Saturday 14 February 2009
This is St Valentine's Day but neither Jessy nor I has a date so we are doing our own thing here at the beach house on Long Beach Island. Last night we slept in our Colonial-costume shifts in our old bedroom here on the third floor. Jessy and I shared a room when we were in England and sharing again with her here reminds me of that. When our classmates, especially the boarding girls, would come over to the house we rented in Norwich, our room was little different than the typical HOH room, with too much of our stuff crowded in and the walls full of posters and photos. This room here is a little more genteel, though it is on the third floor and has a terrific view down the Island and across towards the Bay. That means it's on the cold side, but we weren't chilly last night.
This morning dawned lovely. Down in the kitchen I made a fire and heated water for tea. We made oatmeal and did a bit of homework (meaning Jessy went on the computer) and then we got dressed, in our other Colonial outfits, as we would wear for working at Mommy's 18th-century-themed ice-cream parlour. When the fire was out we went down to the street, and over the dunes to the beach.
Of course this is the off-season and the place was deserted. But it is a Saturday and you'd be surprised how many people eventually turn up. Today was bright and breezy, not quite comfortable enough for no coats, and we wore our long woollen ones with scarves. In our old-fashioned booties and long skirts we were not uncomfortable at all. Luckily we both have experience walking this beach in heels!
It is some blocks up the beach to the street where the ice-cream parlour is. I typed in the pass-codes for the alarm and we went through the whole place, checking up on whatever Daddy said to check up on. The computer here is tied to the same network as the ones at home and the one at the beach house and the ones in Lewes. We sent Daddy a memo on the condition of the store, the ice-cream parlour, and the three apartments, and he responded almost immediately. 'Be careful,' he sent to us.
We typed back, 'We will. We love you!'
It was only eleven then, Jessy had an idea and so we helped ourselves to two books from the store and two chairs from where the outside ones are stored, and we carried it all back up to the beach and situated ourselves there to read. The outside chairs at the ice-cream parlour are authentic wooden ladderbacks with rush seats, precisely what would have been found in a small but tasteful tavern in about 1750. In the beach they sank in pretty far, but again this was no different than we would have done 250 years ago. If we were sitting in chairs on the beach back then, these would have been the chairs we would have had to sit in. So we made do.
In a book we have at the beach house there is a lovely photograph, taken from the top of a water tower, of Beach Haven in about 1880. Whenever we are at this house I can stare at that picture for eons. It's in black-and-white of course, but the houses still look grey and well weathered, surrounded by sandy yards inside paintless picket fences and always with the small barn, like a garage, standing out back for the chickens and pigs. There in the photo is a tavern with a front verandah, the police or lifesavers' station, and the schoolhouse-- how I wish I could have taught there then! It would have been Miss Janine as the school-madam and twelve or fifteen boys and girls, up to about age 13, after which they would have gone to work. I would have taught them spelling and maths and reading and history. Science would have been tending a garden and studying the ocean. People would queue up to use the outhouse. We would have had lunch from a pot on the wood-stove and the elder ones would have helped the little ones. I would have made sure they all washed hands first. The little ones would have naps at 2.00. As it got dark round 4.00 or 4.30, the older boys would sweep the floor and the girls would stack all the books. Then I would let them all go with a kiss on the head and they would run home to tell their parents both of them) all about what they had learnt today.
That's what I dream of when I think about a teaching career. The closest it's ever come to reality for me was when Mother (our young stepmother) home-schooled us when we were still at Lewes. We used to wear these Colonial clothes (even her) and have lunch off the fire, just like that. It was education coming from love... the way it always should be.
Jessy and I sat in our well-settled chairs in the sand and read. I had chosen 'The Lovely Bones'. I have seen it many times but had not got a chance to read it till today. Jessy read a book called 'Everlost'. I have not looked into that one yet, but she keeps telling me about it, so I suppose I shall.
We saw a few people stroll by who waved to us. There was one dog. There really is no ordinance against dogs on the beach in the off-season, but their masters are responsible for cleaning up after them. The one time I have seen a dog leave a mess on the beach, the people were content to leave it there. I was younger then, of course, but I called out to remind them of their responsibility, and the man just said, 'It won't matter much.' I put my hands on my hips and scowled at him till he took a few steps back and kicked sand over the mess. I am sure it really did not matter much after all, but I hate to see people assuming they have some right to be an exception to the rules.
We carried the chairs back to the beach house and sat on the porch there and went on reading. I heated some water, this time on the cooker (stove, sorry) and we sat out there sipping our tea till we were cold enough to go in. Jessy had wanted to go for a ride up the Island, but now she decided on a bath and went up stairs. I put down 'The Lovely Bones' and lay on the sofa in the parlour, with all my Colonial gear on and all the draperies wide open to the ocean sky. I really do think I would like to live here in future. Jessy and I know that Daddy (and Mother too) will eventually agree to endow us each with a house. Between us she and I have decided that she will have Lewes, where Mommy's ashes are interred, and I will have this place. Lisa and J.J. are too young for us to be concerned with them yet, but Jessy and I are agreed that Lisa can have Terncote and J.J. can have... the boat or whatever else. It does not matter what. We'll always have enough room to visit each other and, in the case of this little house, my visitors can stay at the apartments over the ice-cream parlour and the book store. I am sure my husband would not mind living at the beach so much. And if I do not marry, which seems likely anyway, I will grow old here and write my novels like a good little eccentric spinster... like Jane Austen... or Emily Dickinson.
...
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
Showing posts with label death. Show all posts
21 February 2009
14 February 2009
Looking back
Friday 13 February 2009
Jessy and I packed last night and we drove in to school in the Regal. Both of us were in skirts-- this is only typical. We also brought nice stuff to wear for church on Sunday though we have both admitted we are not sure we will go. Holy Innocents' has services at odd times during the off season.
After school we hurried out to the car and got on our way. The light fades fast here and so we went directly to the Ferry, not even checking on the house at Lewes, where Mommy is buried, that's even just a few blocks farther on. It was my first time driving onto the boat but I did well and Jessy was totally composed as though we had done this a hundred times before.
The boat ride is 70 minutes. It was one of the new boats and we got tea, but it was too cold to stay outside and we took a table by the windows. The wind seemed very strong in the middle of the Bay-- the water was mostly whitecaps and the boat tended to roll a lot. We were both happy to get ashore.
Of course I had never driven this way either by myself but it was not hard, and Route 9 turns into the Parkway and then it's just 65 MPH till you get there. I also had never driven this fast before, but I was very careful and not long before our exit Jessy rang Daddy and told him we were fine.
Our house in Surf City was the house we had when I was born. In fact this was to be our only home, I was to start school on the Island and to high school at Southern, and Mommy started her ice-cream parlour and the book store and we might have been very happy here. But my parents thought we should have the experience of growing up with a yard and a swimming pool and a slightly bigger house, so they built the place at Lewes and just after Jessy was born we moved there. So the house at Surf City has always been mainly a summer place for us. It is modest and old-fashioned (like everything about my parents and my family anyway) and has a lovely view of the ocean as well as up and down the beach.
The room that was always meant for Jessy and me to share is on the third floor, facing across the Island at the Bay actually. We each have an old-fashioned four-posted bed and there is a desk and wide dresser. It is an attic room with low walls and a sloping ceiling,. Round the top of the low walls, and across the end walls at the same level, is a cute wallpaper border of sailboats and seashells and dune grass that Mommy put up for us, sort of by surprise, about ten years ago. Neither of us has ever had any inclination to ever take it down. Also we have no inclination to take separate rooms-- there is a very nice guest room below our room that one of us could take, but neither of us could ever decide to be the one to not stay in this room where Mommy's wallpaper border is and so we continue to share. For now Lisa and little J.J. share the other room up here, a smaller, narrower, lower room over Mother and Daddy's room that sticks out in front towards the ocean. Some day one of them (probably Lisa) will adopt the guest room anyway, so it's just as well Jessy and I keep this one together.
Jessy and I have slowly been coming to the idea that we would like to stay here and work in Mommy's ice-cream parlour all summer. It is only what Mother (our stepmother) did when she was our nanny, the summer before and the summer after Mommy died. And she was only a year older then than I am now. I think Mommy would like us to do that, and, like Mother did, help manage the ice-cream parlour and carry on her tradition.
I have begun to believe that I would much rather do something like that than even to go to university somewhere. I could stay at this house all year and commute to Ocean County and try to figure out what I really do want to do. I only know I would miss Jessy, at least for that first year when I have done with school and she is still finishing. I suppose I could work with Daddy for that period. I know he would like that, especially because I would be home near him, which is what he really wants.
I apologise for rambling like this. I confess it is how I write when I am here-- I am less single-minded.
As soon as we got to this house we got changed into our Colonial dresses, just for fun. I have about eight different outfits, mostly handmade, of which I brought three for this weekend. In about 1750 I would have worn one not till I was sick of it but till I could not wear it any more. This weekend we're going to try to live at least in some ways like that. This afternoon I put on my light-blue skirt and bed-jacket with a plain muslin shift (undershirt like a nightgown) and stays (not exactly like a corset) under it and high socks with garters (round my calf of course) and slippers that are like ballet flats. This would have been typical for someone who was not a princess 250 years ago (and yes, I have said ALL that I have on... also typical). Jessy has on her dark-green bodice and plain muslin skirt over her shift and stays.
There are no boys to see us right now but in my experience they tend to love this gear on us girls. The bodice flatters her (I'll leave it for you to imagine why). We both feel very comfortable-- I often wish I could dress like this forever, but for now it is like a little game we are playing, like we did when Mother used to tutor us in the tea room at home in Lewes.
We made a fire in the kitchen, heated water for tea and, though we did (shamefully) cook two of the instant dinners we brought along in the microwave, we did eat by candlelight. I hooked up the laptop to the house network and by about 18.00 I was able to report to Daddy that everything was all right. Afterwards we put on our long winter coats and boots and went over the dunes to the beach. I remember happy times with Mommy, and later with our stepmother, dressing like this and skipping round the beach like we were living here 250 years ago. In the off-season there is hardly anyone here and when we were littler we didn't think that we may have looked odd to modern people. If Mommy could stroll the beach in her gorgeous handmade gowns and black stockings certainly we young girls could. I remember, the summer after she died, my nanny (as she was then) and I hiking the beach to work at the ice-cream parlour, in our long gowns and carrying our shoes, in front of everyone who was on the beach on a summer's evening in the high season. People stared, you know. But they all knew where we were going and smiled and waved as though we were celebrities. That's usually people's reaction, and it always makes me feel, even then, that something was good and right about being a girl who dressed in traditional clothes.
We saw only one person, some blocks down, with a dog. The night was going bitter. We returned to the house, set ourselves up at the kitchen table, and did our homework by candlelight till the fire faded, and then we watched DVDs ('Emma' AND 'Persuasion') till we went to bed. However I woke up at like midnight and typed in this, and I am going online to post it.
I will post more later as our 'retro' weekend proceeds.
...
Jessy and I packed last night and we drove in to school in the Regal. Both of us were in skirts-- this is only typical. We also brought nice stuff to wear for church on Sunday though we have both admitted we are not sure we will go. Holy Innocents' has services at odd times during the off season.
After school we hurried out to the car and got on our way. The light fades fast here and so we went directly to the Ferry, not even checking on the house at Lewes, where Mommy is buried, that's even just a few blocks farther on. It was my first time driving onto the boat but I did well and Jessy was totally composed as though we had done this a hundred times before.
The boat ride is 70 minutes. It was one of the new boats and we got tea, but it was too cold to stay outside and we took a table by the windows. The wind seemed very strong in the middle of the Bay-- the water was mostly whitecaps and the boat tended to roll a lot. We were both happy to get ashore.
Of course I had never driven this way either by myself but it was not hard, and Route 9 turns into the Parkway and then it's just 65 MPH till you get there. I also had never driven this fast before, but I was very careful and not long before our exit Jessy rang Daddy and told him we were fine.
Our house in Surf City was the house we had when I was born. In fact this was to be our only home, I was to start school on the Island and to high school at Southern, and Mommy started her ice-cream parlour and the book store and we might have been very happy here. But my parents thought we should have the experience of growing up with a yard and a swimming pool and a slightly bigger house, so they built the place at Lewes and just after Jessy was born we moved there. So the house at Surf City has always been mainly a summer place for us. It is modest and old-fashioned (like everything about my parents and my family anyway) and has a lovely view of the ocean as well as up and down the beach.
The room that was always meant for Jessy and me to share is on the third floor, facing across the Island at the Bay actually. We each have an old-fashioned four-posted bed and there is a desk and wide dresser. It is an attic room with low walls and a sloping ceiling,. Round the top of the low walls, and across the end walls at the same level, is a cute wallpaper border of sailboats and seashells and dune grass that Mommy put up for us, sort of by surprise, about ten years ago. Neither of us has ever had any inclination to ever take it down. Also we have no inclination to take separate rooms-- there is a very nice guest room below our room that one of us could take, but neither of us could ever decide to be the one to not stay in this room where Mommy's wallpaper border is and so we continue to share. For now Lisa and little J.J. share the other room up here, a smaller, narrower, lower room over Mother and Daddy's room that sticks out in front towards the ocean. Some day one of them (probably Lisa) will adopt the guest room anyway, so it's just as well Jessy and I keep this one together.
Jessy and I have slowly been coming to the idea that we would like to stay here and work in Mommy's ice-cream parlour all summer. It is only what Mother (our stepmother) did when she was our nanny, the summer before and the summer after Mommy died. And she was only a year older then than I am now. I think Mommy would like us to do that, and, like Mother did, help manage the ice-cream parlour and carry on her tradition.
I have begun to believe that I would much rather do something like that than even to go to university somewhere. I could stay at this house all year and commute to Ocean County and try to figure out what I really do want to do. I only know I would miss Jessy, at least for that first year when I have done with school and she is still finishing. I suppose I could work with Daddy for that period. I know he would like that, especially because I would be home near him, which is what he really wants.
I apologise for rambling like this. I confess it is how I write when I am here-- I am less single-minded.
As soon as we got to this house we got changed into our Colonial dresses, just for fun. I have about eight different outfits, mostly handmade, of which I brought three for this weekend. In about 1750 I would have worn one not till I was sick of it but till I could not wear it any more. This weekend we're going to try to live at least in some ways like that. This afternoon I put on my light-blue skirt and bed-jacket with a plain muslin shift (undershirt like a nightgown) and stays (not exactly like a corset) under it and high socks with garters (round my calf of course) and slippers that are like ballet flats. This would have been typical for someone who was not a princess 250 years ago (and yes, I have said ALL that I have on... also typical). Jessy has on her dark-green bodice and plain muslin skirt over her shift and stays.
There are no boys to see us right now but in my experience they tend to love this gear on us girls. The bodice flatters her (I'll leave it for you to imagine why). We both feel very comfortable-- I often wish I could dress like this forever, but for now it is like a little game we are playing, like we did when Mother used to tutor us in the tea room at home in Lewes.
We made a fire in the kitchen, heated water for tea and, though we did (shamefully) cook two of the instant dinners we brought along in the microwave, we did eat by candlelight. I hooked up the laptop to the house network and by about 18.00 I was able to report to Daddy that everything was all right. Afterwards we put on our long winter coats and boots and went over the dunes to the beach. I remember happy times with Mommy, and later with our stepmother, dressing like this and skipping round the beach like we were living here 250 years ago. In the off-season there is hardly anyone here and when we were littler we didn't think that we may have looked odd to modern people. If Mommy could stroll the beach in her gorgeous handmade gowns and black stockings certainly we young girls could. I remember, the summer after she died, my nanny (as she was then) and I hiking the beach to work at the ice-cream parlour, in our long gowns and carrying our shoes, in front of everyone who was on the beach on a summer's evening in the high season. People stared, you know. But they all knew where we were going and smiled and waved as though we were celebrities. That's usually people's reaction, and it always makes me feel, even then, that something was good and right about being a girl who dressed in traditional clothes.
We saw only one person, some blocks down, with a dog. The night was going bitter. We returned to the house, set ourselves up at the kitchen table, and did our homework by candlelight till the fire faded, and then we watched DVDs ('Emma' AND 'Persuasion') till we went to bed. However I woke up at like midnight and typed in this, and I am going online to post it.
I will post more later as our 'retro' weekend proceeds.
...
12 January 2009
Visit with Mommy
Friday, 9 January 2009
I arose, happy with my resolve to go visit Mommy. I have not been up there since well before Thanksgiving and I have missed the quiet peace of that house and the view of the Bay. Daddy caught me however, at about 9.30 as I was descending in my jeans and leather patchwork jacket, and he saw I had my keys out. 'Where are you off to?' he asked, not to be nosy, you know.
'I,' I announced happily, 'am going up to see Mommy.'
He nodded, looking down then, and for a moment seemed to have no words. Well-- that was understandable. 'All right,' he said. 'But let Roger take you.'
I stamped my foot, still standing on the bottom step. 'Daddy! Jessy and I had a whole day planned!'
'All right, but just let him drive you. I have some stuff at the house he can check on for me anyway.' When I was ready to protest he said, 'Can you be sure you'll be back by dark? That's three-thirty today.'
My licence doesn't allow me to drive after dark for another few months yet. 'Sure,' I said-- and then I said a stupid thing. 'We won't have any trouble if we are, you know--'
'That is not the point,' he said. 'It's the law. You don't make excuses to avoid the law. And... it's going to snow.'
I think that must have been the settling factor.
I slumped down in the back of the Cadillac, not even glancing out at the passing landscape. It's dull here anyway. 'Well,' Jessy said, trying to cheer me up, 'it's at least safer, and we don't have to worry about running out of gas.'
I glared at her. Still I felt a little better by the time we had come into Delaware. Our old house is up on the Bay shore, at the very bottom of Delaware Bay, with an unimpeded view of all the shipping traffic and especially the Cape May Ferry route. How I loved hearing that familiar whistle again! The electric gates slid apart and Roger steered the long green Cadillac in to our old yard. The grass in the 'wilderness', the area we always left raw, is high but dormant, and the row of fruit trees to either side look dead and done, but all this will be in superior bloom by Easter again... and Mommy's birthday.
Roger reviewed the alarm codes with us and left Jessy and me to open up the house whilst he went round to the car yard. Inside, the air was stiff and cool-- the heating is set on 55 and we could just see our breath-- and dark, since all the storm shutters have been closed. As soon at the alarm was off we put on lights and ran up to look at our old bedrooms. Of course the bedclothes are off, packed away in plastic containers in the cedar cupboards up stairs, but we both bounced onto our unmade beds and giggled like little girls.
I know Jessy loves this place and sometimes she wishes, even more than I do, that we had never left. However we both understand, far more than Lisa and J.J. ever will be able to, why Daddy did not want to stay here with his new wife and his new children. This house is part of the loss of our mother, and like everything about her Daddy will keep it close to his heart forever. His new wife does not replace her-- they have a pact whereby they insist they will never try, for they both loved her in profound, life-altering ways. I have often said that their being married and beginning a new family is the best way to pay homage to what Mommy always wanted for all of us. But I know it must be different for Daddy.
We descended to the main floor again and slipped out the back doors into the brittle wind. Mommy's small but well-organised flower garden has seen better days-- everything here is dead and cold, but that is owing much more to the season than to any neglect. I know Roger visits this place regularly, just to keep in touch with it. He and Daddy rebuilt the small Buick here that eventually became the car for the girl who became our nanny and, eventually, stepmother, after she came to live with us and then went off to university. For a while she and her best friend stayed in the guest cottage, at the other end of the pool. Then she moved into what we always, so stiffly, called the maid's room, though we have never had a maid here. It was just a small room in front, behind the fireplace in the kitchen. The whole house was designed by Daddy to be an authentic 1740s country farm house, neither large nor fancy but so proper and elegant in its clean lines, slate-blue clapboards, bright white trim and accurate mullioned windows that more than one season the local Colonial society had asked us to let them include it on their old-house tour-- and it was built 250 years after even those architectural experts believed it was!
Mommy's ashes lie in a heavy stainless-steel canister inside a concrete tube in the midst of the tiger-lily beds along the northern side of the garden, under her bedroom window. From here she greets the morning sun as it comes over the beach grass. Some trash and leaves now clogged the ground cover and we both knelt there and cleared it, just the typical winter stuff that tosses up here from somewhere far up the Bay. Whilst kneeling we took each other's hand and said our prayers. Jessy wept. She always does. She was only seven when Mommy left and for a long time she believed it was because of something she'd done. Little kids often think that. But there was nothing she had ever done-- she was always a very good little girl and knew everyone thought so. It's only that when something like that happens when you are that young, you grow up away from that event with only that connection to it.
As we got up Jessy, still holding my hand, turned back to the little tablet in the garden and said, 'I promise to be good, Mommy.' It's what she has always said when she has visited this place ever since we moved away, because it's what Mommy asked her to promise when she lay in that hospital just hours from when she would leave us for good and every time we had visited up till then.
'You have to be good for your daddy and your sister,' she would say. 'They need you to be good.'
'I promise I will be,' she said then. And she always has been.
We went up stairs again and collected a few things from our childhood mementoes-- a collage I made for third grade, the big pink paper dinosaur Jessy made in second, the same year, early-reader books to lend to Lisa, and the big yellow-and-red tipper truck Daddy bought for me when I was J.J.'s age, like all our things lovingly cherished and preserved from then till now with sentimental gentleness by both our parents. This was to be our lifelong heritage home, the place we would always come back to, with our children and grandchildren, for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter and Mother's Day and Father's Day and everyone's birthday. This whole estate-- if I may call it that, all eleven acres of it-- was planned by two young parents as an ideal getaway from public life and a perpetual home in which they would raise their two sweet, innocent girls. All that was lost one October evening eight years ago. Now it is, in some respects, just a house (sadly in need of new paint!) surrounded by fruit trees and tall grass. Secretly Jessy and I have discussed which one of us shall ask for it when the first of us is married. I have never thought Daddy would consider that either inappropriate or expensive. Indeed I believe that is the real reason he hangs onto both this one and the one up in Surf City.
If it comes down to that I would rather have the beach house and leave this place to Jessy. The beach house suits my attitude towards life better anyway. It is small, crowded sensibly but snugly on a small patch of land on which the dunes encroach year after year. There is one garage, no basement, a small parlour and a small square dining room that barely seats six of us to table. It is at the ocean, but this place is at the Bay and a two-mile walk through open beach park will lead to the ocean from here too. I will sit up in what used to be Daddy's library and write my novels, feed my cats, and take long walks on the beach in the off-season. And Jessy will marry someone young-at-heart like Daddy, and take good care of Mommy's gardens and Mommy's tablet in the tiger-lilies. It is what she thinks of when she promises to be a good child. And she will make sure all three or four of her cheerful children promise to be good too.
...
I arose, happy with my resolve to go visit Mommy. I have not been up there since well before Thanksgiving and I have missed the quiet peace of that house and the view of the Bay. Daddy caught me however, at about 9.30 as I was descending in my jeans and leather patchwork jacket, and he saw I had my keys out. 'Where are you off to?' he asked, not to be nosy, you know.
'I,' I announced happily, 'am going up to see Mommy.'
He nodded, looking down then, and for a moment seemed to have no words. Well-- that was understandable. 'All right,' he said. 'But let Roger take you.'
I stamped my foot, still standing on the bottom step. 'Daddy! Jessy and I had a whole day planned!'
'All right, but just let him drive you. I have some stuff at the house he can check on for me anyway.' When I was ready to protest he said, 'Can you be sure you'll be back by dark? That's three-thirty today.'
My licence doesn't allow me to drive after dark for another few months yet. 'Sure,' I said-- and then I said a stupid thing. 'We won't have any trouble if we are, you know--'
'That is not the point,' he said. 'It's the law. You don't make excuses to avoid the law. And... it's going to snow.'
I think that must have been the settling factor.
I slumped down in the back of the Cadillac, not even glancing out at the passing landscape. It's dull here anyway. 'Well,' Jessy said, trying to cheer me up, 'it's at least safer, and we don't have to worry about running out of gas.'
I glared at her. Still I felt a little better by the time we had come into Delaware. Our old house is up on the Bay shore, at the very bottom of Delaware Bay, with an unimpeded view of all the shipping traffic and especially the Cape May Ferry route. How I loved hearing that familiar whistle again! The electric gates slid apart and Roger steered the long green Cadillac in to our old yard. The grass in the 'wilderness', the area we always left raw, is high but dormant, and the row of fruit trees to either side look dead and done, but all this will be in superior bloom by Easter again... and Mommy's birthday.
Roger reviewed the alarm codes with us and left Jessy and me to open up the house whilst he went round to the car yard. Inside, the air was stiff and cool-- the heating is set on 55 and we could just see our breath-- and dark, since all the storm shutters have been closed. As soon at the alarm was off we put on lights and ran up to look at our old bedrooms. Of course the bedclothes are off, packed away in plastic containers in the cedar cupboards up stairs, but we both bounced onto our unmade beds and giggled like little girls.
I know Jessy loves this place and sometimes she wishes, even more than I do, that we had never left. However we both understand, far more than Lisa and J.J. ever will be able to, why Daddy did not want to stay here with his new wife and his new children. This house is part of the loss of our mother, and like everything about her Daddy will keep it close to his heart forever. His new wife does not replace her-- they have a pact whereby they insist they will never try, for they both loved her in profound, life-altering ways. I have often said that their being married and beginning a new family is the best way to pay homage to what Mommy always wanted for all of us. But I know it must be different for Daddy.
We descended to the main floor again and slipped out the back doors into the brittle wind. Mommy's small but well-organised flower garden has seen better days-- everything here is dead and cold, but that is owing much more to the season than to any neglect. I know Roger visits this place regularly, just to keep in touch with it. He and Daddy rebuilt the small Buick here that eventually became the car for the girl who became our nanny and, eventually, stepmother, after she came to live with us and then went off to university. For a while she and her best friend stayed in the guest cottage, at the other end of the pool. Then she moved into what we always, so stiffly, called the maid's room, though we have never had a maid here. It was just a small room in front, behind the fireplace in the kitchen. The whole house was designed by Daddy to be an authentic 1740s country farm house, neither large nor fancy but so proper and elegant in its clean lines, slate-blue clapboards, bright white trim and accurate mullioned windows that more than one season the local Colonial society had asked us to let them include it on their old-house tour-- and it was built 250 years after even those architectural experts believed it was!
Mommy's ashes lie in a heavy stainless-steel canister inside a concrete tube in the midst of the tiger-lily beds along the northern side of the garden, under her bedroom window. From here she greets the morning sun as it comes over the beach grass. Some trash and leaves now clogged the ground cover and we both knelt there and cleared it, just the typical winter stuff that tosses up here from somewhere far up the Bay. Whilst kneeling we took each other's hand and said our prayers. Jessy wept. She always does. She was only seven when Mommy left and for a long time she believed it was because of something she'd done. Little kids often think that. But there was nothing she had ever done-- she was always a very good little girl and knew everyone thought so. It's only that when something like that happens when you are that young, you grow up away from that event with only that connection to it.
As we got up Jessy, still holding my hand, turned back to the little tablet in the garden and said, 'I promise to be good, Mommy.' It's what she has always said when she has visited this place ever since we moved away, because it's what Mommy asked her to promise when she lay in that hospital just hours from when she would leave us for good and every time we had visited up till then.
'You have to be good for your daddy and your sister,' she would say. 'They need you to be good.'
'I promise I will be,' she said then. And she always has been.
We went up stairs again and collected a few things from our childhood mementoes-- a collage I made for third grade, the big pink paper dinosaur Jessy made in second, the same year, early-reader books to lend to Lisa, and the big yellow-and-red tipper truck Daddy bought for me when I was J.J.'s age, like all our things lovingly cherished and preserved from then till now with sentimental gentleness by both our parents. This was to be our lifelong heritage home, the place we would always come back to, with our children and grandchildren, for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter and Mother's Day and Father's Day and everyone's birthday. This whole estate-- if I may call it that, all eleven acres of it-- was planned by two young parents as an ideal getaway from public life and a perpetual home in which they would raise their two sweet, innocent girls. All that was lost one October evening eight years ago. Now it is, in some respects, just a house (sadly in need of new paint!) surrounded by fruit trees and tall grass. Secretly Jessy and I have discussed which one of us shall ask for it when the first of us is married. I have never thought Daddy would consider that either inappropriate or expensive. Indeed I believe that is the real reason he hangs onto both this one and the one up in Surf City.
If it comes down to that I would rather have the beach house and leave this place to Jessy. The beach house suits my attitude towards life better anyway. It is small, crowded sensibly but snugly on a small patch of land on which the dunes encroach year after year. There is one garage, no basement, a small parlour and a small square dining room that barely seats six of us to table. It is at the ocean, but this place is at the Bay and a two-mile walk through open beach park will lead to the ocean from here too. I will sit up in what used to be Daddy's library and write my novels, feed my cats, and take long walks on the beach in the off-season. And Jessy will marry someone young-at-heart like Daddy, and take good care of Mommy's gardens and Mommy's tablet in the tiger-lilies. It is what she thinks of when she promises to be a good child. And she will make sure all three or four of her cheerful children promise to be good too.
...
07 January 2009
I am sick
Wednesday 7 January 2009
This is a poem my stepmother wrote when she was 15 and staying with us as an exchange student. She had been sick for about three days-- blaming it on this weird American climate, I am sure! --and being the genius that she is she was able to depict the mad delirium of a high fever with a such wonder and compassion that anyone can feel her sense of utter helplessness... 'an intelligent being laid low in infirmity'.
I was of course by no means as sick as this yesterday (just had a tummy-ache and sleeping most of the day helped) but I think of this poem often and thought I might share it in my blog.
...
Lewes, Delaware
24-26 September 1997
I am sick.
Deprived of energy, devoid of strength, depraved of will,
enveloped in the strange world of the fever
where temperature
and density
and thirst
and aches throughout my body
are all my sensation.
Eyes water,
with a stinging sadness;
I weep for pain, or to relieve pain, I know not;
so I shut them:
I see not.
Ears rumble,
thick and loud like thunder upon my head;
and so I ignore everything:
I hear not.
Mouth burns,
with a hot anxious constriction,
every swallow a briar down my throat;
and so I dare not part my lips:
I speak not.
I know nothing, feel nothing, want nothing,
but from within.
I rest.
Stretched upon this couch with hands crossed above my chest,
like a Queen in state,
dead to the world behind the rosecoloured glasses
of my mad mind's eye.
My head spins,
slow, dull spirals downward, ever downward,
with no end in sight.
Unworldly thoughts drift by,
like vagrants from the city street
with nowhere to call home
but the vague recesses of my mind
where they beck and call to me,
nagging, nagging, nagging,
for answers I cannot provide
like strange alien torture
to an intelligent being
unused to grave weakness
laid low in involuntary infirmity.
When I am strong enough to reply
they will be gone,
unanswered, eternally a mystery
why they ever appeared and posed a question.
That they would be gone,
I try to imagine things of my own will
as if to show my waylaid mind
that I still have control.
But my will is but a page
against the army of my sickness.
Little girls run hand-in-hand to the beach:
their vivid colours searing in my sight,
their bright voices piercing in my ears,
their happiness incomprehensible.
What girls?
What beach? What colours? What words?
Boys hang a swing in a tree,
dangling daringly above the ground
like dauntless acrobats,
dizzying to me,
frightening to me.
What boys? What tree? What swing?
Is it sunny? Cloudy? Cold? Warm?
Day? Night? Dream? Reality?
Angry, I demand an image
of the swells of the sea
rising and falling with animate regularity,
that it might be a lovely vision of contentment.
But not for me.
What sea? What colour?
What weather-- sunny, hot, cold, wind, calm, rain, day, night?
Am I afraid or at ease?
Am I happy or sad?
Do I swim or sail?
Would I drown? Would I care?
Can I ever know rest with these questions in my head?
For the first time in my life
I take sleeping-tablets
and worry that I have taken too much
and that the last tenants of my mind
are these wild tortured contrivances of my madness.
I sleep.
Still they will not leave me,
haunting my repose
like pins and needles upon the receptors of my brain
nagging me, nagging me, nagging me
that they have required my soul
at a cost too dear
to make Death itself look awful to me.
Eternal sleep:
would that it might overwhelm me!
like a kind dream
in which I know no sickness, no weakness, no madness,
only sleep, beautiful sleep,
floating upon some buoyant bright cloud
while all the saints smile and whisper,
'Isn't she content?'
There I might know no weakness or infirmity,
no sensations,
not even my own mind,
only peace.
I wake.
Joyful sunlight bounces in the windows;
I hear the cheers of the sea-birds
and the gay whistle of the kettle
and I embrace the loving scent of soup on the cooker.
I am warm-- nay, hot,
and toss back the coffin of my blanket,
drained, but refreshed
despite the soilies so vile upon my body
and the knots of my hair resisting my hand's tenuous rake.
Sweat clings like some horrid vine about my skin
but I can sense it
and dislike it
and know it for what it is,
the last vestige of my illness,
that mad mindless state
in which I lay for three days' fast
like a forgotten doll upon the couch.
I wonder what I have missed of the world
and then, care not
for I have survived,
and can face anything now
that I have my mind again.
...
This is a poem my stepmother wrote when she was 15 and staying with us as an exchange student. She had been sick for about three days-- blaming it on this weird American climate, I am sure! --and being the genius that she is she was able to depict the mad delirium of a high fever with a such wonder and compassion that anyone can feel her sense of utter helplessness... 'an intelligent being laid low in infirmity'.
I was of course by no means as sick as this yesterday (just had a tummy-ache and sleeping most of the day helped) but I think of this poem often and thought I might share it in my blog.
...
Lewes, Delaware
24-26 September 1997
I am sick.
Deprived of energy, devoid of strength, depraved of will,
enveloped in the strange world of the fever
where temperature
and density
and thirst
and aches throughout my body
are all my sensation.
Eyes water,
with a stinging sadness;
I weep for pain, or to relieve pain, I know not;
so I shut them:
I see not.
Ears rumble,
thick and loud like thunder upon my head;
and so I ignore everything:
I hear not.
Mouth burns,
with a hot anxious constriction,
every swallow a briar down my throat;
and so I dare not part my lips:
I speak not.
I know nothing, feel nothing, want nothing,
but from within.
I rest.
Stretched upon this couch with hands crossed above my chest,
like a Queen in state,
dead to the world behind the rosecoloured glasses
of my mad mind's eye.
My head spins,
slow, dull spirals downward, ever downward,
with no end in sight.
Unworldly thoughts drift by,
like vagrants from the city street
with nowhere to call home
but the vague recesses of my mind
where they beck and call to me,
nagging, nagging, nagging,
for answers I cannot provide
like strange alien torture
to an intelligent being
unused to grave weakness
laid low in involuntary infirmity.
When I am strong enough to reply
they will be gone,
unanswered, eternally a mystery
why they ever appeared and posed a question.
That they would be gone,
I try to imagine things of my own will
as if to show my waylaid mind
that I still have control.
But my will is but a page
against the army of my sickness.
Little girls run hand-in-hand to the beach:
their vivid colours searing in my sight,
their bright voices piercing in my ears,
their happiness incomprehensible.
What girls?
What beach? What colours? What words?
Boys hang a swing in a tree,
dangling daringly above the ground
like dauntless acrobats,
dizzying to me,
frightening to me.
What boys? What tree? What swing?
Is it sunny? Cloudy? Cold? Warm?
Day? Night? Dream? Reality?
Angry, I demand an image
of the swells of the sea
rising and falling with animate regularity,
that it might be a lovely vision of contentment.
But not for me.
What sea? What colour?
What weather-- sunny, hot, cold, wind, calm, rain, day, night?
Am I afraid or at ease?
Am I happy or sad?
Do I swim or sail?
Would I drown? Would I care?
Can I ever know rest with these questions in my head?
For the first time in my life
I take sleeping-tablets
and worry that I have taken too much
and that the last tenants of my mind
are these wild tortured contrivances of my madness.
I sleep.
Still they will not leave me,
haunting my repose
like pins and needles upon the receptors of my brain
nagging me, nagging me, nagging me
that they have required my soul
at a cost too dear
to make Death itself look awful to me.
Eternal sleep:
would that it might overwhelm me!
like a kind dream
in which I know no sickness, no weakness, no madness,
only sleep, beautiful sleep,
floating upon some buoyant bright cloud
while all the saints smile and whisper,
'Isn't she content?'
There I might know no weakness or infirmity,
no sensations,
not even my own mind,
only peace.
I wake.
Joyful sunlight bounces in the windows;
I hear the cheers of the sea-birds
and the gay whistle of the kettle
and I embrace the loving scent of soup on the cooker.
I am warm-- nay, hot,
and toss back the coffin of my blanket,
drained, but refreshed
despite the soilies so vile upon my body
and the knots of my hair resisting my hand's tenuous rake.
Sweat clings like some horrid vine about my skin
but I can sense it
and dislike it
and know it for what it is,
the last vestige of my illness,
that mad mindless state
in which I lay for three days' fast
like a forgotten doll upon the couch.
I wonder what I have missed of the world
and then, care not
for I have survived,
and can face anything now
that I have my mind again.
...
12 October 2008
Over the bridge and far away
Saturday 11 October 2008
Today marks the eighth anniversary of Mommy's passing. At some time in the wee hours of the morning of the 11th she sat up in her hospital bed, caught my father's hand, and said aloud, 'I see stars!' And with that she proceeded to our loving God who submits even all things unto Himself. When Jessy and I awoke that morning Daddy was leaning over the bed-- for we had slept together that night for being so anxious about how she was doing-- and he told us that Mommy was 'out of danger'. Having both seen 'Sense and Sensibility' we knew how most people would have taken that line, but we knew also that in his faith Daddy meant it entirely another way. Mother (our nanny then) wrote that day calling our reaction The Wailing. 'I do not know how it could ever stop,' she wrote. And it did go on, if not as a sound of tears then as a cold empty pit in our souls, for quite some time till we realised what she had actually prayed for, that there could be some form of happiness without Mommy, not in spite of her absence nor because of it, but along with it. Mommy abides in Heaven, and we abide here, and we are both happy because we simply must be. There is no life without hope, and as Gran says, 'As long as there is life, there is hope.' The two are interrelated, because that's the only way life makes any sense.
I spent a little time in prayer this morning before I actually got out of bed, because I had slept through the actual moment that marked the event and I have promised myself I will never begin an October 11th without remembering her. I know this does not matter to Mommy. She is happy where she is and smiles down upon us all with confidence that we will all be all right. As Daddy has often reminded us, mourning is for those who are left. Pity for the one who has gone on is pointless-- she is the happy one, happy at home in the arms of God, and we are left to carry on in the cold cruel world.
Sometimes, even here, where Mommy never lived, I will walk in to the kitchen and for a moment imagine her standing there in her church dress and apron cleaning carrots or mixing cake batter and I will get a sudden pang down inside when I realise it's only what I might like, not what will ever be. And then I worry that I will forget her smile, or her scent, or the sound of her voice. I know Jessy believes she already has. But then we will watch her on a home video, look over our photos and revisit some of the toys and dolls she gave us, and we know her all over again as we always have. Those who leave us in the body do not leave us in the heart. This is why we call our stepmother 'Mother', like Maria gets called in 'The Sound of Music' (which is where we got the idea) and never 'Mommy' or 'Mum' like Lisa calls her instinctively. Mommy is not replaced at all-- indeed we live on with her, all of us, even our stepmother who loved her like an older sister or even a second mother... as Jessy and I love her in turn. Without Mommy having been what she was to each of us, none of what we have now could have been possible. It is really this profound-- even Mother when she was still our nanny wrote, on the day of her engagement to Daddy, that Mommy was her own saviour, the perfect sister, wife, mother, and friend, a lamb without blemish who suffered a painful and incurable condition and at age 33-- if you can believe that symbolic coincidence-- died to allow us all a new life.
...
Today marks the eighth anniversary of Mommy's passing. At some time in the wee hours of the morning of the 11th she sat up in her hospital bed, caught my father's hand, and said aloud, 'I see stars!' And with that she proceeded to our loving God who submits even all things unto Himself. When Jessy and I awoke that morning Daddy was leaning over the bed-- for we had slept together that night for being so anxious about how she was doing-- and he told us that Mommy was 'out of danger'. Having both seen 'Sense and Sensibility' we knew how most people would have taken that line, but we knew also that in his faith Daddy meant it entirely another way. Mother (our nanny then) wrote that day calling our reaction The Wailing. 'I do not know how it could ever stop,' she wrote. And it did go on, if not as a sound of tears then as a cold empty pit in our souls, for quite some time till we realised what she had actually prayed for, that there could be some form of happiness without Mommy, not in spite of her absence nor because of it, but along with it. Mommy abides in Heaven, and we abide here, and we are both happy because we simply must be. There is no life without hope, and as Gran says, 'As long as there is life, there is hope.' The two are interrelated, because that's the only way life makes any sense.
I spent a little time in prayer this morning before I actually got out of bed, because I had slept through the actual moment that marked the event and I have promised myself I will never begin an October 11th without remembering her. I know this does not matter to Mommy. She is happy where she is and smiles down upon us all with confidence that we will all be all right. As Daddy has often reminded us, mourning is for those who are left. Pity for the one who has gone on is pointless-- she is the happy one, happy at home in the arms of God, and we are left to carry on in the cold cruel world.
Sometimes, even here, where Mommy never lived, I will walk in to the kitchen and for a moment imagine her standing there in her church dress and apron cleaning carrots or mixing cake batter and I will get a sudden pang down inside when I realise it's only what I might like, not what will ever be. And then I worry that I will forget her smile, or her scent, or the sound of her voice. I know Jessy believes she already has. But then we will watch her on a home video, look over our photos and revisit some of the toys and dolls she gave us, and we know her all over again as we always have. Those who leave us in the body do not leave us in the heart. This is why we call our stepmother 'Mother', like Maria gets called in 'The Sound of Music' (which is where we got the idea) and never 'Mommy' or 'Mum' like Lisa calls her instinctively. Mommy is not replaced at all-- indeed we live on with her, all of us, even our stepmother who loved her like an older sister or even a second mother... as Jessy and I love her in turn. Without Mommy having been what she was to each of us, none of what we have now could have been possible. It is really this profound-- even Mother when she was still our nanny wrote, on the day of her engagement to Daddy, that Mommy was her own saviour, the perfect sister, wife, mother, and friend, a lamb without blemish who suffered a painful and incurable condition and at age 33-- if you can believe that symbolic coincidence-- died to allow us all a new life.
...
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