Archive | March 2023

Dark Anniversaries

Mar29

The sound of the ringing phone dragged me out of a deep sleep. Before I knew what I was doing, I was on my feet and stumbling in the dark mobile home hallway toward the living room to answer the phone. I felt heavy with a strange nagging dread. Arnie, my young husband was two steps behind me.

Two months earlier, I had given birth to a baby girl named Christy, who had a rare birth defect. We brought her home twice but were forced to return her to the hospital within days. Having no childcare experience and feeling terrified by her special needs, I felt like a failure as a mother. Yesterday evening Arnie and I had visited our little girl at the hospital. Reaching through the bars of her crib, I gently patted her back. I didn’t know what else to do.

The voice on the other end of the line was Christy’s pediatrician. He said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your daughter has just passed away.” Handing the phone to Arnie, I sank onto the sofa and cried. Christy’s death was our first experience with losing someone dear to us. My husband and I had celebrated out 20th birthdays a few months earlier.

The call from Christy’s doctor at 2 a.m. on April 2nd, 1971, introduced me to days that I have come to call dark anniversaries. Unlike a birthday where you celebrate the person’s birth, the death date is a day you remember them and miss what might have been. Dark anniversaries are seared into your memory forever.

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Nom De Plume

Mar22

This baby just found out what name his parents decided to give him.

Our teacher, a petite nun, wrote the words, “nom de plume”, in large letters as high as she could on the classroom blackboard. Putting down the chalk, she dusted off her hands and faced the class to ask, “Who knows what these words mean.”

I raised my hand. Sister nodded at me. I proudly announced, “A nom de plume is a name.”

Sister exclaimed happily, “That’s right! But what kind of name?” That question had me stymied. As far as I knew, a name was just a name. I frowned and gave her a quizzical look. Sister explained, “A nom de plume is a pen name, or a pseudonym. It’s a fictitious name that many writers adopt, instead of their own. Does anyone in class know of a writer who has done this?”

One of my classmates tentatively raised his hand and following Sister’s nod, answered, “When I was reading the book Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain last summer, Mom told me the writer’s real name was Samuel Clemens.”

I wanted to be a writer someday, so this tidbit of information made me wonder indignantly, “Why wouldn’t a writer want people know who had really written something? If I ever write a book, I know very well that I would never use a false name for my by-line!”

Someone else in class felt the same way I did. I listened closely to Sister’s explanation. “In the past many women authors used masculine pen names to conceal their femininity. Publishers often considered books written by women a poor investment.”

Without raising his hand and waiting for Sister’s nod, someone blurted, “But Samuel Clemens was a man. Why did he use a fictitious name?”

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Fox R US

Mar15

What does the fox say?

A fresh blanket of snow covered the backyard. Opening the living room curtains, I admired ice crystals sparkling like diamonds in the snow. As my eyes adjusted to the bright, March morning sunlight, I noticed that the pristine covering had already been marred by animal tracks. Going from window to window in my house, I tried to make sense of what had gone on following the snowfall.

            Pulling on boots and a jacket, I went outside to take a closer look. Like an Arthur Murray student, I studied the tracks in the driveway nearest to the back door. One track belonged to a rabbit and the other to a deer. Their steps appeared quick, quick, slow, quick, quick, slow. The two were obviously dancing the tango.

Another set of footprints belonged to a large dog with warm feet. The prints were deep and defined. I could tell he stopped to sniff here and there as he passed through the yard.

The rest of the yard was covered with hundreds of rabbit tracks. In some places one hundred bunnies had followed the same trail. The snow was thoroughly trampled. The shelter of the woodshed and underside of the deck next to the house were the most popular places in the yard for the local long-earred crowd.

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Slide Line

Mar8

Blustery cold winds blew clouds of snow across the playground. Happy to be out of the classroom for recess, my classmates and I burst out of the school building ready to play. I stopped and realized it was too windy for jump ropes or kick balls. What games could we play?

            The mittens Mom had fastened to my coat so I wouldn’t lose them, and a large cotton headscarf tied tightly under the chin kept me toasty warm.

            The snow wouldn’t stick together, so we couldn’t throw snowballs or make a snowman. I shrugged. Our teacher wouldn’t let us do either of those things anyway. Sister Florence gloomily scolded, “A hard snowball can take out a person’s eye if you hit them in the face!” Making a snowman was completely out of the question since our playground was the church parking lot.

A classmate named Jimmy found a perfect place to slide on the far end of our play area, a stretch of gently sloped blacktop covered in packed snow. Yelling at the top of their lungs, several of the boys took turns running to that spot and suddenly stopped to slide. I watched with interest. Before long, the slide looked like a dark, shiny ribbon of glass.

            Everyone on the playground wanted to take a turn sliding on the ice. True to our grade school training, instead of fighting, we formed a line so everyone could take a turn at our homemade carnival ride. With shrieks of laughter, some of us fell into nearby snow piles. We tumbled and rolled in our bulky woolen coats, landing unhurt and unconcerned.

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Have Chainsaw, Will Travel

Mar1

Encouraged by the sunshine and blue skies, I pulled on a jacket and left the house to take an afternoon walk around the yard. Melting patches of ice in the driveway made each step a gamble. Not wanting to fall, I stepped off into the soggy snow covering the grass. Snowbanks pushed into tall mounds by a plow along my drive were surrounded by puddles of water.

            Suspiciously, I scolded Mother Nature, “It looks like spring, but I know better. You can’t fool me. I wasn’t born yesterday. We will still get a lot of cold weather and snow in Wisconsin before winter is over.”

Enjoying the fresh air, I walked from my driveway to the nearby bridge. Although the weather was warm this week, it looked as though we were still a long way from having the river ice break up. Just in the short distance that I could see downstream before the river curved out of sight, were at least a dozen large branches broken off trees along the water. Shaking my head, I wondered if all those branches would cause a log jam in the river during the spring melt.

 An ice storm during the winter had coated every highline wire, twig and branch with heavy sheaths of ice. The weight broke several branches from the pine trees in my yard. Until today I had only seen the damage from the living room windows. Since the afternoon was so pleasant, today I would take a closer look at the carnage.

Several broken branches had landed on top of one another along the tree line. The jumble of large, sturdy logs reminded me of a giant game of pick-up-sticks. I wondered if I could cut them up with my small battery-powered chainsaw. I doubtfully eyed the forked branches that would surely hook onto each other and make them doubly hard to saw. A tug on one of the branches showed that the branches were still frozen to the ground.

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