I took a long deep
breath and held it in for a few seconds before slowly exhaling. I began looking
back on the morning. Just like a Kansas tornado, my mornings were a mixture of
chaos and noise spinning madly throughout the house with a lost shoe, a missing
backpack, a fight over a sweatshirt, and milk from a toppled cereal bowl
running off the counter and dripping to the floor. But then, at 7:45 with
kisses, hugs, and reassurances that they will live a full life even if their
brother wears their sweatshirt, they would spill out the door and down the
block toward school.
And as soon as the
door closed behind the last straggler in the group, there was an eerie silence
that left a hollow ringing in my ears. I felt uneasy for a moment. Is someone still here and hiding? Did I
miss-count on their way out the door? Is someone going to burst back through
that door crying because someone else tripped them? Did someone forget
something? Did I forget
something...? A bit lost, I stood in place surveying the destruction. Then,
I spotted my coffee mug sitting on the kitchen island –still hot and waiting.
Wrapping both my hands around the hot mug, I sat down on a stool, and took a
long deep breath. Hot coffee never tastes better than immediately after a long
deep breath. Maybe it was because I didn’t seem to take very many of these
anymore.
It was unusual that
I had the morning off; it afforded me the luxury of sitting, sipping my hot
coffee. Regardless of this luxury, I felt the same nagging hollowness press
against my ribs and sink into my stomach. Rather than contemplate this deep
sadness, I did what I always do: I turned my thoughts to my kids. My built-in
auto response, which protects me from looking too long and too close at the
uglier aspects of life, shifted my contemplation to how satisfying it was to be
the mom of four chaotic but awesome kids. They were four of the most unique
personalities I had ever met and I had the privilege of sharing my life with
them. My oldest, Jack, who is 14, is always in shorts (no matter how cold the
Wisconsin forecast might be), his moppy head of thick long curls diving into
his ears and into his eyes. Very little doesn’t
qualify as some sort of a battle with him; I look at him and have to take a
deep breath in because chances are I will have to defend my position on why
wearing shorts –when it is 15ºF—is not a good idea, or how it is possible that
I know he should study his vocab words if he only got half of them right on his
quiz yesterday.
Then there is my
daughter, my beautiful, wonderful, high energy daughter, Raina. Her 9 year old
body is capable of feeling every emotion within a short period of time. Her
heart is so big she will feel and express every emotion as it comes to her. As
she squeals loudly over a silly comment she has just made, she will be brought
to tears over the thought that she left her special art project at school, and
then she will be scolding her brother, Peter, for saying crude words before
I’ve even figured out how to respond to her tears.
Peter is my 7 year
old son who suffers from OCD; his highs are very high and his lows come quick
and are very dramatic. He is able to manage it for the most part, but when he
is eating his cereal and his stool isn’t pulled up so tight to the counter I
question whether he can breathe or not, he will go from joy to screams in a
second. When he smiles his one dimple
stands out and his whole face lights up; you wouldn’t be able to imagine him
ever being upset. That is why it is such a bummer when Jesse, his little
brother, accidentally tips his bowl of cereal and the milk runs wildly right
towards Peter.
This brings me to
my youngest: Jesse. He is six. He is everything I was as a child and more. His
big round baby face looks so sad when he accidentally tips his cereal over
while telling a silly story to counter his sister’s silly joke; you can’t help
but forgive him before he has said a word. And, seeing as how he spills his
cereal nearly every other day, I remind him he is lucky he is so cute and loves
to kiss his mama still.
While I mulled over
how lucky I was, I couldn’t help but
laugh at the irony that I was also relieved that they had all left for school.
What a paradox my life was.
With my mug cradled
in my hands, my eyes ran the length of the ten foot solid walnut counter. In
spite of being littered with the remains of half eaten breakfasts, its deep
rich brown color warmed me as my coffee did. My eyes moved around the great
room that housed my kitchen, dining room, and ended in my hearth room. I
checked off the details, my details, my choices. I had designed the house on
graph paper; chosen all the details, from structural, architectural, and
aesthetic; I had worked as the general contractor; and, I had spent nearly
every single day for ten months with some tool in my hand, working from morning
till night.
My eyes passed over
the natural stone flooring that ran throughout the kitchen and dining room and
met up with the deep warm Brazilian walnut floor of the hearth room. The stone
I had picked reminded me of the dynamic moving colors of autumn leaves: yellows
swirled into oranges that grew into deeper and darker shades of brown. Tall
walnut pillars divide the dining room from the hearth room like smooth dark
tree trunks. The stone-faced fireplace like a stone outcropping melded with the
paint on the walls and blended the colors of an autumn corn field and the last
few minutes of a setting sun. Two French doors placed deliberately encouraged
the sun to pour in. The paintings that adorned the walls consisted of garden
gates and vividly colored landscapes.
The room ended with an eight-foot picture window, framing a beautiful
view of trees that lined the edge of a lake.
I sat at the counter, cupping my cooling coffee mug, mesmerized by the
movement of the trees that reached and danced with the wind that blew off the
lake.
“Thousands of leaves,” I thought, “maybe millions.”
Something stirred
deep inside me. For a moment, I imagined I felt the same wind blowing through
my hair that was tossing the trees so effortlessly about. I imagined the sun,
flashing between the branches, slipping in between the leaves, and jumping
about across my face.
“I know you. I’ve seen you before… I felt your bark on
my skin as my hands ran across your trunk. I felt the softness of your leaves
fresh from the spring’s budding.”
Looking closer, I
saw myself right there among the trees. I was running through the woods,
skipping lightly over the fallen twigs, sweating, laughing, and calling to my
dog to keep up with me. I was nine or ten years old. I wove in between the maze
of tree trunks, around a group of birch, twisting to avoid running into the
autumn maple. I scraped my skin raw as the bark of the big oak caught my
shoulder and upper arm. Undeterred, onward I pushed; deeper into the safety of
the rows and stacks and lines of so many tall, deep rooted trees.
I was deep within
the forest that surrounded my second childhood home; a home that nestled into
the side of a hill. There was not much wind in there, but when I looked up, the
tree tops collectively pranced back and forth across the blue sky. As I skipped between the trees, I wondered if
mom would be mad that I had ripped my shorts attempting to jump over the
barbed-wire fence. I probably slipped because my shoes were wet from falling in
the creek earlier. The creek was forbidden, but I couldn’t stop myself from
going to the water’s edge to watch the water swirling around then racing away
down the river bed. It hypnotized me. I
hoped she would be too busy to notice my dirty and torn clothes when I got
back. I didn’t have a lot of patience for worrying in those days. So, with the
next amazing leap over a fallen dead tree my concerns were gone.
My country home
felt peaceful, with a deep dense forest, and sun grazed ridge tops. The five of
us in my family were close; though each of us had such unique
personalities. We worked and played
together, and we supported each other.
You could almost hear the sun’s hot rays as they poured down on the
cleared side of our hill where our house was being built by my parent’s own
hands. My mother’s gardens stretched across the hill’s contoured shape. When I
wasn’t sneaking down to the creek or running through the forest, I would skip
rope on top of the piles of lumber meant for our house, or sneak into the
garden and eat as many snow peas as I could before being told to leave them for
supper.
It was beautiful
there. It was a place where everything was free: free to dance, to move, free
to rise and fall with the strong gusts of wind, and free to bloom into large
bursts of crimson sprinkled yellow or brilliant fire-oranges. Here was a place
my sisters and I were free to dance naked in the rain. It was a place where
beans could be picked and eaten right in the garden, tomatoes grew large, and
the herbs were picked each night for dinner. It was a collective existence.
Here we heard only
the birds and the small animals when they crept across the twig littered forest
floor, and the vibrating noises of the cicadas, bees, and dragon flies, their
wings beating the air a warning of their approach. Most days the sun with its
offering of heavy heat drove me into the welcoming arms of the forest. The wild
life carried on around me, bringing me in, sharing their little treasured
secrets. This was a place I felt was mine alone –a private and secret world.
It was a place that
was situated far from any neighbors –far from slabs of cracked concrete–far
from heaps of garbage comprised of broken glass, dirty diapers, crushed beer
cans, and scattered cigarette butts –far from the deep angry sounds of the
inner city with all its fighting, squealing tires, sirens, and relentless
crying.
I understood the
safety the forest provided. I didn’t always live here…
We didn’t always
live on the curve of a sun-drenched hill. There was a time when I lived among
few trees; my last memories of this place are from when I was six. This was a
forgotten neighborhood of worn out, used up, neglected, and fading people.
Those here were jailed by the cracked concrete, victims of an inherited poverty
wrought by the history of a capitalist society. These trees that sit in the
back recesses of my memory were located in the failing and ugly patch of earth
beauty had long since run from. Here the sun beat down on the concrete, boiling
the air, and heating up the unrest that simmered and stewed in the people of
this North Minneapolis neighborhood.
Surrounding our
long back yard there was a tall wire fence that separated my family from the
rest of the neighborhood. Just inside our back fence stood two towering ancient
crab apple trees. In the spring they could be seen from almost anywhere on the
block, but they were nearly the only trees on the block. Their roots appeared
to be climbing out of our sand and weed infested yard. It looked to me as though
the trees were pulling their roots up to run out of the neighborhood and find a
better home, a safer home.
On my way to my
friend’s house, I meandered over the arching roots –balancing, tipping, arms
stretched out, rocking, making it—finally, I would work my way to the back
corner of the fence where there was a gate. I lifted the latch, pulled open the
reluctant gate, and entered the alley.
The alley was the way to everywhere.
Outside the safety
of my fenced backyard, I stood atop slabs of cracked concrete covered in sand
and dirt. The dusty monotone colors covered almost everything in our
neighborhood. Lining the alleyway, were scatterings of beer cans and cigarette
butts, among other rejected things. Pieces of glass sparkled in these piles
like tinsel on a dead and discarded Christmas tree.
I walked by tall
looming thistles that would reach out to grab me if I accidentally walked too
close. Hidden among the thistles, were the soggy remains of soiled Pampers.
They were clumped in the dark recesses of the rotting-out garage walls and
busted fence lines of the back yards that met the alley. Some soiled diapers
sat like fresh road-kill in the middle of the alley or by the tire of a rusted
out car. A stray and starving cat hissed at me by the thistles. Even though his
skin pulled tight against his ribs and his one eye was stuck shut with puss, he
was still prepared to defend this territory, his territory.
The mean boys
sometimes waited down the alley for me. They lived above the backs of the
business buildings that faced the other side of the street. The brick back face
of the building loomed over their parking lot with a depressive dusty gray tone
that neither reflected the sunlight nor seemed to absorb it. These apartments
were accessed by a series of ominously sagging old wooden staircases. From
across the street, I would peer out the front window of my home and watch the
children play in the parking lot of worn down concrete covered with gravel and
littered with potholes that were filled with muddy rain water and who knows
what else. The edges of this barren scene held the wind-swept remains of trash
that clustered in the corners and silently told the story of their lives.
Naked toddlers
without pants, their soiled diapers hanging to their knees, tottered
precariously on the crooked, splintered balconies. In the winter, small
children would be outside playing in the snow wearing nothing more than shorts
and t-shirts. Angry mean mothers jerked their children up the stairs by their
arms, their crying naked babies perched on their hips. I never saw any men
outside there, I never saw them come or go, yet it was always men that the
police would take away.
It seemed like the
mean boys lay in wait for the times my sister and I were sent to pick up milk
at the 7—Eleven . They would pound on my sister’s back when we were walking
home as she desperately held tight to the gallon of milk. I heard the hollow
thud when each fist and forearm came down on her back mixed with their
laughter, jarring and terrifying because they were laughing at their hate –and
my sister’s fear. She was a year older than me and I thought she was so brave
not to cry until later.
Walking down the
alley, I had to pass by men sitting on the back steps of their houses. These
steps with their peeling paint emptied to a dirt yard littered with debris.
Afraid to make eye contact, I looked down at the ground watching my blue shoes,
with the hole in the left toe, kick up sand as I walked. I wasn’t looking at
them, but my mind couldn’t stop seeing them through the lens of my fear. In my
mind, I saw these men laughing out one side of their mouth while the other side
cussed and spit wads of hot dirty saliva into the sand. They smoked their
cigarettes with their stewing anger and blew their simmering hate in clouds
around their heads. Sometimes I heard them yell out to me something drunken and
unintelligible. And I heard the cans being crushed in their fists and the clank
as they tossed them, which I imagined were thrown at me. Journal
Next to our house
was a small apartment building whose parking lot emptied into the alley right
outside our gate. Sometimes groups of these men stood huddled together by a dirty
car that had a stack of cinder blocks for a crutch under one of its axils. One
day while playing in my backyard, I heard one man’s wife yell something to him
from an apartment window, which made him storm inside the building. Just after
that, I heard the muffled sounds of him yelling. Then I heard her screaming.
Sometimes when I was trying to go to sleep at night I heard this same woman’s
screaming. Maybe it was the same woman; I guess I don’t know. It crept under my
skin and made me feel sick. Sometimes the police would come, but after they
left there would always be more screaming.
At night the sound
of fighting always kept me awake. I felt haunted by the howl of hungry cats and
the bark of neglected dogs, tied and forgotten without food or water. I was
comforted by the deep muffled sounds of the rock band that practiced all night
in the warehouse across the street. The sounds of the band floated in through
my bedroom window at night as I lay awake, listening. The breeze that came in
to relieve the humid heat that filled my room danced the sheer window curtain
to the rhythmic pulse of the music. In the glow of the street light, I lay on
my mattress watching the curtain waltz so freely about the window, while
silently hoping that the band would not stop playing –hoping that tonight there
would be no screaming, no sirens, that would interrupt the band’s reassuring
thumping.
One day my sister
and I sat on a bench at North Commons Park waiting for the pool to open. A man, dragging a young woman, then threw her
over the bushes not far from where we sat. He took his clenched fist to this
girl right there on the sunlit lawn of our community park. I saw the energy of
anger and hatred gather up into a fist and then release all its pressure on
her. Her head strained up from behind those bushes from time to time screaming
something I couldn’t understand.
“You better stop
fucking looking or you’re next!” that angry man screamed at us. We sat
paralyzed with fear on the bench praying for the pool to open. I couldn’t wait
to get behind that tall chain-link fence that guarded the pool from the lawn
and those bushes. So, I stared at the still blue water of the pool’s deep end
–still forced to listen to her screaming.
Above all this
stood those two ancient crab apple trees. Their spring flowers a bright pink
contrast dancing above the dust and dirt, the garbage and anger, the broken
people. The branches on those trees danced above my little head, too: above my
disheveled wind-blown hair; above my t-shirt and shorts covered in the alley’s
dust; above my scuffed and dirt-stained knees; above my blue canvas shoes with
the hole in the left toe.
So, this is what I had spent my entire adult life
running from.
The emotion that
washed over me when remembering that confused little girl, picking up shards of
glass by the beer cans, brought me back to the present. She has been buried in
my memory for so long. Smiling while drinking in my memories, I saw little blue
eyes widen and drink in the crab apple trees’ rebellious spectacle with awe and
longing. Up there in those branches,
towering over me and the filthy alley, over the anger and the hate, I noticed
real beauty, natural beauty. Beauty that was free.
Overcome with
longing, I sat on my stool in the kitchen, my coffee mug still full but now
cold in my hands. I looked out the
picture window at the trees outside. In fact, it was just a picture. The glass
window I had so loved stood between me and the trees like jail bars. There it
was –framed by Marvin Windows—the soul food I so desperately needed. I realized
it had been too long since I had felt the wind in my hair and the sun sprinkle
my face with warmth. I had built a house that did nothing but simulate what was
once an authentic part of my life. I had built a life as far from North
Minneapolis as I could manage.
I looked at my
picture window, no longer noticing the swaying trees on the other side. Rather,
I saw my distant reflection, hunched over on a stool. Standing up and walking
toward the window, I saw my reflection in the glass grow bigger. I saw the very
same blue eyes I had seen in my memories widening in anticipation, the same
pale blond disheveled hair.
I had designed this
room with an eight-foot picture window whose purpose was to showcase beauty; I
thought this meant I wasn’t living in poverty. But in doing this I had put a
wall between myself and nature. And here is the paradox my life had become: I
had been enshrining symbols of my inner most desires and fondest memories. It had
not occurred to me why I still felt so empty. I was a caged wild animal; only,
I had built the cage myself.
Adults tend to do
this. We replace the real sources of joy in life with distractions and
artificial replications. We don’t seek out the beauty in the world; we buy a
captured picture and pin it to the very walls that separate us from what once
used to be our playground. And worse, when we realize these pictures aren’t
working for us (maybe because we’ve become bored with seeing that image, maybe
we don’t like that style anymore, maybe it’s not as nice as something else out
there), we discard them. We sculpt our yards and feel proud at having the
greenest lawn in the cul-du-sac. Then we buy large vehicles to take our
children down the concrete slabs that empty into other concrete slabs that
eventually deposit us at stores where we buy more pictures for our walls.
I thought I had
succeeded because I had managed to lock out the ugliness of life from my adult
life: humanity would look as beautiful as the home I lived in. But what did I
really have?
As a parent, I now
have four sets of young and beautiful blue eyes that look up to me to show them
the value of life. I will show them that it lies in the sparkling light that
waits to spill on their faces and it is anywhere they live whether it is in our
finely manicured neighborhood or a North Minneapolis neighborhood. It lies in
the sound of the wind as it rustles the leaves, pulling at them all summer
until winter’s cold wind wins the tug-o-war.
I need to teach
them not to replace the real sources of joy in life with distractions and
artificial replications; but rather to seek out the beauty in the world.
I had been sitting,
perched on a stool in the middle of my meticulously sculpted home. My home
surrounded me with reminders of natural beauty. I had thought that if I made a
beautiful home I would want for nothing as there would be nothing left to want
for. Nothing here would remind me of my childhood home –of poverty. Yet,
surrounding myself with all this had not been enough to remind me to keep
living. The brave little girl kicking up sand as she walked down the alley was
still inside me. She is a part of me as much as the trees were. I can embrace
her.
“Wait ‘til I
tell the kids that I found something I had lost for such a long time…!”
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