Eve

I am here.

I wrote that in the sand on my first time seeing the ocean. Hunting Island, the Atlantic, 2010. I was 25, at the beginning of my professional life and on the verge of discovering my true self. The journey took me to more mountains than beaches, but it was a series of attempts, of trails discovered and summits peaked.

I couldn't have predicted then what the next five years would hold, that the trail would lead back home. And that back home would be with the man who first truly saw me and accepted me, and that it would mean helping to make my hometown even better, and that it would have me thinking in terms of leadership, community building, and finding a sense of place on the plains.

I am here.

I find myself with the urge to write this now, here, on the walls of my home, on the skin of my stomach, in the dirt of our yard. I am here, a few days from thirty, growing into a new meaning. I am thirteen weeks pregnant, six months from becoming a mother. For the last two years, I have been a bonus mom to four-year-old Jack, a part-time parent trying on the role and testing out that love. But, most days, I'm still just me, that girl longing for a mountain alone or a long drive with my love. Most days, spontaneity is mine, reclusiveness is an option, time is relative.

Phillip is excited for his thirties: a chance to prove himself wrong, he says. I wonder where my twenties went, how I got here so fast, but I welcome the change. A chance to prove myself right, to build on what I've discovered, to dig deeper into the passions. And to grow a human being and to teach him or her what I've learned. To show a little one what love is and what community is and what nature is and how to live a meaningful life--or at least provide the foundation and the support to discover all of that on his or her own.

Yes, I am here. 

There's my girl

I lost my grandmother this week. I lost my grandma Lentz, her Aussie accent, her greeting me: there's my girl. I lost my birthday-mate, my brave hero, my reason for watching Wheel of Fortune.

Our last moment together, before I couldn't bear to watch her go farther, was a moment after the seizure that took her to the hospital, after she'd spoken or tried to speak her last words. I knelt by her bed at Hospice, caressed her delicate hand, and said I love you, Grandma. She nodded. Because of course she knew, our bond secured from the day I was born.

I've written about her in more ways than I remembered, in poems and essays trying to capture her story, her spirit, her home. These are a few poems that should speak for themselves, because I can't write anything new yet. I can't write as if she's gone.

Thank You

Lively embarkings
down your driveways,

flimsy grasps for fingers,
limitless: dry goods

displayed in the nook,
naughty flirtations drink

your savings and non-sins,
silly kittens with gum

for eyes, ceilings sag
rain and mold over taught

sheets, silkless drapes
conduct neighbor ramblings,

his winter shorts and orange
shaved legs, dangling

love--your pearlescent
beads, mis-shaped vases:

you could wear white
hair and I'll adore you no

less.

Mariposa, Once

And now, with his Ford permanently

parked, his Veteran flag framed

on your dresser, his cats begging

milk from some other front porch, you go

back to Rockhampton. But not on The Mariposa.

You're the only war-bride

sailing not through seas but skies to find

the white corner ranch, the lopsided

outhouse, even to scream, feel

a spotted toad slick

over toes like it used to--

but you’ve kept his name. You have forgotten

the sound of your mother's goodnight under

his whiskered licks of your ear. Queensland can’t

reclaim you. Only select words lack R's

as always. Absent R’s in a kitchen

stocked with food of your choice alone. Absent

R

leather-stitched on the belt he wore

when he died and dropped

your accent into your trunk of possessions and

locked it.

 

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 9, Waking

My grandparents shape my writing, are always present if not by name. I'm always writing about them, the way their stories have formed my own relationships, the way I could still watch hours of Lawrence Welk if I knew when it was on.

But to write for them, that's another story. Here's what I wrote over a year ago when I tried to compose something for my grandma Lentz.

I have to start at the beginning. Her hair. White yellow perm. Slack earlobes never pierced but never bare. Clips, elaborate. Her feet, in slippers, in slip-ons. Her pants, cotton. She moves slowly now, with help. Push number 2. That's where she was. Push number 2 and feel the elevator take its lift, after a dip, a rise, and brief fall. 2, and turn right. 2, and she's there, on her feet, in a skirt, selling children's clothes. I want to hear her speak, hear her laugh, hold her hand.

Where do I start? The Sound of Music. I see Grandma when I see or hear Julie Andrews. I see Grandma longing to sing, be free. I see the bubbled out walls, the falling ceilings, the Aussie banners, the koala clock. She kept Queensland with her, though I don't know where it all came from. She surely didn't bring it in her one trunk. Her family came, sent, brought. They sent her Vegemite, calendars of ocean. She couldn't even see wheat from her window.

All I get are fragments, memories that I can't form into any tribute. I hug her, and she makes the sound of love. I hold her elbow as she eases down steps, every movement a waterfall. I see her shake as she tells us she watched the sycamore in her yard split in two and crash into her window in the dark, like the earth falling in.

On a twin bed, she sleeps under a quilt my grandpa had picked out, floral squares with a pink border. I used it for a while in grad school, the weight just right for the heat of summer, but took it back home when I found something more my style. Its edges skirt the floor in full coverage; my grandma is blanketed in memory, though sometimes, now, she forgets what she has told you.

One morning in Hutchinson on the trip, after only two hours of sleep and the physical sickness that comes with its lack, I asked my grandma if I could take a nap on her bed while she showered, while my mother ran errands. I curled up on the quilt, on her pillow, and tried to shut my eyes to the tv in the other room, to the plant with four leaves that I gave her several years ago, to the clock beside the door ticking toward noon. I tried to sleep and kept thinking of the return of things: of her to a single bed, of me to my home, of treetops to ground. I remembered mornings at her house as a child, after sleeping over, and climbing into the warmth of my grandparents' bed, Grandpa already up tending to cats and applying Ben-Gay. Grandma and I, we would push down the floral bedspread and raise our legs against the pink walls to do the bicycle. Pump, she would say, to get our hearts going. Our legs ran circles in the air, peddling nowhere and everywhere, so we would be ready to walk. Her nightgown bared her lower legs, English white like mine, and we giggled, together riding into another day.

Grandma Lentz and I, from several years ago.

***

My memories of my grandma Jackson (or, Grandma Over-the-Bridge, as I knew her when I was young), are less physical but intimately tied to care: the way she hemmed up my pants, always 4" too long; the way everything was always in its place at their house, so you could depend on the constant of family; the way she slips coupons and dollars into my pocket; and the food--the food!

I remember her always sitting last, at the kitchen end of the table, spooning sides onto her plate after everyone was half into theirs. She never complained, just kept watch over everyone else's satisfaction. I sat near her, always, and the men farther down. I sat near her because I didn't know her as well as my grandma Lentz and because I wanted to, because I could see her strength and love for everyone that would come through in those small moments.

Sometimes she and my grandpa would take my brother and I home with them after church on Sundays, where she'd fix lunch and we'd play pool or computer games that we didn't have at home. I only remember sleeping over once or twice, and the shadow of the spider on the wall next to the bed that led me to spend the rest of the night on the couch leering at dark corners. But it was a good memory, after all. All good. And her specialty, which I even knew at the time was special, was her grilled cheese sandwich. She buttered the bread so evenly, sliced from the block of Velveeta so cleanly, browned each side so perfectly. I have tried and tried to make grilled cheese sandwiches as good as hers over the years (which is especially special because I generally can't eat cheese like that) but have failed.

I must not have told her, though, how much care I felt in her grilled cheeses because, later in the day of no sleep and attempted nap, when I returned to my grandparents' house where I was staying for the first time in many, many years, when she asked if she could make me something to eat and suggested a grilled cheese sandwich, I said, "Would you really?"

She looked surprised. Why would my face light up from amid the nausea and exhaustion, when just a few minutes ago nothing sounded good, at the thought of a mere sandwich?

"Your grilled cheese sandwiches are the best I've ever had," I told her. "I would definitely eat one right now and love it."

So she did. She made another perfect grilled cheese sandwich. Even fixed tomato soup on the side. And I felt better.

Each morning of my stay, she set out a plate, napkin, knife, fork, spoon, juice glass, and coffee cup for me. She sliced fresh zucchini bread and opened the English muffins, butter, and three kinds of preserves. I gave her a hug each morning when I left, something I wish I could have done more when I was young. It was always goodbye then, until the next time when my parents would take me "over the bridge" to their house in South Hutchinson. This time, it was goodbye until later in the day, until the next morning and the next hug. She's smaller than me now, and I wish I could bring her fresh-baked breakfasts so she could rest. Wheat-free breakfasts, because I know she's allergic. I wish I could give her the opportunity to sit first, to save her troubled back, to not worry about her young ones out in the world.

I slept in her former bedroom while I was there, and she in my great grandma's former room down the hall. The first morning, she quietly made the bed while I was in the shower. The last morning, after I had been away for two nights, I found she had washed the clothes from the first half of my trip, and they were stacked neatly on the bed. Every night I turned on the fan for extra white noise and wished Scooter to stay quiet until daylight so she could sleep, so I would make as little impact as possible, so she could stay in bed until after we woke and walk into the kitchen fresh from dreams.

Grandma and Grandpa Jackson and I, from several years ago.

13 Ways of Looking at a Road Trip: 4, Faces

The face I left at home.

The faces of two adventurers ready for weeks on the road.

The faces of friends with the same name after a year apart.

The faces of family, of women I love.

The faces of a decade-long friendship in a place we love.

The face of a dog who loves views nearly as much as I do.

The face of someone who wishes she'd spent more time on the Konza Prairie when she had the chance.

The face of a happy rider.

The faces of parents who fell in love with a dog.

The face of a mother who wants us closer.

The faces of two generations with with same birthday and so much love.

The face of a dog running free in the Sandhills.

The face of a brother happily going 80 in his new Mustang.

The faces of siblings in our own front yard.

The face of a dog smelling the ocean for the first time.

The face of a woman near the end of one journey and the beginning of another.

But there are other faces unrepresented here. Like those of friends who helped shape me as a writer, a booklover, a student, a professional, a confident woman. Friends who knew me before any of that, who knew me as a girl just entering the world and believed in me when I didn't know what to believe in, who answered questions that I should have known much earlier, who challenged me to think beyond the simple future I had anticipated. Friends who have stayed with me even though we had lost touch. Friends who will forever touch me in more ways than they know. Friends who I hope will be in my life forever, in distance or close at heart and home.

Thank you to everyone who welcomed me back into their lives on this trip and to more that I didn't get to see this time around. This trip was about going forward by going back, and it proved true beyond anything I could have hoped for.

The Life Section

There is much written now about "the third place," that place where you go when you're not at work or at home, that other place where you feel comfortable and welcome. Starbucks stressed this. I remember in my interview I had to describe what makes a good third place and how I would contribute to making Starbucks that place for every one of our customers. Smile, greet them, ask them questions, make sure everything is clean, say goodbye.

But, though I miss the people I worked with at Starbucks (it's wildly been over a year since I worked there), it can't be my third place. I'm too familiar with it, and the lines are too harsh: tile floor, echos of the espresso machine, no corners to hide in. No, I need an anonymous, quiet place. And that, as I've mentioned here before, is Panera Bread on the west side.

I got there this morning around 8am, the perfect time on a weekend morning. There were only a few people sitting with their coffee, books, spouses. The music was not yet on, so the room felt hushed, as if we'd all just woken and were shuffling slowly into the dining room as siblings. I ordered oatmeal, a bagel, and coffee and went to my usual table for two near the window, as I like to look out in between pages and bites. This morning, I watched the rain collect in black puddles on the parking lot and read from Pulphead, essays about brothers in blood and literature.

As I waited for my oatmeal, I paused at an empty table and pulled the Life section from the pile of papers left by someone already there and gone. I knew my friend Steve would be featured by my friend Andrew today, so I found the article and stood there reading, then took it back to my table to finish it as I ate. The papers were gone when I went to put it back in the pile, but I noticed a couple nearby had taken it to share at their booth. Like a daughter passing her favorite section down the table to her parents, I placed Life on their pile and said "Here's the other section," smiling, and returning to my table.

A few minutes later a couple came in looking for a table with access to an outlet. A gentleman popped his head over a partition and said the corner booth has one. The man looked around at the corner behind me and said, "I don't see it." My mouth was full, so I waited to point it out until I would be legible. His wife then came over, scanned the wall, and said, "I don't see it either." "Along the baseboard," the man behind the partition called. I pointed, after a gulp, "It's black, it blends in." The woman looked again, her head moving quickly from one side of the wall to the other. "There, between the two tables on the bottom," I said, gently, as to my grandmother, and she finally sighed, "Oh!"

It's for moments of small connections in the quiet of a Sunday morning, over coffee and bagels, sometimes the windows spotted with rain, that I come here. I know no one, and no one knows me, but we come together in the most intimate time of day to be quiet alone or with a loved one, to share papers and help one another find what we're looking for. A family of strangers, if I've ever felt one.

By the time I leave just after nine, the booths in the main part have started filling, the music--mostly instrumental--marks the start of day, and no one says goodbye when they leave, the spell broken but taken with us to carry out the hours of Sunday and the noise of moments in the rush outside.

Voice

"This here quilt," she repeated, in her own voice. "This here quilt," she read, with punch, and the audacity to know when and where to repeat it. "This here quilt," she said, is full of pain. Or at least that's what she realized in the course of the poem, a response to a quilt block selected by Bathtub Collective member Gabriela for inclusion in the Teaching Gallery as a part of our collaboration with Lawrence High School sophomores.

This month, we began our Writers in the Schools (WITS) program, and, whenever we could, we spent time with Shannon Draper-Gard's 3rd and 6th hour literature students. Though I was only able to visit her 3rd hour once this month (thesis, you know), several of the collective members visited on two or three or four occasions to discuss the art and corresponding literature they had chosen for display in the teaching gallery, or to lead them in discussions of imagery, personification, or alliteration, or to lead a writing exercise. Last week, I sat with several of the students as they worked on their poetry anthologies for the unit. They were asked to find poems online that exemplified literary devices, such as simile, metaphor, and narrative. And they wrote their own poems in response to one of the art pieces we had chosen.

Today, Amy and I listened to them read their poems as they stood by the art that had inspired them. Though many of them were too shy to read, and several agreed only if their teacher would read it for them, those that did read stunned me.

I didn't write poetry in high school, didn't write anything creative but journal entries (and those could hardly be called creative), so I admit to being quite ignorant to the creative writing abilities of sixteen year olds. But one by one they read their poems about lost dogs, long roads, family portrait sessions, oak trees, and a quilt.

Two of the young ladies responded to the quilt: a section of probably 1" squares about one-foot long and five inches tall. It reminded me of Jedsen's mother and the way she likes patterns from the 30s--small patterns and varied patterns. The quilt block was not color-shaded like those that hang on the walls of Amish restaurants. There were no shapes. Just squares. It was simple but spoke for a larger use, one that keeps us warm, keeps us together, keeps us connected to our histories. And that, that is what "this here quilt" built up to. It began as it should have in the mind of a sixteen year old girl: what is so important about this ugly, ratty quilt on the back of the couch? She explained that every time her body brushed it (her line was striking--much better than I'm telling it here), her mother would go into "this here quilt...." Every time. Why? And then she understood. Her mother had been wrapped in that quilt when she was dying, dead. "This here quilt" was everything.

So I think of the artifacts in my family and what my mother treasures. Honestly, everything. The couch with its stuffing spilling from cat claws. The cabinet I bought at a garage sale for $35 when I was sixteen. My bedroom, preserved as I left it except without a bed.

When I got home from campus today and opened my apartment door, I stepped on a flat envelope on the rug inside. It was a photo mailer from my mother, and the postperson (who usually crumples--crumples--my mail into the vertical box at the base of the stairs) had slipped it under the door. I slipped out the contents as I sat on the couch, one hand to my ear talking to Jedsen on the phone, and on top was a faded green business envelope, the kind with the plastic-covered opening for displaying the company's address and the square where the stamp should be demanding "Put Stamp Here." In my mother's crisp handwriting, it read "Kari's golden hair," and beside it, a happy face sticker that said "Thinking of You." Behind the plastic of the envelope, a cluster of golden strands: mine, from age 4 1/2 (so says my father's more ragged note on the back).

 
My mother sent me my hair.

We have been at odds since I moved away for college in Manhattan 4 1/2 years ago, mostly due to the man in my life and the way I have changed since him. I am not the daughter she once had, and she has consistently reminded me of that. Two weeks ago, I finally sent her a letter, a 1500 word letter explaining how I felt about Jedsen, life, her, and what I wanted out of our relationship. We talked on the phone a week later, and a day after that I got a letter she had written me in return before she had finished reading my letter. We have made no strides. It's I want this, and I can't do that. We are not broken but cracked.

But what does this packet of my hair, now twenty years old, mean? With no letter, which I expected, to explain, how am I to take it? Has she given up on me? Or is she trying to remind me of who I once was, someone, I believe, I still largely am? "This here golden hair," what does it mean?

Additional

And, just over a week later, here's an article about Great Grandma: Children Cherish 'Dearest' Mother.

Yes, here I am keeping her memory alive. I'm writing about her, too. Writing about that slumber party. Writing about lawn care.

I have so many writings going about so many things...I'm a bit overwhelmed. Where do I begin? Where do I continue? Business cards? The dash? Black hole? I'm a lot overwhelmed.

Actually, I just discovered that my mom has not thrown away my business card collection. I couldn't believe it. I thought they were gone. But now I can go through them at Christmas and write from the real thing--not just what I remember or imagine they were.

I was a strange, organized child. I could give you the number of a Stain Master representative in Hutchinson. And so much more.

One hundred five and more

And so the era ends. My great grandma, Clara Jackson, died Friday morning at the age of 105.5. Or, more specifically, one hundred five years, eight months, and one day. March 26, 1904 - November 27, 2009.

You can see her and read more about her here. As well as her obituary.

Ever since she turned 100, since she moved in with her son and daughter-in-law (my grandparents), since I moved away and began the tradition of only returning to Hutchinson four or five times a year, I have been considering every visit with her my last. I would hug her, kiss her on the cheek, and let her know how pretty she looked in her purple shirt. Her short-term memory got worse in the last few years, but she would reminisce about her childhood, her children's youth, and her 70+ years of marriage like it was the day before.

I have been reminiscing, too, over the last couple of weeks. We were pals, me and great grandma, particularly when I was young. She babysat me. We did calisthenics in the living room. She helped me build a fort out of blankets and chairs. She let me eat a whole bag of marshmallows. She let me help her make her famous cinnamon rolls. She let me stand on the floor heater to warm my feet. She taught me to sew. She let me go through her jewelry. She let me start her car and back it out of the garage before I was old enough to drive. She brought cinnamon rolls to my class on my 12th birthday. She went to the 4th of July parade with us, sat in a lawn chair on Main Street, and then treated us to Church's chicken afterward. We helped her decorate graves with fresh peonies from her backyard on Memorial Day. I mowed her yard in patterns, in diagonals, in squares, in rows, in a heart once.

She spent her last week in Hospice in Hutchinson. I didn't see her again. She kept saying, "I should have died yesterday." She wanted to go. She has wanted to go for some time.

It snowed on my thirteenth birthday, in the middle of April. It was nearly a blizzard. I was having a slumber party at Great Grandma's house. After a series of pyramid photo shoots, one girl on top of the other with Elmo or teddy bear in joyful hand, we settled down in my great grandfather's former bedroom. The furniture was solid. The bed was a queen. It was low to the ground, headboardless. In a drunken exhaustion from the laughing, we collapsed in sleeping bags on the bed. I reach up to turn off the overhead light but nothing happened. I tried it again. It didn't work. I went across the room and flipped another switch. Lights off. We slept. We shivered. Through the open door, the woman in a slip and bra, peach satin. I looked up at her, ghostly in the dark cold. She flipped the switch back down. It was the heater, she told us in the morning, stern. We shouldn't have touched it. We had turned off the heater and were shivering.

darn, no tragedy

When I researched my ancestry in the past (for family trees for school or for the genealogical website Geni), I was anxious, yes anxious, to find tragedy or strangeness. I found a little:

Mary Jane Shannon (my great-great grandmother) was married seven times and gave all of her children away to the Arnold family in Illinois. She drowned in a creek.

Mary Whittenburg (another great-great grandmother) left her husband and family and moved to Wichita in the late 1800s to become a prostitue.

(I see a pattern with women named Mary leaving their families in the late 19th century. Remind me to never name my child Mary.)

Daniel Lentz (great-great grandfather) died in a house fire in 1902.

His mother, Catherine, (great-great-great grandmother) was a full-blood Pawnee living in Arlington, Kansas.

John Kliewer (great-great-great grandfather) was a much-in-demand coffin maker in Russia. Then he was a Dietrich Gaeddart immigrant to America in 1874.

This generation lags in drama. I mean, my family has so much drama--just like yours, I'm sure--but there have been no fires or great abandonments.

One Hundred Five

My great grandma turns 105 today. 105.

Here's an article: Woman Nearing 105th Birthday Still Immersed in the Joys of Life.

She lives with her son and daughter-in-law, my dad's parents, and has for several years. She was against it for a long time--wanted to stay in her own house by herself for as long as she could. She's very independent. She drove until she was, I think, 95. She babysat me when she was nearing 90. She's amazing.

Her daughter and grandchildren and great grandchildren are coming from California to celebrate. I, too, am headed to Hutchinson tomorrow. I never know what visit will be the last visit with her. She just keeps on.

I don't think I will ever publish this poem, so this is a piece of her. By me. 2008.

Great Grandma’s Kitchen

Oh, how we rolled
out the dough. How she beat it
with her bony hands and taught me
to press evenly. How the rolling
pin was too big for me
to handle. How she brushed
on the butter, the melted
yellow, and made impressions
in the dough. How she let me
sprinkle on the cinnamon with even
shakes. Then roll it all. Roll it tight. And
cut it in circles to line a circular pan.
And then how she mixed
the icing and showed me how to work
a wooden spoon. How I then painted
the icing on pillowed rolls
like she did, the white dripping
into puddles. How she watched
Lawrence Welk while we waited
for the pan to cool and set two
plates on the table. How she
let me lick the icing from my fingers
because she did it too.