Port Key

House Key. With Bow.

Bows Make Everything Better.

The idea I had - take my grandparents letters and photos from November 14, 1944, through early January 1945 and write about them in real time seventy-five years after it all happened.  It still seems like a good idea.  I'm still trying to tell that story.  I have an outline.  But I have so much more.  Or maybe I have something else.

In my now house where I live with Joel and have raised my children to almost adulthood, I have many items of "then".  In my downstairs bathroom, for example, there is a shadowbox with a photo of my grandparents house and a key (the actual key, not a photograph of a key).  The key is to the original lock on the original front door of their house, circa late 1860s.  That once front door was always the back door to the house as I knew it, but this key began it's life as the front door key to a white story and a half clapboard house in Union County, Tennessee about 150 years ago.

And holding this key in my hand this morning - well, if love and longing could open doors and turn back time, I'd be there in less than a heartbeat.  It’s both melancholy and magical holding items that are part of something that once was and that still "is" in my memory.  Places I can close my eyes and see vividly.  And all of this hasn't always felt this close.  It's not always this available in my head and heart and memory - but it's all there now. Crowding the spaces in my head and jockeying for attention - jumping from one to another and I'm trying to see it all, feel it all, write it all. And the words. So many words.  I feel like they're trailing off behind me as I walk and leaving smudged inky fingerprints on everything I touch.  So many words that I've literally pulled myself over while walking to type them out in my phone. And all I want to do is write, but I need days of time and quiet and what I have is busy and noise and fragments of time where all I can do is text ideas to my future self from the track or the hallway at work or walking through downtown and hope they hold a place that I can dive back into. Because this feels fleeting.  Like if I don't do this, it's going to be lost. So Sunday morning are for writing now, I guess.

Shadow Box with Antique Mirror, Reflected

If not now, when?

Woodpile with Wheelbarrow

I spent time with my grandparents when I was little in the house where my Mother grew up. Lots of time.  Long endless unairconditioned summer days and cold dark winter evenings where rooms of the house were closed off by blankets and doors to keep the warmth from the stack heaters and wood burning stove concentrated in the kitchen and den. (Their wood burning stove was installed in the late 70s at the same time my dad had one put in our den.  It was something of a rural renaissance for my New York City born father who took to chopping wood and building fires like you wouldn’t believe, but it was also a chance to spend time with his father-in-law, who in his own understated quiet way poked fun at my dad and his woodsy ways but from a place of love and respect, I’m sure. Truly.)  

John and L.J.

September 1979

Anyway, the house where I spent so much time – it was hot.  And it was cold.  There were a lot of extremes from season to season is what I’m saying.  But in this house where I spent so much time, there were drawers and trunks and closets and chifforobes of photos and letters and books and yearbooks and paper dolls and record albums - memories of my Mother and my beautiful aunts and their growing up years.  And somewhere along the way, in those long summer afternoons and cold winter nights I began to think of all of those things as my own.  Only child of me?  Maybe.  But laying stomach-down on the landing at the top of the stairs listening to my Aunt Brenda’s Beatles album while looking through their high school yearbooks and photo albums and reading my mother’s diaries and learning the names of their friends  – their stories became my stories.  Coupled with all the conversations with my  grandmother about the way things used to be – all of it always felt so familiar to me.  My Grandmother’s words and the photos and being in the house where my Mother grew up – I just absorbed all of that into my bone marrow.

My Mother died June 21, 2016.  My grandparents were married on June 21^st.  My grandfather enlisted in the Army on June 21^st of 1944.  Maybe it's just happenstance that all those events coincided on the same date across seventy-six years, but I’m not a big believer in happenstance.  I do believe in signs, however.  I’m a big believer in signs.  A few weeks ago I drove Owen back to Knoxville after a weekend here at home, and instead of turning left onto Cumberland Avenue and heading toward I-40, I turned right and headed toward Broadway/Gay Street.  Then I turned left and drove out through Fountain City and Halls and then on out into the country.  I had not been to the cemetery where my Mother’s buried since the day we took her home.  But sitting in Owen’s car on that Sunday afternoon I experienced one of those band-aid life moments – it was time to go home. So I drove the however many miles it is from campus to Hickory Valley. I cried the whole way. 


When I pulled into the cemetery – a place so familiar to me from many afternoons spent there with my Grandmother that I can tell you who’s buried where and who’s related to who and how – it took many minutes of me talking to myself to get me out of the car.  Because as familiar as this cemetery is, it’s a completely different place with my Mother buried on top of the hill. 

I did get out of the car [eventually] and made my way up to the top of the hill and stood near my Mother and Grandparents. And it was hard. Those people, those three people buried side by side were the arc of so many of my childhood days.  Going to work with my Mother at the store*, waiting until my Mother said it was finally late enough that I could run through my favorite Little House on the Prairie field to my Grandparents house (it was after Donahue was over, by the way) where my Grandma would make eggs for me – sunny side up – and then after I had what was my second breakfast knowing it was time to wake my Grandfather up. And once he was ready to go, riding back to the store with him in his red GMC truck. That's a snippet of all the memories that absolutely flooded through me. All of those long ago days felt so close. And my thought then, again, was that I don’t want to lose them.

So,  there was that Sunday afternoon in the cemetery in the country, and Veteran’s Day looking at photos of my Dad and Grandfather, and my Dad’s  November14th birthday where the two of us sat and listened to a gentleman talk about his experience surviving the Holocaust, and then heading once again into these weeks that hold my Grandfather’s experience in World War II. The idea I’ve percolated for so long of trying to write down what I know has become so insistent that I had to get up and write this morning before I could do anything else.  If not now, when?  Now.  

 My Mom and Dad - November 1978

His 40th Birthday

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*My grandfather had a Texaco station and grocery/convenience store.  He and my mother worked together until he retired and closed the business when I was nine.  I have the keys to the store building in a box in my living room. 

Our Lady of Sorrows

We Weren't Done [June 21, 2016]

I wrote this in the days after my mother died in 2016 but never hit publish.  I'm hitting publish now, because I don't want to lose it.
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I sat down earlier today to write my mother's obituary and I couldn't do it.  I pulled up templates and googled "good obituaries" and found lots of suggestions, but no help.  I could list my mother's family, her place of birth, her death - but it was the life in between, what could I say?  Too much.  There is too much to say.  So I walked away from it and like I have done many times and for many things during this last week and asked for help - Joel wrote her obituary for the paper. He did a wonderful job. But it was mine to do. And I couldn't do it.

The thing about writing an obituary is that it's a place to list your earthly accomplishments, which in my mother's case was easy - first in her family to go to college, first in her family to get a Master's Degree, first to get a PhD.  She owned her own business.  She raised a daughter. She moved from Knoxville to Kentucky to pursue her dream of being a college professor.  She was loved everywhere she went.  And then.  And then. And then she was diagnosed with MS.  Twenty three years she lived with her MS.  And at the end of that time it could be easy to look at only what she lost - her career, her mobility, her memory, her beautiful handwriting.  But her life was full and I can say that she was content. She had my father, she had Joel and me, she had a small circle of friends and family who saw her on a regular basis here in Nashville. And she had Owen and Sarah.

And as I sit here I'm just floored at how life has turned out. How is it Joel and I have both lost our mothers and that Owen and Sarah have lost their grandmothers.  A life with no Grandmother in it. The grief tonight is physically unbearable.

I'm trying ro find that grace and peace I felt in the hospital, but now that I'm home and just realizing all the life altering decisions that have been made in the last two days, it's hard. There's no grace or peace on this side of her death.  There's just empty. And pain.

She was only 74.  I say "only" because she comes from a gene pool where the women have long lives.  Her mother, my grandmother was 88 when she passed away. I've heard several times already that is was her time.  She was tired. That she's better off because her struggle is over.  The thing about that is - all those helpful comments make me angry.  Furious. Raged.  People commenting on her struggle who didn't see her contentment. And yes, her life may have looked smaller, more narrow from someone who didn't interact with her on a regular basis, but her life was full. She reveled in her grandchildren,  She may not have known the day of the week or who the President is, but she knew her grandchildren and lit up when she was with them. 

I sat with her by myself for quite a while after she died. I sent everyone home and it was just the two of us.  I wanted to memorize everything about her that I could. Her beautiful hands most of all.  I didn't want to leave her.  I wasn't ready for her to go.  I needed more years of Sunday lunches.  I needed to see Owen take her for a drive in the car.  Watch her watch Sarah graduate from Saint Bernard.  We all needed more hugs, more love, and more time. She was only 74.  We weren't done.