not crazy, just messy

Once in grade school, I had a bloody nose. And although there wasn't anything monumental about that...the air was dry...it was winter...the fact that I didn't pay attention to all things evident in my life that shown like a picture window to my life to others, my thumb must have caught blood and held it there and attached itself to my paper where others saw it, said ewe and moved a little farther back on their chairs.

In old age, I am trying to pay attention to those things that might need more attention than others: my driving, after the accident last year and my insurance rates went up, not really my fault; my winter sweaters I find at Goodwill one bag for five dollars I am so proud but they don't last long, when I'm not careful.

In Catholic grade school, where the bloodied thumb print sent people scurrying, we spent eight years there and really didn't have a choice of friends. With eight or nine girls in a class, you brought everyone home to your house for birthdays and pre-holiday parties, new what their houses looked like as well, what kind of car they drove, how we all fit in the backseat going to church.

Two particular friends lived on a rented farm in a small house on a slope leading down to the pasture and drawers in their rooms so organized and color coordinated I was stunned upon seeing them at twelve. I still remember socks in one drawer, sorted by colors and all matching pairs, lined up one by one next to them like children on a playground where the nuns hovered round. Their sweaters, three on top of each other, and folded like they do in good stores in the Cities.

My sweaters drawers were like the sales counter in a second hand store: arms entwined arms and there was no pattern for colors.

Relativity, simple

A discussion with my daughter who writes as well, who is writing more now than she ever did in twenty years, even with a degree in English twenty years ago from MSU, when she kept a nineteen month blog on the journey of her husband's second round with cancer, and now that she's an MFA candidate at Hamline in creative writing non-fiction.

Do we sometimes create events in our life just to make our lives more interesting or have something to write about? At first it seems like an easy way to justify short-comings or moments or years of insanity or wild moments in ones life: that you had control of it and it was your choice.

I think when you write, there may be a case for that line of thinking. Whatever comes down the course of a day, it is an interesting journey, some days  more interesting than others. And it's a change in thought process that makes it so, not just happenstance.

Traffic can be boring. Sitting in traffic is twice as boring. But watching the people around you makes it a little more intersting: the three kids in the back of the car that at first seem subdued but as the time ticks past free themselves from restraints and become moving active time bombs throughout the car. When the mother's hands fly up, when she reaches for the paper towels you know her Starbucks has just hit the floor. And if it was one of those seven dollar Christmastime extravagant purchases they have going on right now at Starbucks, the children are lucky if they're not smacked.

Fifteen years ago I lived in California for five years, and on those occasions when I was stuck on the San Mateo bridge, every time I was on the bridge it seemed unless I was coming home on the red eye, the idea of observant in traffic became important and food for thought. That San Francisco was right over there, an arm reach away, was delightful. That small sail boats set sail on the bay every second and people lived water inspired lives there.

You get to know taxi drivers on the San Mateo bridge. They get to know you.

Books and more books, can't pass them by

Finally got one bookcase partially cleaned. There is detritus there, all those things one can't give up: books, small vases, odd art pieces, and plain old detritus gathered. I bring home books from everywhere and don't ever read them all. Some day, I say. Some day. Meanwhile, they are waiting there on bookshelves in the old apartment in the old hotel. I think I was always meant to live here, gathering dust and then dusting myself and my things off again.

Old wood on patio

I've quit mourning seasons, the older I get. Gave up the notion of trying to hold onto summer, the one that I love, good wine, unwrinkled face....although I had a new thought about that old adage this morning, if I won the lottery, of course, I'd travel the world and save the world and make my children wealthy, but I'd also, along with putting my breasts back where they belong, get a facelift...move than skin one inch back all around and waah laah I am thirty-five again, woo hoo.

I had all of these revelations this morning, clearing the patio of detritus and hanging onto those few things that will be useful next spring: some pots and planters, all the old soil dumped into the middle of the middle planter, how the leaves in a pile on cement are like artwork....reminiscent of both a mummy mummified and an oblong piece of patio art.

I have new eyes, at the cost of $$$ cataract removal. I see everything now. Scary. Even my inner sight is changing. I looked in the mirror last week after the second eye was removed of its cataract and thought dear lord, where did all those age spots come from. When did all those wrinkles decide to reside on my cheeks? I look like my mother, where for a long time, well into my thirties I was lucky enough to have skin that fooled time. With a facelift pulling back the skin an inch, maybe a half an inch, there might be youthful incognito magic tric skin again.

I didn't spend that much time thinking about skin. Took the above picture instead.

I can see clearly now

Back when I was twenty-four I memorized all the words to that song, all the lilting hopeful words backpacked for tomorrow or yesterday. Where are the years wasted but in that backpack, yes?

One week past the last cataract surgery, and I can see clearly. I don't know how long I had them, pesky cataracts, only that two years ago, maybe longer, light started bothering me painfully but not consistently. Growing older one excuses those nuances of aging, bad eyesight. Last summer past eyesight grew even more painful. I ventured to the optometrist in November, knowing in December another fourth year past a birthday and I'd have to take the driver's eye exam.

Now I'm not quite so sure that the driver's eye exam is what it should be. I passed, with the knowledge of cataracts growing. I was grateful to hold onto the license. I have older friends whose licenses are tentative from year to year. They still drive from house to drugstore to hearing place to liquor store. That will probably be my path too : )

But the optometrist, not the old guy from the Cities that I loved and trusted, but a newer cheaper brand at Wal-Mart issued the proclamation, cataracts, a few weeks earlier. What do I do? I asked.

Go home and think about it.

I did for six months, but by early summer could not drive at night, cursed the day vision.

And what did I do? Instead of pushing for early surgery, went on a road trip to Montana with my daughter, of course.

I could drive in the day fine. At least that's what we told ourselves. Could not drive at night. If Jen would have been impaired during night driving home, we would have been stuck at the side of the road.
The trip was in August. I had my first surgery September 17th.

Wonderful new eyesight in the left eye.

Upon entering, brush off the bugs

Everywhere, boxelder bugs. This time of year, prevalent annoyances: so many leavings, altered views out windows~from screened to glassed, bugs. Don't step on them, my grandson says. Them, are all dead spread out on the sidewalk in front of the main door. You can't help but step on them, can't help but crunch the dead. I think of the Hunger Games: rolling heads, dust of the deceased, things that will eat you. We don't have it so bad.

I like fall. I like the closing in of it, dusting off things, rearranging. The shorts and tees go into plastic. The sweaters come down, gratefully, and take the place of shorts and tees in drawers. The flowers, durable ones, are hauled inside to the little space there is for plants in a small apartment. Pumpkins are bought and adorn doorways, instead of boxelders. They are swept away. Gone is potato salad and brats and cold pasta with veggies. Soup cooks on the stove. Squash gets chopped into chunks. Apples sit in a pretty bowl begging for attention.

I hate football, hate those big guys going after the tall thin guys, hate the crunching and punching and all. I watch real games through fingers held in front of eyes, was not that sad when my oldest grandson broke his arm last week during ninth grade football and that fact benched him. I'm sorry for his broken arm. I'd rather it had happened climbing a tree or skiing or just rolling down a hill. But he was there for the taking, slim quarterback with a good arm. Not a dirty play, his father said. He was there with a camera to capture it. Cool, Noah said, stilly prone on the ground. You should put it on Facebook.

There are no boxelder bugs in the photo. There is the dry grass of summer, a Minnesota drought. There is the pediatrician's arms with her bandaged finger holding up Noah's rubber like arm. She has a ring on. He has a bandage on his finger, too. What's up with that, I wonder. His arm looks like those rubber things people stick out of trunks for pranks. A Halloween arm. Broke in two places, both lower arm bones.

When I go to visit, step over dead boxelders, the younger brother holding the door, the house operates like there is an invalid indoors. And there is, sort of. At fourteen, he'll heal fast. Not fast enough for the rest of football.

Sigh.

Fixing Cadillacs

The eyes went along with the rest of the body, starts the poem from Midnight Depression. Wake up. At midnight. Somewhat alone, except for the phantom fish in a phantom jar...the one I've always been meaning to get, the night train...wait for it, wait for it...rumbling tracks...shaking the phantom phish...the occasional light nater interloper to dreams who takes the back stairway.

The young die. Too young. Too soon. But in plenty of time to avoid the body going south. I lived with a gay man for too many years. He was not out of the closet. I took care of him. Until I didn't want to anymore. I had better things to do. Take care of my kids, my grandchildren. On the day I left him, I drove east out of the Bay area noticing rolling hills so dry even thoughts could set them ablaze, wind turbines on the slope of great turbulence, me driving up and down. And then I noticed, this lump in my throat.

Lumps are great trumpeters of what is coming. This lump was benign. This lump, noticed when swallowing, would be eventually diagnosed: caused by gastric reflux, caused by stress, caused by the gay guy not coming out of the closet. My diagnosis, the last one.

Sometimes shortness of breath comes. My blood pressure never rises, except when they took the cataract out. We do that to people, the charge nurse said smiling.

Last winter, joint pain in the knee and then shoulder. It skips the elbow. Why?

Last winter, I passed my driver's exam eye test. This summer, never.

I went to Montana anyway. And drove some. And missed mountains, and nuances in my daughter's tone, a dog at the bottom of the great stairways, a motorcycle man, handsome, I think.

One eye is good now. One eye can see. One eye is doing all the work, while the other waits for surgery. My turn, it says. I'm tired.

My sister had her teeth pulled for new October dentures on the same day. How'd we get so old, we wonder. We once hung from trees, and all our secrets fell into a pile of leaves.

Yes, my good eye says. A start of a new poem.

on the side of the road

sometimes socks, or a shoe...one the side of the road.
You wonder where the foot went. If it's still attached to the body. You hear of people being stuffed into duffel bags after they're dead. A shoe might have fallen off. They found a four year old in Britain today, tucked under two dead people in a backseat. Who would have thought that's how her day would have turned out. Unless the dead grandmother had secrets. It goes either way. A random act of ultimate meanness. Or the road that shouldn't have been taken..

There were two purple chair on the side of the road I took today. Wicker. Worn, the way I like chairs sometime. A history in chairs, not mine, but I can sit on them and add some content.

And a purple table. For the patio. I've been wanting such things for the patio. Now they've materialized. It happens sometimes that way. The lottery that I've been wanting does not.

entrails in alley

I am usually discerning when I throw stuff out by the dumpster. You step off my patio, walk past recycle and there is the large green container that holds everything disposable. In summer it reeks. And in summer more people seem transient, it seems, and vacate quickly.
We live in an old hotel. There are twenty units. Most of them are one and two bedrooms on the second and third floor. There's an elevator access and stairs in the front, and a backstairs all leading to the second and third floor.
My apartment's bedroom is adjacent to the backstairs entrance and ascent. The door slams hard in order to make it secure and closed. I've gotten used to it.
I haven't gotten used to the entrails that people leave outside the dumpster: bookcases, matresses, box springs, televisions large and small, stereo systems broken, pieces of tables, plastic storage is a popular throw away, metal frames and more. What goes into the dumpster often are boxes and bags of clothes, toys, small appliances. Often the detritus of old hotel life stacks up. Sometimes a piece or two are hauled away at night. I've claimed two shelves, a bookcase, and that's about all. I've thrown away one television set and it's still there. In theory, trucks or caretakers are supposed to haul this away. My television set has gone untouched. I should have hauled it to an electronics disposal place myself.
I've noticed things up and down alleys in downtown St. Peter that could outfit an entire household. And provide them with transportation. And help them start a used stuff store.
I pride myself in becoming a minimalist after years of collecting. There are things I can't give up. And if they are dear enough to call for another home, they find themselves down the street at second hand stores. Or in the front of the building with a take me sign. I've given away a microwave, a vacuum cleaner, and an air matress. No television set, however. It still sits there by the dumpster abused by the rain. I will haul it away soon. It grates on me.

Waiting for something

They tore down the parking lot. To put up a parking lot.
My niece sent me wine from California the other day. It was suppose to arrive on Wednesday morning. On Tuesday, big yellow tractors and haulers tore up the parking lot. To put up a parking lot. New version of an old song.

It's hard to find me in my building without machinery and yellow tape. I decided to get up early and sit on the other side of my building in a little patio area. I have my own patio, but I live in no man's land back there. UPS, FED-EX, pizza delivery people...all wander around looking for 115 or 116. Sometimes people are just wandering. You have to redirect them. No entry. No this isn't a govenment building. No, I'm not in the mood for idle conversation about your gall bladder.

I barely got settled on the other side of the patio when I noticed six or eight stalks of dead plants in a planter box in the area. I'm no gardener. I like flowers. I plant flowers. I tend to flowers. Do I know what I'm doing, pick one of two, not really, in theory.

I am ripping out the dead stalks when I see the Fed-Ex man pull up. It's quarter to eight. Could I be so lucky as to have my package in record time? Of course not. Is that for me? I ask. Are you 111? Shucks, no. 115. He smiles and departs into the interior of the building and up the stairs with a large package. But if I can't find Amanda home, would you sign for it? Sure.

It's a minute later when I realize all the 11 something apartments are on the ground floor. Four of them. Mr. Fed-Ex comes back down. That way I point down the street to the end of the building. I just figured that out, he said. A little while later he comes back. No Amanda. I sign my name. He lifts the box over the patio railing. It's heavy, he says, and leaves before I have a chance to change my mind.

I sit there with Amanda's large package until nine. Problem. Do I take the package to my apartment...not an easy feat...through a locked door, down the elevator, through the basement, up a fight of stairs, out the door, navigate the small path between shrubs and trees...because they have torn up the parking lot. I do, but I curse the cute but blasted Fed-Ex man the entire way.

Back to my station. I meet interesting people while sitting at my post waiting for wine. I see interesting stuff. The new Ace Hardware Corporate Offices across the street hosts many older, retiree-looking genteelmen who work there. And one young woman with her hands full and a fumbling key.

Someone on a balcony walks out, smokes a cigarette, and flicks it toward me. Nice try.

A nice forties something man with a pickup is loading up his clothes into it. He talks to me. Street chit chat. Nice day. Nice weather. Wine?? Do you ever go to Trader Joe's? Sure, all the time. Me, too.

A thirties something man with a pickup is loading up his clothes. He does not talk to me.

A woman who turns out to be the choral director in town comes by with a nice car and stuff. She gets out with stuff and loads up a cart. She goes inside and up the elevator with her stuff. And comes back with other stuff. Eventually we talk. She is a character, lively, full of talk. Her daughter has moved here. She's up on the second floor. I am always happy to see thirty something and older moving into our building. I shudder when the young men get out of their souped up Blazers with large stereo systems and barbells. Next time, I will call the cops is my mantra to them.

Emily comes by with flowers in her hand for a friend. Jessica comes down with her white fluffy dog for a walk. No UPS driver ever comes by. I've figured out through an internet search that this is how my wine is comiing. I ask the woman in the salon if she'd watch for him. She says sure. I go back to my apartment and hang out with Jessica's very large box from a Pet Store. I surmise it's pet food. It was heavy enough. But there is a color guide and it is marked beige.

The UPS driver shows up at eleven with the wine. You found me, I say jubilantly. I was at 111 just the other day, he said. Really, well here's another box for her, I say but not out loud.

Thanks for the wine, I say. He smiles and disappears towards the disabled parking lot that is now void of workers and machinery.

Montana leaving

The fastest way to travel home is by plane, the prettiest by train. Bus might be close to train, save for that word....close. Elbow close. Snoring close. Breathing close. Head on shoulder close.

Too many stories on trains. Too many long journeys back. Vacant faces staring past the driver's ear. Highway comes up to meet the gaze but passes straight through.

Anonymity, on trains. More space. The lounge car for drinks or gazying sideways past prairie and hills. A woman wrote a poem once about North Dakota and trees. As we left Fargo, I thought I saw the place.

I travel light. Worry distance and timelines, not suitcases and stuff. If I lose the pull-behind, I have underwear, a toothbrush, and forty dollars in the smaller one. And something to write on. I could be left by that tree in North Dakota, and if I had the carry-on could last for awhile.

Leaving California by train. Transients under railroad tressles. Lost souls leaning again a wall. And a yellow chair in the middle of a field with a lamp like the one my mother had sitting next to the chair.

We gave that lamp to Goodwill after she died. I'd like to think it made it's way to California to a field the way John Lennon made his way to strawberries.

I choose to ride in the passenger car this time. Not because I think they're kind to my back. And I sleep sparsely, restlessly, in these chairs. Airplanes, too. The pest next to you who doesn't sit still, until she orders wine and digs out the Tylenol PM.

I ride out of California knowing I will be back. We ascend into mountains fraught with heavy snow. Causeways take water down to my apartment on the hill overlooking the bay. I sit on that hill when I can't go home and think of things randomly. My children. Irksome living arrangements. A cat lost at the beginning.

Observer, always. Someone once said I should have a disclaimer pinned to my sweater warning passers-by of my penchant for gleaning their story. Like a farmer combining grain. Like a penny-wise thrifty searching the grass. I like your stories. Please share.

Montana we ease into. It's getting dark. Mountains are there but blurred and stalwart. By morning we'll be easing out of the more mundane western part of Montana into North Dakkota. Mundane is not a word I like to use, but there is a need for contrast here.

Watch the landscape blur. Watch the woman in front of me pilfer through their never ending food suitcase. In the morning she will ask me if I want a sweet roll, maybe, or a hunk of cheese.

Not sleeping and remember the Tylenol PM. A woman gets on on the west side of town. Pretty city. She does not look back. She does look around the train where sleepers are sprawled across seats. I move my bag and she sits down.

god in all places but mine

I am not sure of god. Sometimes god is a potluck in my mind. I take a little bit of everything...Swedish meatballs, German potato salad, Irish stew, and some nondescript bean thing that has all sorts of ties to other countries named cassoulet baked fried refried...some days and absolutely nothing other days. I find myself in the sky floating like a cloud past my window...not really searching...more like on a leisurely journey where I don't have to think. About God.

My mother handed me a new Maryknoll Missal on the day of my First Communion. I was six and riding in the back of the car. In her stiff formal manner that was the norm when she dealt with me, she turned abruptly from her position in the passenger seat and handed me the holy book. Here, she said. This is from your Dad and I. This is the happiest day of your life.

I took the book and turned it over in my hands. Nice cover. It smells news. The inscription in my mother's handwriting, Love, etc. etc.

I am still waiting.

For that happiest day of my life concerning religion..

I am happier praying off my deck, or not, with a beer in my hand. If not prayer, than some sort of communion with butterflies and rabbits and feral cats running by and clouds.

I think I was always meant to be a non-religious doubting person in a sea of religious never doubting followers of Jesus Christ.

I have a hard enough time with God, let alone throwing in JC into the mix.

And all of the thoughts that others like me have thought....why war, why death, why destruction, why men power tripping, why not....have gone through my head and other thoughts.

About God. And religion.

Don't know. Have not come up with any substantial conclusions in my head.

My Facebook page reads the sun is God, or maybe John Lennon.

I'll go with that.

Road trip

Itching for a road trip cross country to states I haven't been to. Louisiana, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, New York (shame on me), Maine, New Hampshire, Alaska. Or to places I've been often: west coast, mountains states, five state area surrounding MN. Doesn't matter where. Doesn't matter if there are no reservations. I could sleep in the car, eat at truck stops, watch truck drivers come in from a haul, and later depart myself. It's not so much in the destination, the old saying goes. You know the rest.

 I like to drive. I like behind the wheel. I like new roads, old roads, gravel roads, good roads. I like bars in towns I never heard of. I like quaint places to rest my head. But if the smell of cleaning fluids and cigarettes permeate, I will get up at three a.m. and drive on.

I like old school houses that are turned into something else. I hope the ghosts of students past come back to ring school bells, slam books, start fires in grates to warm the souls. I like warnings on streets: watch out for the ducks.

When there are feelings of being immobile, both physically and mentally, there is the yearning for walking out to the car without anything in hand and heading south. Or west. Going to the Cities isn't quite enough. I used to drive cross country regularly. And take odd roads. And stop at odd places. Now life seems to regular, too tethered, too ordinary. The older I get, the more chances I want to take. The opposite should be true, perhaps. Might scare my children, again, with irrational ways or impromptu leavings. It's the kids that are suppose to leave, they said when I packed up and moved to California, not the mom. They were older, most of them, out of college.  I assiduously went about loading up the car, deleting my life here, setting my life up there. When is too old too old. When is old enough not old enough. When does the list of things I gotta do deplete. Hopefully never.

There may be a road trip this summer. I could knock off the southern states easy. Or there just might be something that keeps me home.

Porch lights

My father always said that our mother did not want to be out on the farm, six miles from Comfrey, six miles from nowhere. Perhaps that was the reason she stood by the east windows in the living room looking down the road as if someone might appear on that dusty horizon and take her away. The few cars that did traverse that road were predictable: old Juney driving home drunk (interchange Juney with Henry or Sparks and it sums up the three regular drunks my father had to sometimes pull out of our ditch), the insurance man who would in time piss off my father to rage, and the mailman speeding over red rock ridge on his way to our mailbox.

Whomever Mother might have been waiting for never came. I conjured up a used car salesman from the Cities, that glossy-domed man who had long commercials enticing you with used but good cars. She had a boy friend before my father that no one knew about except for me. My sister was surprised years later when told her about Cecil. What precipitated our mother's telling the story to me about her first true love happened the night before she told me her story. My sister was long gone to the Cities by then, and I was left in charge, on Sunday card club nights, of my two brothers, nine and four.

With the two boys safely in bed and the front porch light on signifying all is clear, a car full of friends from Sleepy Eye came down the road on their way to no where in particular and s opped for a few hours. There was some drinking going on. Probably backseat almost but not quite sex, neither of which I had learned to partake in. Yet.

After a few hours, they departed, just before my parent's came home from a night of 500 and ham sandwiches.

The conversation about Cecil ocurred the next day after my parent's had discovered various sundry items on the front lawn: beer cans, a whiskey bottle, and a not used condoms still packaged. My father frowned at the thought of confronting me, which was usually the case, and went out to the hog barns, leaving my mother and I at the kitchen counter.

In her rarely used motherly manner, she stumbled upon the blocks of informing a daughter what was right and wrong at the age of fifteen. Everything she told me I had heard before, in much less flattering manners and cruder words. Giving up on the lecture, she lit a cigarette and poured herself a drink: Seagrams Seven with Seven-Up. Didn't most parent's drink that? She had another stash of booze in her bedroom closet, stuffed far back and under her winter coats. I would sometimes partake in the awful cheap port she hid on Sunday night babysitting stints with my brothers. Bored to death, I'd pour Dixie cups full of the cheap port, throw my head back and drink it down. I'd be passed out on the couch until I heard the garage door open and then I'd fly up the stairs to bed.

Your father wasn't my first love, my mother said. I was startled. Never had we approached a conversation anywhere near like the one that was going to ensue. In fact, my mother and I had little to say to each other most of our days. The only time we ever opened up to each other before was four years earlier when the local doctor put us both on diet pills, aka speed, to lose forty pounds. We lost forty pounds and our minds: we sat at the kitchen counter and laughed about everything: tomatoes, the mailman, telephones.

That particular afternoon of revelation however turned to Cecil. Cecil was my first love, my mother said. I was in my early twenties. We spent many days courting and going to the movies. I remember kissing him for the first time under a street lamp. I thought he was the one. I thought I was the one for him.

He went away one summer, she continued. His father owned a lumber yard up north or in the Dakotas. Somewhere. I didn't see him until Christmas. By then he had a bar maid pregnant and was getting married. I got a dear Agnes letter. I kept it for a number of years. I don't know where it went.

I suppose Cecil might have been the one my mother was waiting for all those years, standing by the ugly Sears curtains in the living room waiting for a car to come barreling down the road, screech to a stop, and take her away.

When that didn't happen, she found other ways to leave while still being there. There were two of us by then, my sister and I, when she started having illnesses, real and imagined. There would be two sons born as well, intermingled with three miscarriages and a still birth. My sister, five years older than I, remembered two miscarriages lost on the living room floor.  It was probably why we got cheap living room carpeting to hide the red stains on hardwood.

I was too young to remember. On one of these occasions our mother sent Pat, then five, out to the fields to find our father. Sick with the flu, Pat was garbed in pajamas and a bathrobe. She remembers bare feet in winter because there had been no time for shoes. She remembers plowing, how the white bathrobe flew around her in the wind. You looked like an angel standing there on the edge of the plowing, our father told her.

That was only the beginning. I remember more illnesses and tumors and disorders than one person should carry themselves.  There was a tumor she grew on her knee that required surgery. There was a faulty gall bladder, kidney stones. We were coming home one Thursday night from Perpetual Help Devotions when the kidney stones flared up and she lost control of the car. I remember the plowing out my backseat window, how close we came to a telephone pole.

Often, Pat and I would come home from school to find an empty house. I don't know where our brothers were. Probably carted away to family or friends. We had aunts who pitched in, a housekeeper from Leavenworth one year who only let me put one teaspoon of sugar on my Corn Flakes.

When the school bus rounded the corner a quarter of mile from our farm house and the back porch light was on, we knew we were coming home to an empty house. We sat together, my sister and I, because we got on at the parochial school and found comfort in each other's presence. That was not a common occurrence. I was more a thorn in her side, five years younger, and more than a little precocious.  But on the school bus we teamed up because we knew what we might find when we got home.

Slow down, she would say as I tried to hurry our departure off the bus. That small space from school bus door to the door of the house always seemed a mile long and threatening to me when I knew we were going to be alone. In reality, our house was nearly on the road, making morning rituals easy: get up with only fifteen minutes to spare, down a cup of cocoa and a piece of toast just as the school bus rounded the corner, and then fall out the door, race up the ditch and walk up bus stairs.

When the porch light was on, we knew what to expect. We never told anyone, not friends, not other bus riders, that the house was empty. Instead, we descended the stairs, ran down the ditch and into the house. Always there was a note. Took your mother to the hospital, written in my father's learned cursive handwriting....Comfrey, New Ulm, Minneapolis, Rochester....were all interchangeable depending on the circumstance. Will stop in Sleepy Eye and get those applesauce donuts you like, stop in New Ulm and get hamburgers, won't stop, there's dinner in the fridge.

Our coats and book bags were dumped in the corner for awhile. Eventually we would tidy up, but the first ritual was locking all the doors, pulling all the shades, and locking every door.


Years and years later, when our parents died and Pat and I perused through those guest books funeral homes set out by the front door and give you as a gift, we discovered something very interesting. Cecil, the old boy friend, had been at our father's funeral. Three years later, almost to the day, he was a viewer at the funeral home when our mother died.

I never knew the man. Didn't know what he looked like. But perhaps our mother meant more to him than she ever knew.

On leaving town

I packed this morning and hauled various items to the car: clothes, food that might spoil in the fridge in a weeks time, shoes, coat sweater jacket because it has become @#$%^%$ cold out again. On one of the trips back from car to apartment I picked up several soda cans that had been tossed and flattened in the parking lot outside my door. As I was walking towards the recycling bin a woman with two dogs, a stroller and a baby, and a four-year-old boy walked by. What's that lady doing, the little boy asked his mother. She's picking up pop cans, the mother answered. Some people need extra money and so they go around picking up pop cans.

Revisiting an old life

I spent a week in California at the end of March. A friend asked me to go along for the fun, her daughter was doing wedding stuff and we could view wedding dresses and venues and flowers. Sounded good to me. And the extra bonus would be spending three days with my niece, Kerstin, and her husband, John Koester, and their dog Andy, in San Francisco. Advice, don't ever  pass up a trip to California if you need a coastal trip. I hadn't been there for awhile, mostly touch downs by layover planes in the last few years.

I usually opt for an aisle seat if I can, but I was lucky enough to have a window seat on this return trip and gave up soda and coffee for a four hours seated view to my left. You traverse the heavily populated twin cities metro area dotted with lakes for the first few minutes. And then cross over the flat lands and prairie and hundreds of other lakes of Southern Minnesota. My brother worked for Northwest for years and years, took advantage of those free stand-by flights, and often knew when the plane was flying close to our farm near Comfrey and the Jeffes petroglyphs. My parents and my aunt owned a piece of the Red Rock Ridge for years, passed it on later to us. It was probably the obvious piece of landscape that stuck out like a wave to my brother passing by on a plane. We played on that ridge. We rode horses on the ridge and bikes down the gravel road.

Once past the predictable farmland in MN, you can tell where the land changes in South Dakota showing off badlands and foothills the glaciers so eagerly left in their wake.

We sat on the either side of a very nervous young man, Jehovah Witness I might have wrongfully guessed as he was dressed in the JW garb of street ministers. He gouged me twice in the ribs with his elbows when we were first on the plane. Kept wringing his hands and smacking his forehead. He did not look up for conversation. I can usually assess who wants to talk and who doesn't want to talk in about five seconds sitting next to someone. I fall somewhere in between, thinking if the plane would crash in flight, at least I had said hello to the fellow next to me instead of acting like he didn't exist.

I decided he was even too nervous for a hello, and took a benadryl and drifted blissfully into la la land, although not quite asleep. Surreptitiously I watched him from veiled sleep, was about to ask him if he wanted a pill or three himself when we crossed over the Rockies and that landscape caught my attention for quite awhile.

I love how we have this great spans of land where no one has walked on or built on or cried on or loved on or even died on. There are places on this planet where, once again blissfully, no human foot or fool or foe has touched. It is there where my imagination lets loose to just weather: wind comes here, rain, too, and tons of snow. I had a third cousin who died when I was seventeen and pregnant with my first child. My life was set in stone. Hers was not. She was a free spirit, wild hair, few strings tying her to one place. I had met her once, a wild child with lofty ambitions of seeing the world and saving the world or maybe changing her mind about the last one and just living in the moment while seeing the world. She took a trip with a professor and some other students her first year of college. Small plane. Good conversation, I'm sure...the kind you have when you're just starting college and you have your professor up there on a pedestal with his/her ideas and philosophies and dreams. The plane went down. It took a long time for authorities to find the plane and the bodies. I hope Mary Ellis was holding on those dreams as she met the earth and realized it was time for some other plane.

Usually in the Rockies the clouds snag us and cover up the view. That day it was a bit hazy but clear enough to imagine the rocky life below.

Twice gouged in the side again, I took another benadryl and this time drifted into a near rocky mountain haze of my own. Two hours later, we were coming down out of the sky, I saw the old familiar east bay
hills where I lived for four or five years, caught sight of the San Mateo Bridge.

I always close my eyes when we go in for the landing across the bay. Kerstin's husband John said how many times have you heard of a plane smushing into the bay. None, that I could think of. But I bet there was at least one.

Fairly uneventful flight, save for the jabs in the ribs. When we were getting off the plane, the young man nervously gathered up his stuff, but just as he was heading for the aisle looked down and gave me a sneaky little smile that made me sit up. Huh, I thought. If he didn't want to talk to either of us, his ploy certainly worked.

Later, my friend Suzanne and I wondered if he had acted up on purpose the whole trip out. And that attached to his suit on his lap was a camera. And our nervous glances caught on video for all the world to see.

Probably not. We were just grateful he was not with us on the trip home.