A Roll In The Hay

Two days ago Johanna read aloud:

The barn creaks.

Swallows nest in the rafters

and fly overhead.

Fat hens cackle over newly

laid eggs.

Red and black pigs 

squeal and fight.

And I take the hay

  from my hair--

That you put there.

The poem was written by my Mother.  It is sweetly sexual and my four year old daughter reads it clearly and seriously.  I sit next to the love of my life who gives my hand a quick squeeze.  He needs to tell me that the poem is very good.  I know that it is.  He knows more than that though.  For in these eight year he has journeyed with me he has relentlessly sought to discover the Mother who gave me dear memories of deep snowed winter walks, of picnics in all seasons, of waking in wonder in the morning to greet small chicks and budding Trilliums.  That he was always able to see the Mother that I loved--despite her very serious illness-- was his victory, my victory, love's victory, and ultimately my Mom's victory.    

Occasionally Fresh Eggs (Part 4)

My mother wrote a great deal.  Eventually, I would like to share some of what she wrote.  Indeed it occurred to me today that eventually writing about my Mom might flow naturally from commentary on her poems and short stories.  Johanna has taken to reading Grandma Mary's poems recently.  I am undone by them.  In essence I am not sure how things so utterly beautiful can be described with no flourish.  When I am "on,"  I am almost metaphysical in style and my Mom is working through the simplicity of the haiku.  I wish that I could have known her sooner before mental illness robbed her of so much.  But, the poems. These poems are worth sharing.  I will bring some here.

lisping and all

"Redeeming love has been my theme and will be 'til I die..."

The line is found in a hymn--There is a Fountain Filled with Blood.  I have every theological reason to hate the hymn. Yet, I was listening to a wonderful arrangement of the song by the husband and wife duo Welcome Wagon.  The line, familiar once, blew through me like an updraft in a hollow barn.  So that's it!  There it is stated simply enough.  It captures that Les Miserable moment; the one where the priest forgive Valjean setting his redemption in motion and the redemption of a myriad of others.   

If I haven't been in a depression since my Mom died, I have certainly been in a recession.  I have stood on Dover Beach.  Writing a Palm Sunday sermon was a struggle.   Proclamation was a struggle.  It is not that I have stopped believing.  Those closest to me know that I still believe it all.  It is just that uncertainly sucks the life out of me.  This line reminded that the centre does really hold.  I believe that people can change.  That I can change.  That love can change impossible situations.  God is redeeming love and I can, by God's grace, be transformed into it.  

This I believe today and I will believe tomorrow and I will believe it until this poor, lisping, stammering tongue lies silent in grave.

Occasionally Fresh Eggs (Part 3)

My parents moved to the farm a month after I was born.  Along with the 100 Roosters, they came with two white cats--Fats and Skinny, and another resident of the Whiting Hotel named Eddie.  Eddie was very clear that he was a hobo and not a bum.  Hobos would work, he claimed.  He worked.  That year the promise of Spring was portentous.  They put in a massive garden.  Planting every seed sold in the feed store.  My first memory (which must have been the following summer) is of being in a little pen watching them work in the garden.  My Dad made a little enclosure for me as they were afraid I would wander into the road.  Afraid: always afraid.  It was in part fear that led us to this particular Farm.  There first choice had a brook running along the outskirts of the property.  They decided against that place.  They were always afraid I would drown.  Images of that property were always the other modality, the other possibility, when I was a child.  In that alternative world-- my Mom's other children Marty and Jessica lived with us.   We would play together in the brook.  That Marty and Jessica didn't live with us was the great felt tragedy of my early life.  Yet, I was not a particularly lonely child.  The neighbors had three boys.  When I was small the two older boys would take turns coming over to our house to play.  

Later, I hope to be able to insert here my Mom's description of that first summer on the farm.  But, for now I will just point to the existence of these writings.  My Mom wrote several scores of notebooks filled with poems and short stories.   She used to wake up a three in the morning.  She would drink coffee, smoke, cough, and type.  When I was seven she published a book of poems called Pale Ponies.  I, of course, was sure that she would soon be famous.  I gave those books to everyone!  

Those books and poems always included that small farm as a main character.  The farm was ten acres.  However, the barn was a glorious old barn--it had a barn swing, a loft where truly free range hens would hide their eggs, and a pig pen.  The garden was nearly two acres that first summer.  

 

Occasionally Fresh Eggs (Part 2)

My parents met at the Whiting Hotel.  The year was 1975 and my Mom was released from the Traverse City State Hospital during one of the swells of deinstitutionalization. My Dad was struggling with alcohol, recently divorced, and recently bankrupt.  The Whiting rented rooms by the week or month.  It was the closest thing that Traverse City had to a big city rooming house.  When I was about 10 my Mom packed us up and took us away from the farm announcing that we were leaving Dad.  We first drove into town and went to the Holiday Inn.  I was excited that there was a pool and I was just getting into my swimsuit when my Mom decided that we couldn't stay there.  She tried to get her money back unsuccessfully and we went to the Whiting.  My Mom was always making decisions like that.  Inexplicable to me.  It was almost like she feared that too much middle class normalcy would push her over the edge.  Or, perhaps, she knew that Dad would be able to find us at the Whiting.  He did.  Indeed we weren't there very long when he came and took us back home.  

Occasionally Fresh Eggs

My parents kept the "For Sale" sign for the farm my entire life.  It was often painted over.  Mostly for enterprises: "Cukes For Sale,"  sometimes after a terrible fight it would read: "House: For Sale by Owner!"  Usually it said "Farm Fresh Eggs For Sale."   We had a healthy supply of hens on the farm.  This was despite the fact that when my parents moved to their 10 acre farm they came with a box filled with 100 chicks--all roosters.   Rooster who spent the next several years in pageantry in our backyard until one- by- one they were shuffled off this mortal coil via a stewing pot.  Later my parents got hens-Rhode Island Reds--who laid brown eggs that my Mom would sell the neighbors.  One day after being unsettled by over healthy business, and wanting to let people know that eggs were not always for the having, my Mom painted over the sign so that it read "Ocassionally Fresh Eggs."  The following day the announcer at the country music station mentioned the sign in his morning routine.  My Mom enjoyed the joke and left the sign up.

 My Mother died three weeks ago.  In her dying, as in her life-- love, mental illness, fear, and  tenacity were mixed.  I never expected to outlive my Mom.  And that I saw, indeed, that I felt that last vaporous breath, has done little to concretize the loss.  

I have long said that I would write a book about my life with Mom entitled "Occasionally Fresh Eggs"  and I thought that this is as good of place as any to begin. 

  

It looks good on paper

The other day I was justifying, making excuses, acting out the part of a person who can't be made accountable for their own life.  I was talking about Steve--my friend, the 66 year old formerly homeless person who lived with us for three years, who just moved out to do a job that he sees as his calling in life, who calls us his family.  I was talking about Steve to someone and I said:  "I guess it sounds impressive to say that we lived with a man who was homeless. But, in reality it only looks good on paper."  What I meant was true enough--after some initial hiccups I found living with Steve to be a real joy.  I like his stodgy, ornery way of being in the world. We clicked. In the last three years Steve spent a fair amount of time helping us--supporting my dream of a street newspaper, walking our dog, reading to our kids, taking out the garbage, making Wednesday night Spaghetti.  I said "it only looks good on paper," in part, because I wanted to say that it is not hard to live with Steve... I love Steve.  But, there was another more insidious side to the matter. There is my deep seeded sense that I  am a fraud.  Who thinks if I squeak by at all  in life it will be because the externalities--the paperwork--checks out right.  I admit right now that I can be a bit of a liar in all my self-abnegations, and I might just not know all they ways in which this lying hurts folks.  I hated the main character in "A Catcher in the Rye" who calls everyone "fake"--maybe I have become that person and my treatment of myself is an evocative example of this attitude.