I feel more like myself, complaining and sweet in turn, and just exactly good enough.