Farmington, CT, settled 1640 by whites. Before that by the Tunxis Indians. Good farming country at first, later in my time a colonial bedroom for Hartford’s insurance executives. So many handsome white clapboard houses with black shutters. Affluence, when I didn’t know what affluence was. A twisted culture of peculiar satiety, a digression in progress, eh? A classmate grows up to shoot a cop. A boy robs his neighbors’ jewels, then a package store. Gets shot in the ass on his way out the door. A suicide in a bathtub; gunshot to the head; another gunshot to the head; and one, two three men fly their planes into foggy mountains. No matter, everyone dies, and they’re all dead now. Or moved away, like me. One or two remain, which is curious to me. Why would they do that? When Clare, the youngest and sole survivor of my parent’s generation turned 90 I sort of fell in love with her. Smartest woman I ever knew, who married the widower of the bathtub suicide fifty years before. Something of a scandal. Still a knockout, too, if you can believe it. I went home when my mother died and after she was removed from the house Clare asked me over and we drank wine on her deck overlooking the Farmington Valley. Once, twice. Several times, while the maple leaves changed. Do you think you’ll come back here after this, she asked. If I did it would be to see you, I said. We wrote, but gradually she lost the ability to use a keyboard and our communications stopped. I wanted to go see her but didn’t. She turned 95, 96. Still I didn’t go. Then one day last year someone sent me her obituary, and there was no reason to go home any more.
I love the way you capture the boiling down of a life into the suicide, the cop-shooter, the thief, and the rest of the cast. 40 years seems to be the window of memory then it's just the uncle that fought in the war, the spinster aunt who was mummified before anyone found her, the cousin who made it to Broadway. Curious.
Tod, the regret drips from the words. The details: she's a knockout, drinking wine on her deck, and that line "I wanted to go see her but I didn't." And then the last line. Good stuff.
Well, I believe that many people had a “lovely” home. One filled with joy, support and emotional stability. To the contrary I have a “place” that I am from; a “place” that I ran from when I was old enough to do so and I’ve been running ever since. Now I will read the words others write of homes. Stories with humorous anecdotes– a first spotted puppy, cats that ruled the barn, apple trees that always bore and the pink peonies that bloomed for Decoration Day. Please write that tone of ink and I will pretend it is my home too. Thank you.
“Hi, nice to meet you. I wonder, do you have a minute?
“My mother grew up in this house, then moved away when she and my father married. I don’t know what kind of life she had here, because she died when I was little. Even though we had moved back here before she died, I never got to ask her if she hid things in the little compartment in my bedroom closet like I did. She probably had the other, bigger bedroom, so maybe she never even went into the little one.
“She moved back to this house with my father and older brother when their landlady offered to buy him, my brother. That’s the family lore, anyway. He was an extremely good-looking little boy, from the pictures I’ve seen. He grew up to be an extremely handsome man. Until he smoked and drank too much and his face bloated and his teeth fell out. I’m glad my mother never saw that happen, although, I’ve always wondered, if she hadn’t died when he was 10 maybe he wouldn’t have started drinking when he was 11.
“My grandmother — my mother’s mother — came here for holidays even after my mother died. Her own former house. Think about that for a minute, and you’ll understand why my stepmother — 10 months after my mother died, my father married my godmother (if you're wondering about that, I wonder too, from time to time.) — my stepmother was always anxious. She was a meticulous housekeeper (gave up a good government job to marry my father and was very organized), but she still worried. Grandma’s white glove always found the one spec of dust that fell after Pledge had wiped every surface clean.
“We had everything boys could want, I guess. Bikes and telescopes and walkie-talkies and grandmas over for holidays. For a while, we had 3 grandmas over for holidays. All their birthdays were within a couple of weeks in May. So my stepmother made 3 birthday cakes, served on Mother’s Day. It must have been strange for her, my stepmother, doing that. I’ve wondered. She made a birthday cake for our mother’s mother, and one for her own mother, who she didn’t like at all, and one for my father’s mother, who was heard saying at the wedding that brought my stepmother into the family, this won’t last.
“Well, it did. Eventually we had to leave this house after my father’s heart attack. Too many stairs, they said.
“I wonder, too much info, I know, but, I wonder, if, see, I forgot to take the things I had hidden in the compartment in the closet when we moved. Yes, it was fifty years ago. Do you mind if I go look?”
The profusion of grandmothers! And the cliffhanger of the compartment. That it even had one in the closet renders the house a keeper in my book. Whenever we moved, the first thing I would do in a new house was look for secret panels. I was so disappointed to never find one.
The use of the story within the story is very effective and original.
Love the ending especially--that you do not tell us what was in the compartment, how the reason for the MC's visit to the house are the people and things that are gone. The what it's about are the ghosts.
Actually, I went past the house once and the man living there at the time came out and offered a walkthrough, but I didn't take him up on it. I don't know how he would have felt about me opening a closet and looking for the secret compartment. A little more than he bargained for!
What happens to a body when it doesn't have a hometown? Hurtling itself from place to place. Restless for a sense of place. But any place never feels like home. So it must move again. Maybe transience is a product of alienation from its "hometown"? Parents hippy "Come From Aways" despised by the conservative German settlers for their shack at the cleft of the valley of alders filled with their overproduction of grubby children. Classmates stolid fisherman's sons who never had a chance to crack a book before they proudly dropped out of elementary school to slaughter fish on the ever-swaying decks of their fathers' brightly colored Cape Islanders. Teachers always trying to bound the body in petty judgments and fearful stories of the world beyond the single Main Street of donair shops, tattoo parlors, check-cashing nooks, and the only still-proud Royal Bank of Canada. Of course the body thought only of escape. But after so many years of seeking place, the body accepts that its fundamental nature is nomadic. A pilgrim body whose hometown is disembodied. Airport hallways in strange cities where the other bodies speaking foreign languages pass it by without a look. Sailboats that must keep cutting through the grey waves offshore with no option to anchor in the deepest caverns of the North Atlantic. The slippery zoom connection to other bodies, faces freezing and shifting in the projection from the place where they have settled, comfortable and safe in their hometowns. I love you, the body says, but I must keep moving.
PS this is Julie. Haven't been here in a while and I changed my substack profile to my mothers maiden name cause my first poem will be published in a few weeks and it is a doozy! Miss you and love Mary G's little community.
Thanks Ruth! I started a manuscript last fall that grew out of my Story Club, Mary G's influence, and then Maya Popa's CWC. Who knew that the internet, on which I had lurked disdainfully for most of my life, would be a source of such generative community? One of those poems has been accepted at OnlyPoems. I'll try to link it here when it comes out.
Know just what you mean. Moved to the rural Maine coast in 1976, and island in a sense of ingrown white natives, and was forever "from away," or a "straphanger," though it got less intense after 40 years !
It was about time the elephant in the room was addressed. I could no longer ignore it. Or the others. One person’s elephant is another’s ex-lover.
Together since childhood in the only school in town, we had been close, from childhood to adulthood.
By first grade, we all knew each other. By third, we knew each other’s mothers. By fifth, we knew who were abused.
Puberty brought preferences for others, resulting in broken hearts. As sophomores we knew the popular kids from the losers. By junior year, the jocks separated from those accused of being gay.
A body count began.
Adulthood skewed ambitions, some falling behind, others lurching ahead. The Gaussian outliers of the bell curve changed places: the body count accrued.
After graduation, the job market was limited. Some would luck out; others would be scooped up; some would miss out. Some strategized, fixing the outcomes. Grownup outcomes. Some navigated them with grade school sensibilities, only to be eaten by those who discarded the naïveté of conscience. Like babies’ bodies, the conscience begins dying at birth.
Those wronging others forget whom they wronged, while the wronged remember who had wronged them—an elephantine truism as relevant later as it was on the playground.
On this Alumni Day, we sat together once again. The ones who traveled and assembled here represented a microcosm of the whole who had graduated together. Grown up together.
Grown apart, together.
My own elephant-in-the-room sat firing eye-darts at me. In front of her sat the alumna who had broken my heart. The energy along this circuit sublimated exponentially. A bitter frenzy of emotion charged invisible wiring connecting us. Grievances and unrealized revenge powered the circuit.
Behind the ex-lover who had broken my heart, in front of my ex-lover whose heart I had broken, crossed several arcs of energy. Volatile, all it’d take was a short. Who’d short out first and spark this powder keg?
The tangled web of jilts, petty score-keeping, social and financial resentment, and the energy nodes of varied heads in this room straddled a kindling temperature verging on immolation.
And then it happened.
It was a blood bath! Who could’ve known how people’d behave, suddenly on impulse, when forced together in such hostility?
Yet, this story has a happy ending. The body count and carnage happened quickly, but in only their minds.
Hey Lawrenceville, I know you have long and venerable history, being born in 1816 and all, but I’ve got a few things to say about before you were born that may knock your socks off.
For example, before you were born, you were named Maidenhead, after a town in England, but that name stuck in the craw of its citizens, who could barely choke out the name without thinking of lust or sin or women’s ankles. So the Reverend Isaac Brown petitioned the legislature to change your name to Lawrenceville stating that “ it must be the wish of every good citizen to be relieved of the necessity of using a term which may offend the delicacy of modesty or disturb the feelings of seriousness or excite the sneers of the willing.”
Now you know where that simmering excitement in your town comes from. It’s history! Also, before you were born —get this—George Washington’s troops marched through Maidenhead chasing the British.
My earliest memory of you was the Presbyterian Church, a large white steepled affair with deep red velvet pews, and fire and brimstone sermons. As a kid, I entertained myself in church counting the lightbulbs in the chandelier or squinting up my eyes to make my black patent shoes disappear in the back of the pews so that my white socks appeared to hover disembodied like tiny ghosts.
We were among your 6,000 inhabitants, but on the periphery, living in a small rented cottage after my mother left my father on our defunct dairy farm outside town, which is now a historic museum called the Brearley House. You can see my old bedroom if you want. We lived an in-between life, not real farmers and not townsfolk either. Like you – a pokey little town in between Trenton and Princeton known mostly for a prep school with its stone wall separating them and us. Them being the sons of wealthy outsiders preparing to take their place somewhere other than Lawrenceville. Us being, well, us.
In retrospect, I was far better off being bored in the Presbyterian Church then when we converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses when I was 10. The days of patent leather shoes were over!
George Washington got around. He camped in Farmington with troops on his way to some battle. We also had diary farms, right in town, and a prep school for girls, Miss Porter's. Jacqueline Kennedy went there. One redeeming fact about Farmington is it was a major waypoint in the Underground Railroad, but a couple generations later lapsed into an enclave of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and the rest.
She wondered if she could find a way back. Home? Well, there wasn't really a place she'd call home, or that had been home, that she'd ever called home. They'd never stayed long in any one place when she'd been a girl. Could she even remember the addresses? But, if she could, wouldn't it give her a kind of chain to hold on to, to work her way... back? To the first place they'd lived? That was easy, it was on her birth certificate. 19, Southland Street.
She took pencil and paper and jotted it down. Next? Oh yes, the first address she'd had to learn by heart in case she'd got lost and had to tell a policeman. 23 Woodbury Road. Then 70 Brinsley Road. And so on. A list of ten addresses. So? A map?
Google Maps. Feed in the address and the town (not always the same).
My God these houses had changed. Unrecognizable. Every house but one or two had undergone an extension. Use the street view. Build-ons at the sides. Gardens concreted to make parking space. A weird, unfinished, unequal look. One in particular, that had lost the balance of the look she remembered. The front porch had gone and the extension went all the way to the neighbours' place. It looked ugly, a mess.
What had been done to this house annoyed her. She felt betrayed.
But what was that on the front wall, above the bow window? She zoomed in on the street view. And felt a sudden shock of recognition.
Ivydene 1905, said the plaque built into the brickwork above the bow window. She'd completely, totally forgotten it, but there was nothing more familiar now, nothing that said louder that this had been her home.
Oh, i love that one detail bringing it all back to her. Sometimes, that's all it takes. I'd forgotten until this moment the historic plaque on the house I left behind 16 years ago. But there it is now, in my mind's eye. I can almost read it, but not quite.
Oh, I just did at your prompting and got a lovely view of my former home--i can see the plaque but when I pull in closer, I still can't read it. Oh, well. Some things are better left behind.
I think there might even be a way to go back in time on Google Maps / Street View. At least that’s what I think I remember from the pandemic when I was looking at all the addresses of the places I lived.
It’s almost time for them to leave. Sara and Annie are moving to Illinois, Alex is moving to Washington, and Mike and Felicity will be moving too. They are about to be married. Mixed emotions abound. The whole family is breaking up. Sara and Mike are no longer. No longer husband and wife. No longer fighting over all the little things, like shower installations, and the big things, like whether Alex should repeat kindergarten. Yes, Sara said, “Alex is young for his class.” "No," Mike said. "He will be labeled." Mike won. Sara knew he was thinking of his own experience as his mother’s child, so she let it go.
It’s been eight years since the divorce. They are no longer hosting the family’s Christmas Eve party in their Classic 1924 house near Boise State University. The kids are fine. The parents are okay. Change is in the air. Sara has been offered a promotion in the Midwest, Alex has been accepted at Washington State, and Annie is about to start high school in Oak Brook. Mike is about to move in with Felicity.
It’s a leaf-flowing, autumn day. The leaves on the Aspen trees look like bright yellow tears flying around the back yard, sending a sad farewell to the occupants. Sara and Mike’s friend, Eric, had brought the two saplings back from his mountain property—a gift for his friends. They had planted them carefully, so the baby trees would grow up with their two children, Alexander and Anastasia. The two Aspens had both become tall and stately. The children are growing tall, too.
Sara, Alex, and Annie are waiting for a taxi to the airport. The family trip is part of the relocation package. They will spend a week at the Embassy Suites together. A gentle transition to a new life. Sara’s decision to make this move began with a hunch and resulted in an unexamined reality. Someday, she will realize that all of her big decisions start that way—with a hunch. Some of them work out. Others become learning opportunities.
When Sara applied for the promotion, she hadn’t considered all the consequences. She knew it meant moving away from her family in Boise, her Italian roots. “But, I’ll be traveling there for work…” Up until the moment she applied for the position, Sara had never imagined moving away.
"Up until the moment she applied for the position, Sara had never imagined moving away." Funny how life goes, how we make decisions and then live with them.
I don’t know what to think about this word “home” anymore. I volunteer at a day shelter for homeless men a few days a week. Sometimes when I sort the mail there I come across fliers for furniture or home improvement stores addressed to men who come to the shelter or “current home enthusiast.” I don’t even know where to start with the irony of that. Or that of the last name of a man who comes in now and then to check his mail. House, he says. At the front desk when I sign a man in I find his name in the online roster and select the box beside it. Then I ask him where he spent the night and select one of the options – Jail, Street, Other Shelter – from a dropdown list on the other side of his name. When a man comes in wearing blue scrubs and a plastic wrist band printed with his name I think that Hospital should also be among the options, and that Bus should be one when a man comes in asking to buy a 30-day bus pass. All of these places are places to stay. Are any of them home? And what about when I answer the phone and it’s a woman calling who’s being evicted with her three children. Do you have any tents? she asks. We don’t. Or the man who came in after he got kicked out of his storage unit for sleeping in it. At my favorite Dairy Queen a woman named Mo lost everything a year ago in a fire. Two days before Thanksgiving last week the hotel room where she had been staying flooded. Ruined everything, she said. I’m starting over, again, she said. A homeless camp between my favorite Dairy Queen and the pawn shop next door included four shopping carts and two green tarps. One day it moved 20 yards over to some small trees and shrubs by the car wash and shrank to two carts and one tarp with a baby stroller outpost by the nearby bus stop but now it’s all gone. The cashier Michelle at my grocery keeps her sleeping bag in a clear plastic bag behind the front counter. It’s a dingy blue plaid lined with navy flannel inside. Last night at the grocery a man rummaged in the dumpster just beyond the spread of the parking lot lights. A woman in baggy sweatpants and a saggy leopard print coat and cream-colored fleece slippers pushed a cart toward the alley. I could go on, with this word home, but I just don’t know, any more, where it goes.
The details, the descriptions, the stories. This is so well written and so heart wrenching. I feel like printing it out and reading it at the next city council meetings in the three incorporated towns near me.
In 1974, my father intentionally got “lost” in the Berkshires. He was looking for a small second home in the country for us, and felt that if it was meant to be, the home would find him. Sure enough, he fell on a modest cottage set back 200 yards or so from a small lake, in a community with the name of Richmond Shores. At $14,500, it was pretty much a steal.
In that first summer, my father set about to build a gazebo on the lawn, a wooden structure enclosed in mesh, somewhere we could eat all of our meals, as there wasn't space inside the house. My quirky Dad decided to make it seven sides. “Why seven?” I asked him. “Because there are no seven-sided buildings anywhere I know of. It’s a challenge.” He told me this as he grappled with the impossibility of dividing a heptagon into equal segments mathematically. At 15, I couldn’t appreciate how cool it was that he had intentionally waded into this architectural uniqueness, just so we would have the one such building in the state, probably the country, maybe even the world.
He did a lot of work on that cottage. Transformed the second floor to sleep five, put in bay windows, a new bathroom, dug a deeper well. “Richmond” was a refuge for 30 years for my parents, their increasingly far-flung children and their children, and for my French aunt to bring one of her grandchildren every other year. We all loved that gazebo--especially in a thunderstorm.
My father died in 1996, but we didn’t sell it until a decade later, when my mother could no longer safely drive up and back, and we decided to move her to my sister’s in California. A “lovely gay couple” bought the house and promised to treasure it and only improve it.
Ten years later, I had occasion to be in Western Massachusetts for a conference, and drove out to the house, somehow excited and nervous at the same time.
The gazebo was gone.
The “lovely gay couple” had built a impressive porch, and perhaps had taken down my father’s gazebo, or had sold it and the new owners had.
I have to believe that someone somehow had never explained what made it so special, for how could they possibly tear it down if they knew?
I once bought a house from a woman who begged me to keep the chandelier in the dining room. I said, of course I will! The moment the papers were signed, you know what happened. Did I feel bad about it? Maybe a tiny bit. But really, that chandelier looked ridiculous in my house. Sorry your dad's seven-sided creation is lost forever. I've a feeling it was that lovely gay's couple chandelier. Hope you took many photos!
When we bought this house from "a little old lady" who refused to leave after we signed all the papers (another story for another time), she returned 3 weeks later and demanded: the stick to lock the sliding door and the thermometer that hung outside.
I both look forward to and dread going to the house I grew up in (where my father still lives) - the emotions exist side by side. Going home means my past comes flying at me with an insistent voice that intones, “you must make sense of your life.” When I go home, a few vague memories stick out, but mostly it’s a feeling tone that prevails. The feeling is one of stillness and loneliness. It’s a bittersweet experience and I’m a sucker for bittersweet - I treasure that feeling. I recall someone once writing of Samuel Beckett that he had two loving parents and was brought up in upper middle class comfort, so why is his work infused with such unrelenting gloom? The implication being that it was an act, an attempt by Beckett to co-opt a pessimism he didn’t have a right to. But I understand Beckett’s gloom, even though mine is not nearly as intense or all-encompassing. When I walk into my old bedroom, I think of the kid I was, who managed to be lonely even amidst the love of two kind, attentive parents and material comfort. Where does that disposition come from - what is the origin story? I have no idea. I love Isaac Babel’s line describing a Jew as someone with “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” I started wearing spectacles when I was 13 and I became a Jew when I was in my early 40s, but I have always had autumn in my heart. And home is where I feel that autumn most deeply.
I'm reading Patti Smith's new book, Bread of Angels. Trying to get a handle on her punk-ness, and her attraction to the outlaw and outcast. I realized that her family life, her parents and siblings, was solid. Poor, very poor, but open and loving. Somehow she had to rebel against that, or get outside of it, but with the knowledge that that foundation was there.
Home feels a certain way. A person can be housed and not homed. Likewise homed but not housed. The ideal, of course, is to be housed and homed at the same time. Chris considers herself quite fortunate. She was housed and homed for most of her childhood and youth. There were two years during high school when she was housed, but neither she nor her family felt that she was still homed. After that, she moved a lot. Different places. Sometimes with friends, sometimes with strangers, sometimes alone, sometimes with lovers who may or may not have been her friends. Remembering those years, she counts ten dwellings, four of which were homes. Ten homes would have been nice, but she survived. Eventually, she settled. Or maybe the better word is that she “centered.” She centered such that she was always home. Sometimes she wonders if this centering is permanent. The more time that goes by, the more permanent it feels. But, even if it isn’t, Chris takes comfort in her historical capacity to handle homelessness.
I have a great Black Olives story for you. In 2011 my poetry group held a celebration in Hamden, CT for the poet Donald Hall and presented a chapbook of poems where we responded to his poem Olives. (see below) My poem, which appears in my book Given Time: a mother-daughter cancer memoir, acknowledes that what we call "ripe olives," are actually picked green and dumped in lye to turn them black. Appetizing?
Oooh. "Lascivious, doddering poet...cavorts with their daughters." I'm concerned about the black olives I've indulged in, now, at every family feast--but ooooooh, this poet!
City Limits. First speed limit sign: 25. She edged her car up the small rise. On her right, older homes, bright paint, clean windows, verdant lawns, and beds of dahlias, roses, snapdragons. To the left, the shell of an old motel. Just beyond it, the house described in the listing. But she barely listened to what the agent had to say. Whimsy. Magic. The air tingled with it. The house was set into the hillside. A nudge from behind her navel to climb that willow tree. Or that one…or…But a grotto! So many stories in the moss as it stretched up the rock wall between the house and the hillside. Overhead: a bridge from the second story to the hill. Security hazard in the city; a passageway to imagination for a child in this small town. She closed her eyes and touched the fragments of so many make believe moments brushing her skin. And then she saw her: the artist, the muse of imagination. A child galloped past, pushing through the grotto and shimmying up one of the willows to sit, legs dangling from a branch. Then the dismount. The manuever the woman had done so many times herself. “Skinning the cat.” The child dropped to the ground and climbed the tree to start over.
“I’ll take it.” The woman told the agent.
“But you haven’t been inside yet.” His eyebrows raised.
The scent reached me first, vanilla-like. It led me to the stall in the corner of Old Toll Square. There I heard her voice again, 'Gorse–the yellowest of flowers.' The words came in all the lilting richness that had roused a life-long interest and, later, persuaded me to sleep. And with the words came the expression that spoke of care: nose, mouth, chin–soft; eyes–easy as caramel, rich as chocolate.
I hadn't been home for a decade, no point when she wasn't there. But now pictures flowed in 4K resolution and surround sound, and she was with me again.
I thought on the gorse, the humble little petals. She saw the beauty of them, a beauty that was projected as much as it was inherent. She'd tried to explain that vision to a son who wanted big things–big places, big people, big bold flowers. She couldn't then but she did now. The dormant message was awakened. And delivered.
The stall-holder was delighted when I took his whole stock. My sweetheart looked quizzically.
I remembered other of my mother's words, 'When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out of fashion.'
We planted a corner of our Mediterranean garden. Now we spend our time in year round embrace.
1314 N. Lexington is where I loved when I started elementary school after we left the yellow stucco farmhouse near the small town of Bois d' Arc where Osage orange trees grew in the fencerows and all the old folks were buried at Pleasant Hill. Maybe that yellow house burned down or a tornado tore it to pieces. It's gone, my first home is gone.
Farmington, CT, settled 1640 by whites. Before that by the Tunxis Indians. Good farming country at first, later in my time a colonial bedroom for Hartford’s insurance executives. So many handsome white clapboard houses with black shutters. Affluence, when I didn’t know what affluence was. A twisted culture of peculiar satiety, a digression in progress, eh? A classmate grows up to shoot a cop. A boy robs his neighbors’ jewels, then a package store. Gets shot in the ass on his way out the door. A suicide in a bathtub; gunshot to the head; another gunshot to the head; and one, two three men fly their planes into foggy mountains. No matter, everyone dies, and they’re all dead now. Or moved away, like me. One or two remain, which is curious to me. Why would they do that? When Clare, the youngest and sole survivor of my parent’s generation turned 90 I sort of fell in love with her. Smartest woman I ever knew, who married the widower of the bathtub suicide fifty years before. Something of a scandal. Still a knockout, too, if you can believe it. I went home when my mother died and after she was removed from the house Clare asked me over and we drank wine on her deck overlooking the Farmington Valley. Once, twice. Several times, while the maple leaves changed. Do you think you’ll come back here after this, she asked. If I did it would be to see you, I said. We wrote, but gradually she lost the ability to use a keyboard and our communications stopped. I wanted to go see her but didn’t. She turned 95, 96. Still I didn’t go. Then one day last year someone sent me her obituary, and there was no reason to go home any more.
Wow. Beautifully done, Tod. And so nice to know a woman can still be seen as a knockout at at 90. Beauty is beauty.
I like how you sneak a short story into this in one sentence:
"...who married the widower of the bathtub suicide fifty years before. Something of a scandal."
Sadness, it seems, outlived everyone. So gorgeous and so heartbreaking, Tod.
Lovely how this starts broad (the city, its characters), and narrows down to Clare.
It's the "didn't go" that hurts the most. Moving story, so well written.
I love the way you capture the boiling down of a life into the suicide, the cop-shooter, the thief, and the rest of the cast. 40 years seems to be the window of memory then it's just the uncle that fought in the war, the spinster aunt who was mummified before anyone found her, the cousin who made it to Broadway. Curious.
Powerful.
an endearing story
Tod, the regret drips from the words. The details: she's a knockout, drinking wine on her deck, and that line "I wanted to go see her but I didn't." And then the last line. Good stuff.
Well done, Tod! My mom’s side of the family is from
New Britain/Berlin, CT and I have such fond memories of that area.
Now, that's a powerful story.
The Place
Well, I believe that many people had a “lovely” home. One filled with joy, support and emotional stability. To the contrary I have a “place” that I am from; a “place” that I ran from when I was old enough to do so and I’ve been running ever since. Now I will read the words others write of homes. Stories with humorous anecdotes– a first spotted puppy, cats that ruled the barn, apple trees that always bore and the pink peonies that bloomed for Decoration Day. Please write that tone of ink and I will pretend it is my home too. Thank you.
Home was a treacherous place for many of us. I love what you've written here.
thank you Mary.
Wow, that's where I'm from too.
Me too.
Most homes are a mix, if people are honest. Some are disasters, and some are something else.
it has taken me years to piece it all together and there's still much I don't understand
Beautiful sentences, Judy, and rich and compelling.
thank you KC
“Hi, nice to meet you. I wonder, do you have a minute?
“My mother grew up in this house, then moved away when she and my father married. I don’t know what kind of life she had here, because she died when I was little. Even though we had moved back here before she died, I never got to ask her if she hid things in the little compartment in my bedroom closet like I did. She probably had the other, bigger bedroom, so maybe she never even went into the little one.
“She moved back to this house with my father and older brother when their landlady offered to buy him, my brother. That’s the family lore, anyway. He was an extremely good-looking little boy, from the pictures I’ve seen. He grew up to be an extremely handsome man. Until he smoked and drank too much and his face bloated and his teeth fell out. I’m glad my mother never saw that happen, although, I’ve always wondered, if she hadn’t died when he was 10 maybe he wouldn’t have started drinking when he was 11.
“My grandmother — my mother’s mother — came here for holidays even after my mother died. Her own former house. Think about that for a minute, and you’ll understand why my stepmother — 10 months after my mother died, my father married my godmother (if you're wondering about that, I wonder too, from time to time.) — my stepmother was always anxious. She was a meticulous housekeeper (gave up a good government job to marry my father and was very organized), but she still worried. Grandma’s white glove always found the one spec of dust that fell after Pledge had wiped every surface clean.
“We had everything boys could want, I guess. Bikes and telescopes and walkie-talkies and grandmas over for holidays. For a while, we had 3 grandmas over for holidays. All their birthdays were within a couple of weeks in May. So my stepmother made 3 birthday cakes, served on Mother’s Day. It must have been strange for her, my stepmother, doing that. I’ve wondered. She made a birthday cake for our mother’s mother, and one for her own mother, who she didn’t like at all, and one for my father’s mother, who was heard saying at the wedding that brought my stepmother into the family, this won’t last.
“Well, it did. Eventually we had to leave this house after my father’s heart attack. Too many stairs, they said.
“I wonder, too much info, I know, but, I wonder, if, see, I forgot to take the things I had hidden in the compartment in the closet when we moved. Yes, it was fifty years ago. Do you mind if I go look?”
i absolutely love all of this
Thanks, Mary.
The profusion of grandmothers! And the cliffhanger of the compartment. That it even had one in the closet renders the house a keeper in my book. Whenever we moved, the first thing I would do in a new house was look for secret panels. I was so disappointed to never find one.
The use of the story within the story is very effective and original.
Thanks, Mark. It was fitting for a little gay kid to have not just a closet, but a secret compartment in it.
You make this so easy imagine…revisiting a home, your home
Love the ending especially--that you do not tell us what was in the compartment, how the reason for the MC's visit to the house are the people and things that are gone. The what it's about are the ghosts.
Oh man. Now I'm thinking about the satchel I hope no one has ever found. Tossed it into the weeds behind our house years ago...
Still there, probably. Waiting.
A story for another day. The early scribblings of a writer.
Did you go look?
Actually, I went past the house once and the man living there at the time came out and offered a walkthrough, but I didn't take him up on it. I don't know how he would have felt about me opening a closet and looking for the secret compartment. A little more than he bargained for!
What happens to a body when it doesn't have a hometown? Hurtling itself from place to place. Restless for a sense of place. But any place never feels like home. So it must move again. Maybe transience is a product of alienation from its "hometown"? Parents hippy "Come From Aways" despised by the conservative German settlers for their shack at the cleft of the valley of alders filled with their overproduction of grubby children. Classmates stolid fisherman's sons who never had a chance to crack a book before they proudly dropped out of elementary school to slaughter fish on the ever-swaying decks of their fathers' brightly colored Cape Islanders. Teachers always trying to bound the body in petty judgments and fearful stories of the world beyond the single Main Street of donair shops, tattoo parlors, check-cashing nooks, and the only still-proud Royal Bank of Canada. Of course the body thought only of escape. But after so many years of seeking place, the body accepts that its fundamental nature is nomadic. A pilgrim body whose hometown is disembodied. Airport hallways in strange cities where the other bodies speaking foreign languages pass it by without a look. Sailboats that must keep cutting through the grey waves offshore with no option to anchor in the deepest caverns of the North Atlantic. The slippery zoom connection to other bodies, faces freezing and shifting in the projection from the place where they have settled, comfortable and safe in their hometowns. I love you, the body says, but I must keep moving.
PS this is Julie. Haven't been here in a while and I changed my substack profile to my mothers maiden name cause my first poem will be published in a few weeks and it is a doozy! Miss you and love Mary G's little community.
Fortunately there's your avatar to remind us... :)
congrats on the poem - where will it be published?
Thank you so much! Terrified and excited. OpenPoems end of the month, I'll link it here
...first poem will be published in a few weeks...
tell me more & congratulations on writing a doozy---that's the only way to poetize
I love your "petty judgments" comment
Thanks Ruth! I started a manuscript last fall that grew out of my Story Club, Mary G's influence, and then Maya Popa's CWC. Who knew that the internet, on which I had lurked disdainfully for most of my life, would be a source of such generative community? One of those poems has been accepted at OnlyPoems. I'll try to link it here when it comes out.
Thank you Julie, eager to read a doozy! I've considered changing my name too and I will if I ever write the story/poem that is my doozy.
This is so beautiful.
I didn't mean to copy your response, Mary. It is indeed beautiful. Have to re-read it to appreciate all that is in this little piece.
Just shows how beautiful this piece is!
Blushing
I like the physicality of this piece…a body hurtling from place
to place.
Know just what you mean. Moved to the rural Maine coast in 1976, and island in a sense of ingrown white natives, and was forever "from away," or a "straphanger," though it got less intense after 40 years !
This is lovely.
This is stunning, Julie.
Thank you Kevin. Inspires me to keep working on it.
This is beautiful.
Title: Homecoming
It was about time the elephant in the room was addressed. I could no longer ignore it. Or the others. One person’s elephant is another’s ex-lover.
Together since childhood in the only school in town, we had been close, from childhood to adulthood.
By first grade, we all knew each other. By third, we knew each other’s mothers. By fifth, we knew who were abused.
Puberty brought preferences for others, resulting in broken hearts. As sophomores we knew the popular kids from the losers. By junior year, the jocks separated from those accused of being gay.
A body count began.
Adulthood skewed ambitions, some falling behind, others lurching ahead. The Gaussian outliers of the bell curve changed places: the body count accrued.
After graduation, the job market was limited. Some would luck out; others would be scooped up; some would miss out. Some strategized, fixing the outcomes. Grownup outcomes. Some navigated them with grade school sensibilities, only to be eaten by those who discarded the naïveté of conscience. Like babies’ bodies, the conscience begins dying at birth.
Those wronging others forget whom they wronged, while the wronged remember who had wronged them—an elephantine truism as relevant later as it was on the playground.
On this Alumni Day, we sat together once again. The ones who traveled and assembled here represented a microcosm of the whole who had graduated together. Grown up together.
Grown apart, together.
My own elephant-in-the-room sat firing eye-darts at me. In front of her sat the alumna who had broken my heart. The energy along this circuit sublimated exponentially. A bitter frenzy of emotion charged invisible wiring connecting us. Grievances and unrealized revenge powered the circuit.
Behind the ex-lover who had broken my heart, in front of my ex-lover whose heart I had broken, crossed several arcs of energy. Volatile, all it’d take was a short. Who’d short out first and spark this powder keg?
The tangled web of jilts, petty score-keeping, social and financial resentment, and the energy nodes of varied heads in this room straddled a kindling temperature verging on immolation.
And then it happened.
It was a blood bath! Who could’ve known how people’d behave, suddenly on impulse, when forced together in such hostility?
Yet, this story has a happy ending. The body count and carnage happened quickly, but in only their minds.
You've summed all of it up perfectly! And you had me from the beginning with "One person’s elephant is another’s ex-lover." Well done!
Luckily, the one whose heart you broke wasn't "Carrie."
Especially since the tux was a rental.
Interesting aspects of some kind of ceremony we are all encouraged to attend.
The ending was a great relief. I was holding my breath. Love this.
Blood bath!? How was this story going to end? With a nice turn. Great work.
Hey Lawrenceville, I know you have long and venerable history, being born in 1816 and all, but I’ve got a few things to say about before you were born that may knock your socks off.
For example, before you were born, you were named Maidenhead, after a town in England, but that name stuck in the craw of its citizens, who could barely choke out the name without thinking of lust or sin or women’s ankles. So the Reverend Isaac Brown petitioned the legislature to change your name to Lawrenceville stating that “ it must be the wish of every good citizen to be relieved of the necessity of using a term which may offend the delicacy of modesty or disturb the feelings of seriousness or excite the sneers of the willing.”
Now you know where that simmering excitement in your town comes from. It’s history! Also, before you were born —get this—George Washington’s troops marched through Maidenhead chasing the British.
My earliest memory of you was the Presbyterian Church, a large white steepled affair with deep red velvet pews, and fire and brimstone sermons. As a kid, I entertained myself in church counting the lightbulbs in the chandelier or squinting up my eyes to make my black patent shoes disappear in the back of the pews so that my white socks appeared to hover disembodied like tiny ghosts.
We were among your 6,000 inhabitants, but on the periphery, living in a small rented cottage after my mother left my father on our defunct dairy farm outside town, which is now a historic museum called the Brearley House. You can see my old bedroom if you want. We lived an in-between life, not real farmers and not townsfolk either. Like you – a pokey little town in between Trenton and Princeton known mostly for a prep school with its stone wall separating them and us. Them being the sons of wealthy outsiders preparing to take their place somewhere other than Lawrenceville. Us being, well, us.
Such a delightful read! And i love that final sentence.
Thanks Mary. I’m already missing you!
Oooh, those "sneers of the willing!" They are responsible for so much. So good, Christine.
Wonderful read, Christine. I particularly like the black patent leather shoes disappearing. So true to a little kid bored in church.
In retrospect, I was far better off being bored in the Presbyterian Church then when we converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses when I was 10. The days of patent leather shoes were over!
George Washington got around. He camped in Farmington with troops on his way to some battle. We also had diary farms, right in town, and a prep school for girls, Miss Porter's. Jacqueline Kennedy went there. One redeeming fact about Farmington is it was a major waypoint in the Underground Railroad, but a couple generations later lapsed into an enclave of racism, antisemitism, homophobia, and the rest.
Yup. Miss Porters is right down the road!
She wondered if she could find a way back. Home? Well, there wasn't really a place she'd call home, or that had been home, that she'd ever called home. They'd never stayed long in any one place when she'd been a girl. Could she even remember the addresses? But, if she could, wouldn't it give her a kind of chain to hold on to, to work her way... back? To the first place they'd lived? That was easy, it was on her birth certificate. 19, Southland Street.
She took pencil and paper and jotted it down. Next? Oh yes, the first address she'd had to learn by heart in case she'd got lost and had to tell a policeman. 23 Woodbury Road. Then 70 Brinsley Road. And so on. A list of ten addresses. So? A map?
Google Maps. Feed in the address and the town (not always the same).
My God these houses had changed. Unrecognizable. Every house but one or two had undergone an extension. Use the street view. Build-ons at the sides. Gardens concreted to make parking space. A weird, unfinished, unequal look. One in particular, that had lost the balance of the look she remembered. The front porch had gone and the extension went all the way to the neighbours' place. It looked ugly, a mess.
What had been done to this house annoyed her. She felt betrayed.
But what was that on the front wall, above the bow window? She zoomed in on the street view. And felt a sudden shock of recognition.
Ivydene 1905, said the plaque built into the brickwork above the bow window. She'd completely, totally forgotten it, but there was nothing more familiar now, nothing that said louder that this had been her home.
Oh, i love that one detail bringing it all back to her. Sometimes, that's all it takes. I'd forgotten until this moment the historic plaque on the house I left behind 16 years ago. But there it is now, in my mind's eye. I can almost read it, but not quite.
Try Google street view!
Oh, I just did at your prompting and got a lovely view of my former home--i can see the plaque but when I pull in closer, I still can't read it. Oh, well. Some things are better left behind.
Memory is best kept a little blurry, like a too-zoomed-in google view.
Glad you did. It's a real Time Machine.
But you're right. We've got plenty on our plates as it is.
I think there might even be a way to go back in time on Google Maps / Street View. At least that’s what I think I remember from the pandemic when I was looking at all the addresses of the places I lived.
It’s almost time for them to leave. Sara and Annie are moving to Illinois, Alex is moving to Washington, and Mike and Felicity will be moving too. They are about to be married. Mixed emotions abound. The whole family is breaking up. Sara and Mike are no longer. No longer husband and wife. No longer fighting over all the little things, like shower installations, and the big things, like whether Alex should repeat kindergarten. Yes, Sara said, “Alex is young for his class.” "No," Mike said. "He will be labeled." Mike won. Sara knew he was thinking of his own experience as his mother’s child, so she let it go.
It’s been eight years since the divorce. They are no longer hosting the family’s Christmas Eve party in their Classic 1924 house near Boise State University. The kids are fine. The parents are okay. Change is in the air. Sara has been offered a promotion in the Midwest, Alex has been accepted at Washington State, and Annie is about to start high school in Oak Brook. Mike is about to move in with Felicity.
It’s a leaf-flowing, autumn day. The leaves on the Aspen trees look like bright yellow tears flying around the back yard, sending a sad farewell to the occupants. Sara and Mike’s friend, Eric, had brought the two saplings back from his mountain property—a gift for his friends. They had planted them carefully, so the baby trees would grow up with their two children, Alexander and Anastasia. The two Aspens had both become tall and stately. The children are growing tall, too.
Sara, Alex, and Annie are waiting for a taxi to the airport. The family trip is part of the relocation package. They will spend a week at the Embassy Suites together. A gentle transition to a new life. Sara’s decision to make this move began with a hunch and resulted in an unexamined reality. Someday, she will realize that all of her big decisions start that way—with a hunch. Some of them work out. Others become learning opportunities.
When Sara applied for the promotion, she hadn’t considered all the consequences. She knew it meant moving away from her family in Boise, her Italian roots. “But, I’ll be traveling there for work…” Up until the moment she applied for the position, Sara had never imagined moving away.
"Up until the moment she applied for the position, Sara had never imagined moving away." Funny how life goes, how we make decisions and then live with them.
Yeah, and it’s not always easy. Your prompt hit a chord in me as I’m working on my next book and it’s all about “home.”
A lot of changes happen in the autumn whether it’s life or the landscape. Nicely captured.
There's a lot to admire about someone who grabs a hunch and goes for a ride.
I love all the parallels and counterpoints.
Home Coming, and Going
I don’t know what to think about this word “home” anymore. I volunteer at a day shelter for homeless men a few days a week. Sometimes when I sort the mail there I come across fliers for furniture or home improvement stores addressed to men who come to the shelter or “current home enthusiast.” I don’t even know where to start with the irony of that. Or that of the last name of a man who comes in now and then to check his mail. House, he says. At the front desk when I sign a man in I find his name in the online roster and select the box beside it. Then I ask him where he spent the night and select one of the options – Jail, Street, Other Shelter – from a dropdown list on the other side of his name. When a man comes in wearing blue scrubs and a plastic wrist band printed with his name I think that Hospital should also be among the options, and that Bus should be one when a man comes in asking to buy a 30-day bus pass. All of these places are places to stay. Are any of them home? And what about when I answer the phone and it’s a woman calling who’s being evicted with her three children. Do you have any tents? she asks. We don’t. Or the man who came in after he got kicked out of his storage unit for sleeping in it. At my favorite Dairy Queen a woman named Mo lost everything a year ago in a fire. Two days before Thanksgiving last week the hotel room where she had been staying flooded. Ruined everything, she said. I’m starting over, again, she said. A homeless camp between my favorite Dairy Queen and the pawn shop next door included four shopping carts and two green tarps. One day it moved 20 yards over to some small trees and shrubs by the car wash and shrank to two carts and one tarp with a baby stroller outpost by the nearby bus stop but now it’s all gone. The cashier Michelle at my grocery keeps her sleeping bag in a clear plastic bag behind the front counter. It’s a dingy blue plaid lined with navy flannel inside. Last night at the grocery a man rummaged in the dumpster just beyond the spread of the parking lot lights. A woman in baggy sweatpants and a saggy leopard print coat and cream-colored fleece slippers pushed a cart toward the alley. I could go on, with this word home, but I just don’t know, any more, where it goes.
to not have a home is so very sad.
The details, the descriptions, the stories. This is so well written and so heart wrenching. I feel like printing it out and reading it at the next city council meetings in the three incorporated towns near me.
Just the glimpses are heartbreaking and instead of the homeless why aren’t we saying the persecuted.
So many wrenching details. The cashier with her sleeping bag really strikes me, for some reason.
In 1974, my father intentionally got “lost” in the Berkshires. He was looking for a small second home in the country for us, and felt that if it was meant to be, the home would find him. Sure enough, he fell on a modest cottage set back 200 yards or so from a small lake, in a community with the name of Richmond Shores. At $14,500, it was pretty much a steal.
In that first summer, my father set about to build a gazebo on the lawn, a wooden structure enclosed in mesh, somewhere we could eat all of our meals, as there wasn't space inside the house. My quirky Dad decided to make it seven sides. “Why seven?” I asked him. “Because there are no seven-sided buildings anywhere I know of. It’s a challenge.” He told me this as he grappled with the impossibility of dividing a heptagon into equal segments mathematically. At 15, I couldn’t appreciate how cool it was that he had intentionally waded into this architectural uniqueness, just so we would have the one such building in the state, probably the country, maybe even the world.
He did a lot of work on that cottage. Transformed the second floor to sleep five, put in bay windows, a new bathroom, dug a deeper well. “Richmond” was a refuge for 30 years for my parents, their increasingly far-flung children and their children, and for my French aunt to bring one of her grandchildren every other year. We all loved that gazebo--especially in a thunderstorm.
My father died in 1996, but we didn’t sell it until a decade later, when my mother could no longer safely drive up and back, and we decided to move her to my sister’s in California. A “lovely gay couple” bought the house and promised to treasure it and only improve it.
Ten years later, I had occasion to be in Western Massachusetts for a conference, and drove out to the house, somehow excited and nervous at the same time.
The gazebo was gone.
The “lovely gay couple” had built a impressive porch, and perhaps had taken down my father’s gazebo, or had sold it and the new owners had.
I have to believe that someone somehow had never explained what made it so special, for how could they possibly tear it down if they knew?
Seven-sides, you Philistines. Seven.
I once bought a house from a woman who begged me to keep the chandelier in the dining room. I said, of course I will! The moment the papers were signed, you know what happened. Did I feel bad about it? Maybe a tiny bit. But really, that chandelier looked ridiculous in my house. Sorry your dad's seven-sided creation is lost forever. I've a feeling it was that lovely gay's couple chandelier. Hope you took many photos!
I expanded it and added pictures on my Substack. https://open.substack.com/pub/markolmsted/p/the-gazebo
All of that is just amazing, Mark. Thanks for posting the photos. And the video!
When we bought this house from "a little old lady" who refused to leave after we signed all the papers (another story for another time), she returned 3 weeks later and demanded: the stick to lock the sliding door and the thermometer that hung outside.
oh my god, that's amazing
It was. We had to "lawyer up" to take possession. When I called our attorney and told him about her, his response: "Little old lady, my ass!"
Sounds like a title for something.
Now that is a great idea!
"Why seven?" And I love his answer!
Acute angle of each segment : 51.43°
Hope it helps.
(Hope I'm right...)
I'll just pop that in my time machine. AI can do anything.
Great ending!
That gazebo will remain long in memory. And I'm only a reader.
I both look forward to and dread going to the house I grew up in (where my father still lives) - the emotions exist side by side. Going home means my past comes flying at me with an insistent voice that intones, “you must make sense of your life.” When I go home, a few vague memories stick out, but mostly it’s a feeling tone that prevails. The feeling is one of stillness and loneliness. It’s a bittersweet experience and I’m a sucker for bittersweet - I treasure that feeling. I recall someone once writing of Samuel Beckett that he had two loving parents and was brought up in upper middle class comfort, so why is his work infused with such unrelenting gloom? The implication being that it was an act, an attempt by Beckett to co-opt a pessimism he didn’t have a right to. But I understand Beckett’s gloom, even though mine is not nearly as intense or all-encompassing. When I walk into my old bedroom, I think of the kid I was, who managed to be lonely even amidst the love of two kind, attentive parents and material comfort. Where does that disposition come from - what is the origin story? I have no idea. I love Isaac Babel’s line describing a Jew as someone with “spectacles on his nose and autumn in his heart.” I started wearing spectacles when I was 13 and I became a Jew when I was in my early 40s, but I have always had autumn in my heart. And home is where I feel that autumn most deeply.
Lovely, Wim. Baruch HaShem, may the autumn in your heart continue to nourish you!
Thank you, Mary!
I'm reading Patti Smith's new book, Bread of Angels. Trying to get a handle on her punk-ness, and her attraction to the outlaw and outcast. I realized that her family life, her parents and siblings, was solid. Poor, very poor, but open and loving. Somehow she had to rebel against that, or get outside of it, but with the knowledge that that foundation was there.
Sam Beckett, Isaac Babel–you called up the heavy cannon there, Wim!
Beautiful piece, Wim.
Isaac Babel makes me want to be Jewish.
Ha - I absolutely love Babel.
What a long long history of a house and some kind of home place.
Home feels a certain way. A person can be housed and not homed. Likewise homed but not housed. The ideal, of course, is to be housed and homed at the same time. Chris considers herself quite fortunate. She was housed and homed for most of her childhood and youth. There were two years during high school when she was housed, but neither she nor her family felt that she was still homed. After that, she moved a lot. Different places. Sometimes with friends, sometimes with strangers, sometimes alone, sometimes with lovers who may or may not have been her friends. Remembering those years, she counts ten dwellings, four of which were homes. Ten homes would have been nice, but she survived. Eventually, she settled. Or maybe the better word is that she “centered.” She centered such that she was always home. Sometimes she wonders if this centering is permanent. The more time that goes by, the more permanent it feels. But, even if it isn’t, Chris takes comfort in her historical capacity to handle homelessness.
Ah, nice final thought there. It's taken me so many years to feel this current house of mine is my home.
I volunteer at a day shelter for homeless men and now I am not sure what home means any more. Posted a story here earlier.
Being at home with yourself makes moving easy. Easier.
I have a great Black Olives story for you. In 2011 my poetry group held a celebration in Hamden, CT for the poet Donald Hall and presented a chapbook of poems where we responded to his poem Olives. (see below) My poem, which appears in my book Given Time: a mother-daughter cancer memoir, acknowledes that what we call "ripe olives," are actually picked green and dumped in lye to turn them black. Appetizing?
Olives
by Donald Hall
“Dead people don’t like olives,”
I told my partners in eighth grade
dancing class, who never listened
as we fox-trotted, one-two, one-two.
The dead people I often consulted
nodded their skulls in unison
while I flung my black velvet cape
over my shoulders and glowered
from deep-set, burning eyes,
walking the city streets, alone at fifteen,
crazy for cheerleaders and poems.
At Hamden High football games, girls
in short pleated skirts
pranced and kicked, and I longed
for their memorable thighs.
They were friendly—poets were mascots—
but never listened when I told them
that dead people didn’t like olives.
Instead the poet, wearing his cape,
continued to prowl in solitude
intoning inscrutable stanzas
as halfbacks and tackles
made out, Friday nights after football,
on sofas in dark-walled rec rooms
with magnanimous cheerleaders.
But, decades later, when the dead
have stopped blathering
about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze
upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders
waiting for hip replacements,
while a lascivious, doddering poet,
his burning eyes deep-set
in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.
(used with permission)
What a poem! And oh, no, you may have ruined black olives for me forever.... Time to go down the rabbit hole!
Were they kalamatas Mary. You can tell us. It’s a safe space
Lol
This reminds me of Frank O'Hara's Autobiographia Literaria. Different childhood experiences, but in the end the poet wins out (if cavorting with daughters is winning). (https://www.poemist.com/frank-ohara/autobiographia-literaria)
Oh to be in the company of Frank O’Hara. Thanks John for the link.
In the end the poet gets the girls. The hell with the olives.
Fabulous poem! Thank you, Christine.
Oooh. "Lascivious, doddering poet...cavorts with their daughters." I'm concerned about the black olives I've indulged in, now, at every family feast--but ooooooh, this poet!
Thank you for sharing your story and Donald's poem. I'm now thinking about olives in a whole new way!
City Limits. First speed limit sign: 25. She edged her car up the small rise. On her right, older homes, bright paint, clean windows, verdant lawns, and beds of dahlias, roses, snapdragons. To the left, the shell of an old motel. Just beyond it, the house described in the listing. But she barely listened to what the agent had to say. Whimsy. Magic. The air tingled with it. The house was set into the hillside. A nudge from behind her navel to climb that willow tree. Or that one…or…But a grotto! So many stories in the moss as it stretched up the rock wall between the house and the hillside. Overhead: a bridge from the second story to the hill. Security hazard in the city; a passageway to imagination for a child in this small town. She closed her eyes and touched the fragments of so many make believe moments brushing her skin. And then she saw her: the artist, the muse of imagination. A child galloped past, pushing through the grotto and shimmying up one of the willows to sit, legs dangling from a branch. Then the dismount. The manuever the woman had done so many times herself. “Skinning the cat.” The child dropped to the ground and climbed the tree to start over.
“I’ll take it.” The woman told the agent.
“But you haven’t been inside yet.” His eyebrows raised.
“No need."
She just knew! I love that it's just past a relic of an old motel.
It’s the house I grew up in. There were people (including my 8th grade English teacher) living there when I was the kid shimmying up that willow tree.
I liked the way you combined the exterior details with the interior ones.
Thank-you!
I was there–tree, moss, hillside–and I swear I saw some of those make-believe moments.
And I am certain you did!
The scent reached me first, vanilla-like. It led me to the stall in the corner of Old Toll Square. There I heard her voice again, 'Gorse–the yellowest of flowers.' The words came in all the lilting richness that had roused a life-long interest and, later, persuaded me to sleep. And with the words came the expression that spoke of care: nose, mouth, chin–soft; eyes–easy as caramel, rich as chocolate.
I hadn't been home for a decade, no point when she wasn't there. But now pictures flowed in 4K resolution and surround sound, and she was with me again.
I thought on the gorse, the humble little petals. She saw the beauty of them, a beauty that was projected as much as it was inherent. She'd tried to explain that vision to a son who wanted big things–big places, big people, big bold flowers. She couldn't then but she did now. The dormant message was awakened. And delivered.
The stall-holder was delighted when I took his whole stock. My sweetheart looked quizzically.
I remembered other of my mother's words, 'When gorse is out of blossom, kissing is out of fashion.'
We planted a corner of our Mediterranean garden. Now we spend our time in year round embrace.
What a sweet tale! Love the way the flowers conjured up memories. Like Proust's madeleine.
Proustian! Mary, you take generosity to new levels.
Such a lovely story, Terry with a wonder of an ending.
Such a treasure to remember a mother's words. Beautiful, Terry.
Beautiful, Terry.
Thanks, Angela. Always kind.
I am sincere. It’s beautiful.
1314 N. Lexington is where I loved when I started elementary school after we left the yellow stucco farmhouse near the small town of Bois d' Arc where Osage orange trees grew in the fencerows and all the old folks were buried at Pleasant Hill. Maybe that yellow house burned down or a tornado tore it to pieces. It's gone, my first home is gone.
A prose poem. I love that final sentence that hits us--smack!--with its truth.
thank you Mary
I recently saw 3 different stage shows that leaned on Our Town, all with a cemetery prominent. Now you've capped them all with this beautiful piece.
Mary said it: that final line is gold!
Thank you Angela.
i met to say "... is where i lived..."
but "loved" is close enough