Location/occasion: Late summer of 1998, Branbury State Park, Vt., – between Brandon and Middlebury, in case you’re curious, or have ever been there. Car camping.

Husband: bad knees, needs electricity or at least a car battery to run the machine to help him breathe at night, but eager to see (and show the kids) the night sky without much light pollution, scared of heights, a worrier and a careful planner.

Me: happy to assure husband I will “be careful” … no clue what that means. Generally my first thought when something goes wrong is, “What will I tell Lew?”

Kids: 10 and 12. Not the least bit scared of heights. Quite agile.

I think we stayed there two or three nights. Nope, must’ve been just two; the car battery couldn’t last three. One evening, husband explained over dinner (with a Styrofoam plate) what a galaxy is and why the stars you see are all in our galaxy and in all different directions, but the Milky Way IS our galaxy and appears as a band in the sky. (“How could a star over there be “in” the Milky Way?” Thinking back to the thick plate helped.) Then he had us stay up until it was late enough and dark enough to see the “teapot” constellation (which spews steam which looks like it becomes the Milky Way (which I hadn’t seen as well we could that night at any point since I was a kid in Western Mass.) and ALSO another galaxy (the only thing we could see which wasn’t in our galaxy) with the naked eye and also through the telescope he had brought. Great science lesson. (Is this why neither of them has any interest in science?)

This was the next night or the previous night. I noticed the rangers were leading a “sunset walk” to a nearby outlook at say, 6:30PM. I wanted to go in the worst way, and the girls were interested too. Bad knees/scared of heights husband couldn’t come. “Be careful. Do you have everything you need? Don’t let them … ” Of course, of course, of course not. (It must be safe; the rangers are leading it.) We got there … what, a few minutes early? No, must’ve been a few minutes late? In any case, no one was there. But there was only one place it could be; Cat had been there before. So we started the climb. The first part involved a lot of boulder scrambling. I figured we’d meet the ranger and the group on the way up. Then there were choices and Cat had crossed that stream, gone through that meadow – but the other way was the only one reasonable way to a sunset view.

We finally got to the place where you could duck under just a few bushes and be on an outlook. I can’t remember – was it a 45 minute climb? I don’t think it was over an hour. I hadn’t expected it to be more than a half-hour because I knew when the sun would set, and I figured the rangers would have planned for us to get there in time for the moment of sunset, let us admire it for a few minutes because isn’t it always best afterwards? and then head us back down, not wanting us to be hiking in the dark. We must have been just behind the group the whole time. We got on to the ledge/rocky outcropping. The view was just incredible – over 180 degrees with the color going from orange to deep blue; the layers of mountains in the distance each a different shade … just gorgeous. (“It’s nice to be here without Lew worrying the girls will fall off. Hey, if we cross to that ledge we would be able to see better. Good thing Lew isn’t here to be freaking out. It’s really quite safe – steep but not unstable.”) It started to rain a bit, then stopped. People appeared from the other direction than I expected – without a ranger – we chatted for a bit and they moved on. It started to rain again.

“Hmm. The ranger group still hasn’t come back and now that rock we crossed is wet and slippery. It must be closer back to the campground in the other direction – where those folks came from. It would be a bad idea to go back the way we came – we’d have to go up and over this bit and there were some pretty steep places other places … and we don’t have a flashlight.”

I’m not at all sure that we ever found the right downward trail. If we did, we lost it several times. It wasn’t rocky and steep – I was right about that. It was borderline swampy. It didn’t seem like it could get dark so fast but of course, we were no longer on a rocky outcropping. And where there had been a nice breeze before, now there were amazing mosquitoes. (Are you wondering about bug stuff? Look, we didn’t bring food, flashlights, or rain gear, you think I thought of bug stuff?) We could hear people in the campground, but a very different part of the campground, and we didn’t get to it for a very long time. I couldn’t see my watch, so I don’t know how long.

At some point the worry shifted from “Will we get back ok?” to “What will my frantic husband do?” Then the realization hit that he – bad knees and all – would start up after us, the way we weren’t going down. Ultimately we did get back, and first I tried to find the rangers who (I was sure) would help me retrieve my husband. That’s when I found out that the ranger-led sunset hike had been the previous week (which also explained why the hike started as late as it had … sunset had gotten noticeably earlier since then). And no, rangers do not hunt for missing husbands.

Jennifer

Loyal readers of the blog may think I’ve forgotten that I already wrote about calling the young man who killed my grandmother in a car accident, but this is a different grandmother and different phone call. 

***************

My mother should have realized by December ’87 that there was an important reason she had been losing weight for a year or so and had begun to have difficulty in keeping food down, but she refused various medical tests which she had previously vowed never to have again. By March ’89 she was diagnosed with untreatable stomach cancer. In April, May, and June pagan spirituality became increasingly important to her. The Goddess was going to save her. Also in that period of time she talked for hours on the phone with all kinds of people about the exciting connections she was making between things she heard on the radio about physics, observed about birds, saw in art shows, remembered learning about the native people of ___, etc. When I overheard snippets of those phone calls, I wondered: What would my experience be on the other end of the phone? Clearly, I would listen because she was (my sister / my daughter / my best friend from college from whom I hadn’t heard in 10 years), but would I be excited by the connections she was making or would I think she was crazy? Would I have any idea, on the other end of the phone, that this 5’ 7” tall woman now weighed 85 pounds?

My mother had read, and had asked us all to read, Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine, and Miracles. We weren’t supposed to think that she was going to die. This from a woman who had considered euphemisms to be way worse than many people consider swears – she never could respect people who said “make love” instead of “have sex” or “pass away” instead of “die”. (I know, I know, Bernie Siegel wasn’t suggesting we use euphemisms, but that we all live love and hope. Screw that.) Despite that, it was not too hard for us to tell those who asked how she really was. But my grandmother (her mother) didn’t ask any of us.

My mother asked for and we planned a big solstice celebration. Just as the sun would turn, would travel the other way, at the summer solstice; the Goddess was going to begin healing her then. We double-checked with the hospice worker who came to the house, “How long?” I didn’t really need to double-check. I was gaining 20, 30, 40 pounds and making a new life inside me, due to be born just after the solstice, she was losing 20, 30 pounds and … (no euphemisms, now). Her favorite creation myth had been the Wintu Indians’ story about how birth and death came to be, because the gods had first planned humans to experience neither one, but ended up with both: “They will know the gladness of birth. They will know the sorrow of death. And through these two things together people will come to know love.” (Take that, Bernie Siegel.) So I knew. But we really weren’t sure her mother knew.

So I called my grandmother. I haven’t been able to reconstruct the words I chose, but I suspect I thought that by focusing on the cycles my mother so appreciated, I could pretend I wasn’t using euphemisms. The conversation wasn’t quite as hard to have as it had been to anticipate – my grandmother did know. I learned then that there is no age after which it becomes easier to lose a child. (Or if there is, it isn’t age 88.)

We had the solstice celebration. My mother died four days later. Three days after that I had a terrifyingly brief labor and m’hija, La Chica, was born.

Jennifer

We had the funeral for my aunt Beatrice . The funeral seemed to be exactly what a Catholic funeral ought to be.

After the funeral, one sister, one daughter, and I returned to the house to resume the sorting-and-taking-stock task. Around dinner time, a girl appeared who had just learned of Beatrice’s death that afternoon. She was very upset and kept saying how close they were. Did we need any help? We had her come in. It turned out that she was a junior in high school and lived a few blocks away. Moira met Beatrice last summer when Cranberry was loose in the evening so she brought Cranberry to the address on the tag. Beatrice was on the floor, and “was not well” or “had been drinking”. They became good friends.

Beatrice told her all about: growing up (Moira’s grandmother grew up in the same place), her first marriage (but not more than we’d figured out already from the wedding album), all the schnausers (we had remembered them all, but Moira knew that Groucho was the one that they “adopted” , I vaguely remember that), the Frost work (and Moira’s English teacher was going to have Mrs. Smith in when they did Frost in the spring; not yet because the teacher didn’t want the end of the year to be anticlimactic; yes, Moira does have a copy of her published book on Frost), the current book (Moira was glad the literary executor would try to publish it), St. Ignatius (Moira was relieved the funeral was there, Mrs. Smith loved it there), step-sons by name, and children thereto.

We kept expressing surprise that Beatrice had opened up to her so much, and Moira explained that she was pushy but had sometimes stayed away because she worried she was too pushy. She was extremely upset that she hadn’t been around since , well, obviously since late March. She had tried at some point(s?), but when Beatrice didn’t answer or something she didn’t go over and insist on going in as it sounded like she often had in the previous months, because she was busy getting ready for a trip. (School vacation trip?) Often when Beatrice didn’t answer the phone or told her not to come over she said she wasn’t well and Moira thought she had been drinking (and sometimes Moira visited anyway).

Just before Moira left, we asked her if there was anything we could do for her, and she said, “Don’t give away the coffee table, her husband made that, she told me all about that.” We assured her that we were not planning to get rid of it, it was one of our favorites, but what did she know about it? And she explained how “Bill , no, Mr. Smith” , had collected tile from demolition sites and he hadn’t glued the pieces down until Beatrice made him do so when they got married. (Another thing I once knew, but had forgotten.) She was quite amazing. I think she was the ONLY person who knew Beatrice both drinking and sober. And she liked all of her.

Beatrice’s first wedding.
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There’s a sweet addendum to the Moira story. She responded to a card (on a copy of a pen-and-ink andwatercolor by my uncle) from me with (among other things) the comment, “I hope she could have considered me a friend.” I didn’t quite know how to answer that, not knowing why she seemed not to have mentioned Moira to anyone, and then Saturday I found a jewelry box in a drawer labeled “Moira, for her graduation” , that’s not until NEXT year, by the way.

From Nancy Tomlinson Hall Rice’s (Jennifer’s mother) Senior Paper, October, 1952
Well, so perhaps my need to write, up through my freshman year in college, can be attributed simply to the fact that I wanted to be like my mother, and was copying those things which seemed to be important to her, without having any idea why. Actually I never saw any of my mother’s finished stories. [S]he was always scribbling down little bits of conversations on the backs of envelopes.
Some of these conversations were ones I remembered hearing or being part of myself, and these were always slightly distorted and much more fun the way my mummy had put them down. I tried not to snoop, but the temptation to see something as she had seen it was often too strong to keep me from looking at things she left lying around in the open.
And I began to keep diaries. One summer in particular, as I remember it, I used up seven lined notebooks, [My mother] suggested that I try for brevity. My diary became not so much a record of what my life was like, but a cheerful practice in saying things well.
And I did say things well. My stories, the ones I turned out in the old days, still strike me as cleverly done. I had what my mother called a flair for the dramatic, by which she meant that I told my stories as she told hers. They were complicated and witty, and very little more. It began to seem to me even then, and increasingly my first year in college, that this was dishonest in me.
One of my best stories, published as the lead story in the school magazine my junior year, would be a good example.
My brother Jerry and I had decided one year to tap the maples on our lawn and in the churchyard next door. It was a silly-ish sort of a lark, and Mummy was cross with it all along, because it meant every pan in the house and rows of milk bottles and dishpans (everything but the bathtub) filled with sickish-sweet maple sap, waiting to be boiled on the stove. And it meant no burners for cooking and the house steamy for weeks, but she was a good-ish sort of Mummy and she let us go ahead. The sap came in a rush, and overwhelmed, we went next door to borrow the giant kettle that Mrs. Delarmy used for spaghetti suppers. Sometimes she let the ladies of the Ladies Aid borrow it for Church Suppers, when she could be there to help.
ìIf it were anybody but the Hall children,î we heard her say to her daughter as we left hugging it happily, ìI don’t know as I would have.î And we remembered our promise to be careful, but wondered whatever there could possibly be to be careful about. After all, a kettle is a kettle, and indestructible.
It was not. We left it simmering one night, and woke to find the house a choke of smoke and the kettle a glowing mass of bubbling flames. The bottom, what with the heat from the gallons of sugar, just burned right out. It was wartime and the kettle impossible to replace. Jerry and I still squirm inside when we remember.
As I said, it was a dramatic story, and I told it vividly and with a high-handed amusement. The details, to be technical, were all slightly askew from the truth, but not more so than the details of the writing I do now. But they were askew in a different direction, and for a different reason. They were askew because it sounded funnier that way, and more dramatic, not because I wanted to make them reveal not only what had happened but the way I felt. I had told it to arouse in others first a feeling of amusement and then of shock, and it seemed to me (almost) that this was enough.
Two things nagged at me. First there was Mrs. Delarmy, who might, because she was a good person, have forgiven the kettle, but never, if she had seen it, the story. And then there was my brother. We never talked much, but we understood each other; about the story he said nothing to me, but I knew I hadn’t been true to something the two of us shared.

Jennifer

Elsie called this morning, worried because she hadn’t heard from my Aunt Beatrice in a long time. She had last gotten through to Beatrice by phone in early February. Beatrice has often been hard to reach; she leaves her phone off the hook when she writes, and maybe at other times as well. But two and a half months was longer than usual; Beatrice usually goes to a writing group Elsie convenes, and Beatrice usually goes to an Easter potluck at Elsie’s house. I usually see her there. Elsie and I are connected through Friends’ Meeting. Beatrice and I are connected through my mother’s brother who died about 4 years ago. They married when his children and I were all teenagers, and although we should have a lot in common, there’s always been tension and hurt there.

I decided to make copies of my mother’s senior paper and bring her one; that would be a good pretext for “dropping by”. (One point of hurt for Beatrice was why didn’t my mother like her? I thought reading the senior paper would help her see just how not-personal that dislike — which Beatrice had explicitly asked about several years ago, and about which I had tried to answer honestly — was. The paper was written long before Mummy met Beatrice, but one could see in it the beginnings of someone not-at-all-interested in politeness for politeness’ sake, which was one sticking point between them. I’m not sure one had warning about Mummy’s competitiveness as a writer in the senior paper, but I HAD been able to tell Beatrice about that.) In the past, apparently, when Elsie has become concerned and asked the police or fire department to check in, Beatrice has been fine, apologetic about worrying her friends, but hasn’t offered an alternative solution for future panics.

I arrived at the house around 1PM, rang the doorbell, noticed dog feces smell, checked the mailbox (empty, and Elsie had written), opened the screen (unlocked, unusual, hmm), st.a.r.t.e.d .. to .. r. a. p. on the window and realized it was broken and the door swung open.

This is a true story. It happened to me, today.

So, I called 911 on my cell phone and it took a while (an hour plus) but it turned out the fire department had broken in 2 days ago at the neighbor’s request, found her and her dog’s bodies in the house, but been unable to figure out the next of kin. The detective was glad to hear from me. The bodies had been there for some time.

One thing I got was a clear visual answer to why Beatrice sometimes left her phone off the hook for a month or more. My family had become aware shortly after my uncle married her that she was an alcoholic, but neither she nor my uncle ever admitted it. (That combination was the biggest reason my mother never liked her, but I had found myself unable to tell Beatrice that.) When she totally stopped drinking about 20 years ago, she still never admitted she had been a closet drinker. When my uncle died, or maybe before, she apparently went back to it.

I rather wish my immediate family wasn’t out of town just now. It’ll be a little hard not to brood over sights and smells tonight.

Poem written by Jennifer’s mother.
Photograph of Jennifer’s grandmother.

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January, February, March, April

Christmas was one of the times to be born:
Christmas or January, the Christmas mothers
having quickened to the call of spring
more urgently, put out their shoots
like indoors plants in the pull of the early sun,
before the warmth of air and sky
and earth and water could tempt the rest.

Yet she was not a Christmas baby,
but an April, conceived in summer
when all the world was hot and vibrant,
not gone to seed. She was moreover
an inflation baby, thought of
before depression, born after.
No, they had not wanted her,
they said so, later, frankly.
“But you were such a cheerful baby,
you smiled, and we were glad you came.”

And yet she knew, she had her birthday mates,
born the self-same day: parents divorced,
baby squalling in the background.
The grandmother brought them up, the aunt.
Not hers, no, with her mother too Puritan
to quit the father, penniless, despondent.
Hers stuck, said nothing but,
“We didn’t want you, no, but you
were such a happy baby, you smiled,
we had to laugh.”

Yes, it was one of the times of year
to be born, April, conceived in summer,
carried triumphant through the blazing fall,
holding heavy through the long
New England winter, holding, heavy, despondent.
(And will we all get through it this year?
she couldn’t help but wonder. No,
for Grampa died on Friday.) And then,
in April, the hepaticas curling silvery
and the skunk cabbages curving purple,
then to come: sturdy, smooth,
small, dark and determined. Then
to come, yes, to be born.

Yes, it was one of the times of year to be born,
April, the world waiting expectant,
ready to laugh and smile through the wet,
and she grew like an April child, shy,
expectant, into summer. “What,”
she said, “will the world do, now
I am come? Will it perhaps change?
They will war no more when they see me.
People will work and war no more.
There will be no orange peels thrown in the street.”

So she went forth to seek her fortune,
and was strong, willing, worked hard and was tired.
She stooped to pick up orange peels
a thousand times a day, candy wrappers, pop bottles.
But they threw them, and at her, and she said,
“Good heavens, whatever is the matter?”
and they said, “Shit. Aw, shit.”

“You know,” said her friend one May morning, “it seems
really quite senseless to me, yes,
it is very lovely to sit here under
the apple blossoms eating liverwurst
sandwiches on pumpernickel bread,
and carefully saving the waxed paper to stow
in the receptacle at the end of the park,
but it really does seem quite senseless to me:
when you look underneath, there is absolutely nothing
holding it all up. It is like Euclid,
lovely and simple and complicated, but
there is nothing behind those geometry
theorems at all.”

“Oh, that is true,” answered the girl helplessly,
“but the apple blossoms are lovely,
are they not?” Yet her heart sank
within her, for her friend, too,
was an April baby, born that self-same
day of affirmation just past,
but her friend asked so very much.
“I,” her friend said, “am not sure
that I shall bother to look again,”
and the girl knew the bottomless panic
for the first time. When her friend
died, and by her own hand, the girl
was furious. God was stupid, exceedingly stupid;
there had been a terrible mistake.

So she wrote to a boy she knew, also April.
“Come,” she said, for she knew no other
word, “is the world not beautiful,
will they not war no more when they see us?
Come, we are grown, it is May already,
time that we and our lives bore fruit.
Come, we will work and be tired, come.”

And so there was marriage, January children,
all but the first. Tired. They were tired.
Christmas came, January and winter
set in. “Here,” she said, “it is only
February, I am exhausted, they
are driving me wild, here it is only
twenty to three, supper at five,
bed at seven, and already they
have crayoned the walls, clayed the floor,
spilled milk twice and left six leaky
orange juice cans in a pool on the couch.
Only nineteen minutes of three
and the fifth of February.”

“Come,” she said to them, snowsuits, mittens,
boots, hats, “out, under the sky,
along the Charles, under the sycamores,
there will be a sign.” And the sign came:
black birds came alight on
the forsythia branches, shaking the snow.

She gathered the large sprays and hurried them home.
“These will be forced,” she said,
“before you know it, it will be March,
the room will be ablaze with yellow,
it will be lovely. We will see
the philodendron sprout and
the kalanchoe bloom. The long
winter weeks of brooding will be over.
Spring will come for us, yes,
rebirth, yes, the affirmation.
Why could she not have waited? ëMy friend,
we are all, else, here. We all are,
though Grampa did die on Friday.’”

It was, it was a good time to be born, April.
More babies were born into the world,
sons of April sons, daughters
of April daughters, those that were left
after war, suicide, divorce and darkness.
More babies wriggled in wrenching agony
toward the world, strong and moist
as hyacinth buds freshly surfacing,
tensed for the last huge pushing pop.
“Yes, pop, they do pop, corks from bottles,
except slightly more dignified. Yes,
sweetheart, you did, too. I was
tired, but I was glad you came.”

More babies were born into the world,
January, February, March and April,
some on her birthday: a boy, Christopher,
a girl, Sarah (the names that year).
Six pounds, twelve ounces, eight
pounds, four. Did the parents know
that Christopher was “Christ-bringer,”
Sarah, the middle name
for Hitler’s Jews? What
did they know, except for club feet,
which didn’t happen any more,
though flippers did. What could
they know, except for constipation?
Over and over she bore them
or bore them with her, through
January, February, March
and April. They’d make it
to April, many an April. Such
a fine time of year to be born.

Except then it struck her:
May was the problem.

Nancy Tomlinson Hall Rice 1930 – 1988
(This poem was written sometime between 1962 and 1973.)

“Sturdy, smooth, dark and determined.”

Jennifer

When my grandmother died in a two car accident at around age 75, my family was pretty convinced that she had desired her death, and I decided that the uninjured teenage driver of the other car deserved to know that. My family agreed, and (partly since it was my idea, and partly since I was a teenager myself) I was the one who called him on the phone, and told him Ö gosh, what DID I say? I think I explained who I was and then said that we thought that she might have been trying to kill herself and that we were glad he hadn’t been hurt. I think he mumbled “Oh” and then there was a kind of uncomfortable silence and I said goodbye and hung up. Every now and then, I muse on the situation, and reconsider whether she really had desired her death, and whether the call was of any use to him then or ever. Did he muse on it every now and then and wonder if that was really why I called? Or had he already (a few days later) essentially forgotten an unpleasant incident? Did my family really think it was true or were some in my family deceiving themselves and/or others in order to feel better?

Jennifer

My daughter at college was on my mind after the blog about what people have read. (I canít deal with reading any of the recommended reading though.) I was thinking about sharing some of our important early read-alouds: The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Mary Poppins (the BOOKS, *N*O*T* the movie!), and The Jungle Book. That really has nothing to do with the next part, except that she rarely calls, and then she did.

She didnít want to talk to me, just her sister. Whatever it was, Hilary didnít want to do it; she suggested a friend now at Oberlin; then another relative. Eventually, I got back on the phone. It turned out she needed to fill out her health care proxy form for a class, and she felt parents were too irrational about their kids. I listened. Her: ìI mean, have you seen that woman in Florida? Sheís like a trained seal. 15 years …î Me: ìWait a minute. Remember me? Remember the parrot?î (I had to remind her about the parrot, but she got it. You folks can just look back some days on the blog*) ìSo, mom, have you guys filled out your health care proxy?î (No. So sheíll bring forms home next break.)

And then the conversation with her dad: Me: ìShe needed someone to be her health care proxy.î Him: ìYou know, you have to be careful. She may not feel loved, if you agree to cut off life-support.î ìI had to remind her about the parrot in order to pass.î (I had to remind him about the parrot too. He doesnít read the blog either.)

ìDid you know the parrot at Brandeis is the smartest parrot in the world? Itís been being trained for 25 years, by students.î ìItís the smartest, or it can do the most?î I started thinking, I bet 3 year-olds could learn way more than most of them do, except that they only spend a year being 3. Would that make them smarter?

* Reprinted from an earlier blog post:
“I once went into an exotic pet store with La Chica, age 6ish. She wanted a parrot or something like it. I was relieved that the prices were such that clearly we weren’t going there, but trying to be polite to the salesman. He bragged something along the lines of “They have the intelligence of a three-year-old, and they live to 40.” (My numbers may be off by a factor of 2.) I couldn’t think of a worse fate. Even La Chica seemed daunted. “

Jennifer

I tend to have nightmares about school especially in the week before school starts in the fall, a day or two before every vacation ends, and on long weekends. This is from before the end of our last vacation.

I was in my classroom (which was a lecture-hall), and I didnít have much for my students to do, so they were somewhat rowdy. I kept thinking of additional things which we could do together, but each involved leaving the room for a minute to get something. Each time I returned there were more students in the room, being even rowdier. I didnít know anyoneís name, but finally realized the reason I didnít was some of them werenít my students. The final time this happened, one of the drop-ins was smoking a cigarette, holding it with a test-tube holder. I remembered that I could call the office for help, so I did. The secretary who answered yelled at me for leaving the classroom.

I woke up, and I couldnít remember what my situation is. I knew I was home, in bed, that I do teach school, and even that the secretary had in fact retired a few years ago, but I couldnít figure anything else out. I knew that the feeling of not being able to remember studentsí names is real, so I figured the way to go would be to pull up a visual memory of my classroom. It took a while, but I finally could remember where my windows are.

Classes went ok yesterday, but students were somewhat rowdy and I wasnít quite organized enough with what I wanted them to do.