Veronica
Pulling slowly into the yard, the sound of the gravel crunched under my tires and I could feel it up through the base of my spine. My shoulders ached with the stress tension that had been building there all morning. My forehead and palms were damp with sweat.
I can do this. She’s not gonna get the best of me. I’m a nurse, I’ll just think of her as a patient. I will talk to the hospice workers as professionals, as a team I am a part of. We’re just figuring out a treatment plan.
I’ve got this.
I got out of the car and walked to the front door. One hand gripped the doorknob, the other tucked a few errant strands of hair behind my ear. I squared my shoulders, and walked in.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Twenty minutes later I threw the door open, not bothering to close it, not caring to slam it, and marched across the yard in a few strides.
As I yanked open my car door I half turned and yelled, “Fuck you! I hope you rot in hell!”
I jumped in my car - this time I DID care to slam the door - gunned it and sped out onto the road, gravel kicking up behind me in an arc while Mommy cried and screamed at the front door and the hospice workers behind her stared at each other with bewildered expressions.
__________________________________________________________________________________
Anne
Well that was a disaster.
I don’t know what I had expected, really. Veronica and Mommy had such a history, and hadn’t really seen each other or even so much as talked on the phone in, what, a year? More?
But what choice had there been? Mary was in LA, and wouldn’t be able to get out there for a couple weeks. With the kids and work, I couldn’t make the two and a half hour drive right away, not before the hospice team needed to get out there to start the process. Veronica was, after all, a nurse, and only a half hour away. If they were ever going to make things right between them, this was it. We’d just had to ask her for this. Desperate times and all that.
So it hadn’t work out, not the end of the world. At least the hospice team had gotten a taste of what they’d be up against in the coming months. I’m sure they’d seen worse. Right?
I was still in a bit of shock that this was actually happening. I had only gotten the phone call a week ago. Mommy was dying? I remember hanging up the phone thinking, no, that couldn’t be right. Her tone didn’t match the words. She sounded …glad? No. Triumphant. See? Didn’t I tell everyone I was sick? Didn’t I tell them all?
And so little time! From what she told me, the doctors said she only had a few months to live! Hard to wrap my head around it.
All these thoughts were jumbled in my head as I crossed the border from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, my overnight bag in the back of my Subaru. At some point I’d have to make some bigger changes, at least on a temporary basis. Talk to Fred about taking care of the kids, contact my boss about taking some time off, figure out care for the farm animals and house pets. Details. It would get figured out.
A stop at Wawa for gas and a bathroom break - or a “fill and empty” as I called it in my home health care job - and a half hour later I saw a sign pointing me in the direction of the Causeway.
The bridge.
For so many years, that bridge was like the front door to our home, for better or worse. And we’d had our fair share of both…
___________________________________________________________________________
Sitting in the back seat, I was waking, disoriented, to an unfamiliar smell. I could feel my legs plastered to the vinyl seat. It was a warm September day, and the windows were open. My hair was blowing wild, whipping across my face and stinging my eyes, obscuring my vision. The car was climbing up over a gentle rise. The air smelled of salt, and fish, and something wild. There was a glistening. Bright lights reflecting off of something, but what? I sat up a little straighter, pushing Mary gently off my shoulder, and leaned closer to the open window. Water! Shining, sparkling blue water, with boats sprinkled on its surface like confetti. Seagulls flew in the sky above.
“Mommy, where are we?”
“We’re almost home, sweetheart.”
But this wasn’t home. We drove away from home this morning. Home was a white house with a big green yard and a white picket fence and a porch with a swing on it. This was a bridge over water. Lots of water. I could see land in the distance far off on the other side.
Soon Mommy was parking our car on the street in front of a square building with a flat roof. The bottom was made of cinder blocks painted turquoise and had a garage door smack-dab in the middle of it. It looked like something Donald and I would have made with our wooden building blocks. Next door was a lot with boats - covered in peeling paint and algae - all up on frames, tarps the size of circus tents flapping at loose ends.
“Here we are children!"
Mary and I clambered out of the backseat, Mary holding Mitzi on a leash. Donald jumped out of the front seat, a cardboard box and potato chip bag falling to the ground at his feet. We scurried around the side of the blocky structure, opened the gate of a chain link fence, and ran in. The whole backyard was all gravel and sand, our own private sandbox! Mitzi squatted and peed in it. At the far end of the yard was a dock that jutted out into the bay, and from there I could see the bridge we had just driven over. Donald ran out onto the dock and slipped on the wet boards, nearly going overboard into the bay water below. Mommy screamed and clutched at her throat, her signature move. Mitzi barked and bolted, pulling the leash out of Mary’s hand, and ran to join Donald on the dock. Wiggling her little stumpy tail and peeing a little more with each step, she Christened the rest of our sandbox yard as she ran. Mary and I looked at each other and followed, and soon we were all on the slick dock, on our bellies with hands outstretched trying to feel the water as it lapped against the barnacle-covered pilings. Mitzi barked again, seagulls cried overhead, and we all laughed, as Mommy tilted her head and smiled a sad little smile.
That night we all went to sleep in our new house. Mary and I shared a bed in one room (we’d had our own beds back home), and Donald was in a bed in the other bedroom. I’d asked Mommy where she was going to sleep, since there were only the two bedrooms. “I’ll sleep on the couch!” she’d answered cheerily. “I don’t sleep that much anyway.”
I don’t know how long I’d been asleep, but I woke when Mitzi jumped up on the bed and made a nest at my feet. Just before I drifted back to sleep, I heard Mommy’s voice in the other room. From where I lay, I could see her in the kitchen, sitting with a cup of tea in front of her on the table. There were opened boxes on the floor all around her, with their contents pulled out and spilling onto the floor. She held the phone to one ear, and twisted the long cord with her free hand. A low grumbly voice came through the other end of the phone, in contrast to her soft one.
“I know, officer. I know what an outlandish request this is … but I just don’t know what else to DO.”
Do about what? I wondered. Were we in trouble? Why was she on the phone with the police in the middle of the night?
“It’s just that I’ve just moved here and I don’t know a blessed soul,” she continued in her soft southern voice, “and I’m afraid I can’t find the alarm clock. I know I packed it, but I’ve searched high and low in every box, and I simply can’t find it. My sweet children start at their new school tomorrow and I want to be sure to get up in time to get them ready. I don’t want them to be late on their first day!” Grumble, grumble, grumble on the other end. She smoothed her hair, placed her hand at her throat (didn’t she realize he couldn’t see her?) and softened her voice even more… “I would just be ever so grateful if you could see to it to call me in the morning. Maybe at 6:45? For the children…”
Mitzi snuggled into my legs a little deeper and I drifted back to sleep, Mary’s warm breath like a whisper on my back.
In the morning, I heard the phone ring. I guessed it was 6:45.
And so, the next day, we made it to school. Mary was in first grade at Ethel Jacobsen, in the next town over. Donald and I walked the two blocks to LBI Elementary. He was in sixth grade with Miss McNeil, who everyone said was a witch. I was in fourth grade with Miss Reilly. Kids whispered to me that she was an ex-nun. What of it? I thought. All my teachers before had been nuns. I didn’t hold them in very high regard. My most recent nun/teacher experience was with Sister Bridget at Mount Carmel. She hated me, I knew she did. One day I got to school late, I don’t remember why. All my classmates were at their desks doing work. As I passed by her desk to take my seat, Sister Bridget looked at me with her cold, hard eyes, wrinkled up her nose, and sneered, “So it’s YOU that smells like cat pee.” At recess that day, kids started calling me Cat Pee Girl. Not very inventive, but creativity is not a prerequisite to hurt, and I shrunk up inside when they laughed and held their noses. There was a girl there, I don’t remember her name, with soft curls that bounced around her shoulders. I don’t even think we were friends, really, but she said to the others, “You know, it could be me that smells like cat pee. I noticed a hole in my closet that my cat goes into.” I looked at her in wonderment. It was clearly a lie. Why would she do that? It was the bravest act I had encountered at that point in my young life. I’ve never forgotten it. Never. And I don’t even know her name…
Miss Reilly was NOT like Sister Bridget. Maybe she left the order because she couldn’t meet the bar for meanness. She just didn’t have what it took. What she DID have was the ability to teach, and the means to reach young hearts, and to love. She wore a cap of dark curls close against her head like a habit. She had plump apple cheeks and kind, smiling eyes. I entered my fourth grade class late that first day (police station alarm clock notwithstanding), and she stood me in front of the class, daring me to hate her with this move, and put her hands on my shoulders. “Class, this is Anne. She’s just moved here from North Jersey”. As a unit, the students shifted backwards in their seats, their eyes widened. I heard someone gasp. I was wearing my jean jacket, my most prized possession. I still couldn’t believe I was allowed to wear it to school after Mt. Carmel’s strict dress code of navy and green plaid uniforms. My grandmother had embroidered a wild mustang on the back of this jacket, traced from a drawing I had made. I pulled the jacket close around me, tossed my long overgrown bangs like the forelock of the mustang, tilted my chin up in defiance, and tried to look North Jersey, in order to hide what I was feeling inside. I was scared. School, children, teachers - especially nuns, ex or otherwise - had not been kind to me. I was in a new home, a new school, I hadn’t seen my father since I didn’t know when. And now I was being presented to this new class like a show and tell project. Before I had a chance to figure out my next move, Miss Reilly guided me to an empty desk next to a prim girl with chipmunk cheeks and wide, curious eyes. She had a line of bangs so straight and even it could give you a paper cut. Her hair was tied with yarn into two high ponytails that spiraled neatly into bologna curls. Her hands were literally folded on her desk, and she wore - I swear to God - a pleated skirt and saddle Oxfords. Her name was Noelle, and we would be inseparable for years.
My brother and sister and I spent our afternoons on the beach when Mommy could take us, or in our backyard. On the beach she would sit in the sand with her arms around her knees and her long skirt melding into the sand, anchoring her. While we splashed in the water or dug in the sand, she’d sit like that for hours, with a faraway look in her eyes. In our yard, she’d be inside while we played. Donald liked to sit on the dock and fish. With his skinny frame leaned against a piling, his eyes would dart through the water, scanning for signs of life. He’d catch minnows in a minnow trap, and then use them as bait to catch bigger fish with a fishing pole. I didn’t clearly understand the concept of a middleman, but there seemed to be one at play there, somehow.
Mary and I liked to play tea-set. We had a tiny China tea-set we’d brought with us from the old house, and a little plastic sifter. We would sit in the sand, and pour a shovelful of our backyard into the sifter. The sand would go directly into the tea pot to be poured into our cups, and the best of the rocks would serve as little muffins and cookies, to be placed on plates.
Dialogue here. Mary explaining her concept of an island?
At one point, someone gave us a crab trap. We’d been instructed to bait it with chicken, and Donald was suddenly a man on a mission. One day, when the tide and other maritime conditions were just right, he caught crab after crab after crab. Mommy, seizing an opportunity to feed her family and be frugal all at once, decided to cook the crabs for dinner. Raised in Louisiana, she was no stranger to the craw fish boil, and figured this was no different. But she’d never dealt with live crawdads. Not knowing any different, she put a large pot of water on the stove. She placed the crabs in the pot. She then turned … the stove … on. So the poor crabs went from basically having a party in a pool, to sitting in a nice warm bath, to… I don’t want to say what came next. Mary and I were sitting on the floor playing jacks, Donald was nearby reading a comic book, and Mommy was cooking in the kitchen. I looked up when I heard something akin to screaming. Little tiny screams. Next thing I knew, Mommy was slapping at the crabs with a wooden spoon as they frantically tried to climb out of the Pot of Death. As the water turned to a boil, the crabs were screaming (likely air escaping from their shells, but to nine year old me, screaming) and desperately trying to claw their way over each other and out of the pot. Little Mary started crying when she saw what was going on, and yelled, “Don’t hurt the crabth! Put them back in the water!” I jumped up, wide-eyed, knowing but not wanting to know what was happening to these creatures pulled from the bay in our backyard only that afternoon. I put my arms around Mary and shushed her, telling her everything was okay, when I knew everything - for the crabs anyway - was about as bad as it could get. Donald had leapt off the sofa, comic book abandoned, his large brown eyes alive with a look that was equal parts dread and amusement. He was a kind, sympathetic soul, so he felt for the crabs that he had caught earlier, I knew he did. But watching our mother stricken with horror, swatting at these creatures in their life and death struggle, just set his brain on fire. He ran back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, running his hands through his hair and yelling, “Mom, get that one! Mom, get a bigger spoon!” One of the crabs made it out of the pot, landed on the floor, and immediately started skittering across the kitchen, with Donald in hot pursuit. “Anne, get it, it’s headed your way!” But I jumped onto the sofa, clutching Mary to me more for my own protection than hers, and she started climbing me like a tree. Donald pounced on the crab, then yelled out when its claw clamped down on his finger. He yanked it off and dunked it back in the pot while Mary wailed and Mommy screamed and swatted and cried, till the last of the crabs fell silently back into the pot.
The next day, when we went to the Foodtown grocery store, Mommy pinned an index card to the bulletin board. In her sharply slanted handwriting, it read, “Crab trap for sale. Gently used.”
Mommy spent much of her days and nights seeming lost in her own thoughts. She was young, only 30, but had such a worn out expression on her face. Her head was perpetually tilted on an angle, like she was trying to hear something far off. Her high cheekbones, fair skin, and brown, almond-shaped eyes were framed by soft, wavy dark hair that fell halfway down her back. I didn’t understand how someone could be so beautiful but look so sad all at the same time. It was hard to connect with her even for simple things like homework, certainly not for any deeper questions about what was happening in our lives, why we moved to this lonely place, when would we see Daddy again.
The house we lived in was up on pilings, as many of the Island houses were, with the ground-level space used for garage and storage. The second floor was divided into two apartments, one street-side and one bayside, and we were the lucky ones that had the bayside rooms. The windows at the back of the house (which was our front and only entrance) faced west overlooking the bay, and the view was achingly beautiful. The mainland in the distance was miles across the water, and the bridge was the only way on or off the island. From our vantage point, we could see the arc of the bridge, boats coming and going on the water, and seagulls floating on the wind currents above. We soon learned to drop what we were doing when Mommy called for us to come see the sunset. Sunsets, or any random moments of beauty, were the only time Mommy really seemed to come alive. I never understood how something that was so much the same — the sun dropping over the horizon — could be so different night after night. The rich deep colors of the sky, growing ever more intense by the minute, spilled down onto the waters of the bay, not just coloring them, but seeming to change the very texture of the surface. We were as mesmerized by it as she was, though we always had to groan and grumble to not let on that we loved it. But we would stand there in silence by the window, the four of us pressed together, to watch what beauty could be wrought from an ending.
Those windows overlooking the bay were a source of beauty, but as the late summer turned to fall and then winter, they also became a source of bone-chilling cold as the icy winds whipped across the bay and rattled the windows and door. There were many houses on the island, but almost none had been built with year-round living in mind. Most had electric heat from baseboards or floor grates. Mary and I would pull a footstool up to our floor grate and just sit there, coloring books on our knees, to feel the warm air blowing up through the vent. In the past, I just remembered feeling warm in my home, even when it was cold out. All the years I lived at the Island, I would never know that sense of ambient warmth again. There was cold, and then there was a place where heat came from. If you wanted to feel warm, you needed to be near that source.
Mommy sought a different source of warmth. The kind that came from strong arms. I remember John, tall and dark. He was kind and soft-spoken. I didn’t understand his role in my life, but I liked him, and was glad when he came around. John once gave me a pair of cowboy spurs he got from Mexico. They were made of a bronzey metal, with worn leather straps, and had a horse engraved on the side of each. I cherished those spurs, and would keep them through all our moves. There was another man, I only remember seeing him once. His unruly red hair fell to his shoulders, and he was wiry looking. Shifty. I didn’t trust him. I didn’t know why, but there was something about him.
At some point that dark and cold winter, Daddy came to visit. He brought with him a lady he said he was going to marry. I didn’t understand this. To be fair, I didn’t understand much of the circumstances of my life. I didn’t understand divorce, or moving away from our big house and our friends to this desolate place. I felt but could not comprehend the depth of my mother’s loneliness. I could not reconcile the clash of missing my father, with the joy of seeing him again, but with his arm around this woman I had never met, and the news that she was to be my … my stepmother? What fresh evil was this? Why was a Disney villain suddenly to be part of my life?
A couple months later, there was much more to be confused about as Donald, Mary and I moved to Kentucky to live with Daddy and Caggy. Was this an extended visit? Was it permanent? If anyone told us, it didn’t stick, and we didn’t know who to ask or how to ask it. We didn’t know how to put words to an ache, to a hole.
But we were kids. Maybe they didn’t explain because in the end, it didn’t matter if we understood or not, it was the plan the grown-ups had contrived. So our tea sets and coloring books and toy soldiers and clothes were repacked in more boxes. We said goodbye to our mother, not knowing when we would see her again, not understanding anything about this. I hugged her softness and warmth close to me and inhaled the scent of her. She smelled of her powder puff, and cheap shampoo, and of The Island. As I pulled away, I thought there seemed a little more of her to hug. A little extra softness that hadn’t been there before.
And then we were all deposited, bewildered, in a third floor apartment in Lexington, Kentucky.
In Lexington, we all finished out the year at Tates Creek Elementary. No one there knew I was the Cat Pee Girl. No one knew I was the one to be teased. There was a boy there that had that role already. They told me he was an Indian. An Indian! I had so many questions. It was my life-long dream to live as an Indian brave. Although I was madly in love with both John Denver and Grizzly Adams, I would have ditched both of them in a heartbeat to have five minutes to talk with this boy, to learn from him. But at recess, there was a chase. I got caught up in the mob. Who were we chasing and why? It was the Indian boy. I was the fastest runner, I had always won all the races at recess at Mount Carmel. Soon I was at the front of the pack, but I didn’t know what I was doing. What was I supposed to do if I caught up to him? I didn’t think the rest of the kids just wanted to talk. Suddenly, at the top of a small hill, I saw a foot kick out at me. It connected square in my gut, toppling me over me backwards, and knocking the wind out of me. As I tumbled down the hill, I was overcome with shame, and knew I deserved the kick. I had been caught up in that mob to give chase to someone that I would have worshiped, and I did it only to throw off my role of being the one others laughed at. I would never again leverage another person’s position just to improve my own.
In Kentucky we were warm once again, and we got to school on time. There were more rules, fewer sunsets. Certainly no one to call us over to look at one. We were not allowed to sit on the green sofa unless our hands were washed and we were dressed in our church clothes. But if we were good children, we were allowed to have popcorn and Sprite and watch a movie on TV on Friday nights.
Dialogue: liver and onions?
It was all so very orderly. There was no mention of a tired and lonesome mother, though we were able to talk to her on the phone sometimes. We all tried hard not to cry when we spoke to her, but that was difficult for Mary, and she didn’t always make it. She was only seven. I understood that I needed to watch over her and comfort her. Donald understood he had the same duties for me.
We soon moved out of the apartment building and into a house. It had just been built, and was tucked at the end of a cul-de-sac by the name of Personality Court. I had never seen a neighborhood with less personality than that of Personality Court. I was old enough at that time to understand the word “irony”.
School let out for the summer, and the next month we took a road trip down to Louisiana, as we did most summers, to visit our grandparents. Daddy had been raised mostly in Mississippi, and Mommy in Louisiana, so all of our relatives were either there or in Texas. We were excited for all the usual reasons - Big Mama’s house was nothing short of magical - but also because we would see Mommy again! We knew that it would just be a visit, we wouldn’t be going back to live with her, at least not yet. But we hadn’t seen her in months and couldn’t wait to see her and hug her and hear her sweet voice.
We ran in the door, and then stopped in our tracks. There was our mother…
With a baby in her arms.
“Hello, my darlings. Meet your new baby sister!”
Her name was Veronica, and she was beautiful and perfect. I’d never cared one way or the other for babies, but suddenly there was nothing else. When she was placed in my arms, I just stared at her, beaming, utterly entranced. She was wearing a little white dress and was chewing on the back of her hand. Her chin glistened with slobber. Where her head was nestled in the crook of my arm I could see she was nearly bald. But the few wisps of hair I saw on her head were….
Red….
One more mystery thrown on the heap.
Later, I sat with Mommy on Big Mama’s screen porch, in the thick Louisiana heat. I didn’t know how to ask, or even if I should, but I mustered up the courage…
“Where do babies come from? I mean, how do ladies get pregnant?”
Her eyes immediately fixed to a spot on the floor off in the corner. She cleared her throat.
“Well darlin’ … you see, a man gives a woman a seed … ”
She cleared her throat again, opened her mouth, and then closed it. She got up and whispered, “I think I hear the baby crying”, and went back inside the house.
And with the image of a man shyly handing a woman a seed, my first and last explanation of the birds and the bees was concluded.
With a repeated scene of more hugs and tears, we left Mommy again. This time, we had to say goodbye to a sister, too.
We all started a new year of school in Lexington. We made new best friends. We worked at perfecting our roles of being orderly, structured children, of not asking questions. But we silently craved moments of randomness, times of our dinner being beaten back into the pot. We waited patiently for the day when we would be reunited with our mother and baby sister, not even knowing if that day was ever to come.
Finally it did. Just after Christmas, the three of us walked across the tarmac and climbed the portable steps to an airplane that would take us back to New Jersey, back to The Island, back to our mother. I turned around just before I stepped onto the plane, and saw Daddy crying as he waved goodbye. I found my seat, looked out the window, and silently cried. I didn’t know whether they were tears of sorrow for losing my father again, or joy for returning to my mother, or unrest over not knowing where we were going.
After a few days with Mommy in our new home, I found myself bouncing and swaying in my seat, as I absently picked at the rip in the green vinyl bench beside my leg. I stared intently out the small window fogged with breath and fingerprints. I was looking for my house.
This was my first time riding a school bus. I thought it would be exciting. In Lexington, and in our first house on The Island, we were close enough to walk to our school. Before that, we were in Catholic school, and Daddy would drop us off on his way to work. But now our new home was miles from school. And since Donald was on the middle school bus and Mary on the EJ bus, I was alone. I knew to get on the bus heading to the south end of The Island, but I did not know my stop.
Ask the bus driver, I thought. But my throat was tight with embarrassment and fear. Any ten year child should know their bus stop.
So I watched out the window, hoping I would see my house from the Boulevard. I knew what it looked like, this house that was now my home. We’d moved in over Christmas break. It was beautiful. It was big. The dunes were just steps away from this oceanfront home with brown cedar shingles and yellow trim.
Of course, we didn’t own the house. We didn’t even live in the house itself. We lived in the little apartment above the garage. Church mice. The Bishop owned the house, and he lived there some weekends and a good bit over the summer. Mommy had taken a job as his housekeeper and cook. The apartment was adorable in its tiny scale. There was a living room, with a table on the far wall, and a strip of kitchen at the back. There was a small bath, and one bedroom. Mary and I shared a twin bed, Donald slept on a trundle that pulled out from underneath, and Veronica’s crib fit along the back wall. Mommy slept on the couch in the living room.
With the sleeve of my winter coat, I cleared my breath from the window, but still couldn’t see far enough up the side streets to recognize my house. I could get off the bus if I see a pay phone, I thought. But who would I call? Mommy? I didn’t know my new number yet. The police? But I didn’t know what address to tell them.
Then, the last stop. The remaining kids stood up, gathered their books, and began shuffling their way to the front. I got up and moved forward with them, trying to appear confident, praying the bus driver wouldn’t recognize me as the fake that I was. My feet connected with the pavement. The bus door whooshed shut behind me, and a gust of wind stole my breath. I turned eastward, toward the sea, toward my home, and marched across the empty lanes of the wide road. I walked with conviction the two blocks to Ocean Boulevard. I knew with certainty that my house was on this street, but where? I looked left, and then right, but I had no clue. It occurred to me that I would be able to recognize it more easily from the beach, so I walked straight ahead, wavering only slightly as the road disappeared from beneath my feet and became the endless sand that grabbed at me and threatened to pull me under. Once I crested the dunes, with the eternal ocean before me, I paused again and wondered, which way? In the coin-toss of my mind, I turned right, towards the southern tip of The Island.
I walked with purpose, my head shifting constantly from the sand before me to the ocean on my left, to the houses on my right. I walked till my legs and feet ached with the effort of battling the sand. I walked till my hands and face were numb with the cold, numb from the wintry sea spray carried on the biting wind. I thought many times that I should turn around and walk the other direction. But what if my house was on the next block? One more block … one more … one more …
The light was fading. The salt of my tears, so cold against my face, mixed with the salt of the ocean and left my face raw and chapped.
I was afraid. I looked out at the ocean and saw a gull floating on the waves. Adrift. I was adrift. I was lost.
A child lost to poverty.
A child who had lost her father. Like the bridge that tenuously connected the strip of Island to the mainland, so the chasm between my father and myself was spanned. Separated by a vast distance, physical and otherwise, yet still tethered thinly together.
A child lost from her mother. No physical distance to separate us, not with the close living quarters, yet unreachable nonetheless. She was the alluring sandbar that looked so welcoming with its clear, gentle waters to splash in. So close, almost within reach, yet separated by a gulf of dark, swirling water. The sandbar could only be reached by chancing the riptide. So much promise, so much risk. There was no bridge to safely cross over to connect with her. To connect with her mind. She was an island within an island.
A child lost in the most literal sense, as I did not know how to find my way home.
And so I began to pray. I prayed for home. I prayed for my Mother’s arms. I prayed for the scanty warmth of the baseboard heater. I prayed that God would send me a sign. And He did.
As I trudged on, and wiped at my tears and my leaking nose with the back of my sleeve, I began to notice ….
Everyone was walking the other way. Every person (though there were not many), every dog, even the seagulls all seemed to be flying north. I took this as my sign. I turned around and started walking with renewed purpose. Now the ocean was to my right, and the northern tip of The Island, with its lighthouse, was many miles straight ahead. I felt rejuvenated. I felt determination creeping into my soul. The wind dried my tears and I pressed on, picking up speed.
When I turned in the direction I was pointed, I left behind my fears, my indecision, my feeling of being adrift on an uncertain sea. I shed them; they fell off me and pooled briefly in my footsteps before sinking into the sand, gone forever, I would not define myself as lost. Not lost to poverty, or distant parents, or dependence on others for my fate.
The tide was coming in. The waves were crashing forcefully on the shore, creeping closer up the beach. But they would not take me. They would not take me from my home. I was no longer lost. This place was home. My mother was home, even when her mind carried her far away. My brother and sisters were home.
Most importantly, I was home in myself. In my heart, my soul, my strength, my thoughts and ideas and faith. Home.
And then, with the light nearly gone from the sky, up on the left nestled in the dunes, sat the brown shingled house with the yellow trim, with light spilling from the windows of the little apartment above the garage.
I was home.
