Back Porch Sittin'

The Old Man and I sat on the back porch watching the sun set over the Rockies and drinking Miller High Life cans. His hand found mine - the touch of his skin always goes deep - and we talked about how this crazy family schedule wouldn't have to last forever. The sprinkler rhythm was low and sweet and it smelled like Russian Sage and fresh cut grass.

"I'm sorry I'm so fat and emotional," I said.

The Old Man smacked a mosquito on his neck. "You're not fat," he said.

Back to Work: 10 Tips for New Moms

You're a new mom, with a baby in daycare and a full-time job. Here are 10 tips for a smooth transition back to work:

1. Wherever you are, be there mentally. If you're at work, don't freak out if you haven't thought of your baby for 3 hours. If you're at home, don't dwell on work.
2. If you're still breastfeeding, take time to pump to keep up your milk supply. The law says you can. Don't let bosses or coworkers make you feel guilty for doing so. A hands-free pumping bra makes the time pass quickly.
3. There are no studies that show wheat beer increases milk supply. Oatmeal increases milk supply. But that's no reason you can't have a beer every once in a while to relax.
4. Take time to be with your baby when you get home. You need each other.
5. When your baby gets sick for the first time, your vacation and sick time will be depleted from maternity leave. Take a deep breath when your husband, rolling in accrued sick leave, doesn't understand that it is now his responsibility to take the baby to the doctor.
6. Don't be surprised if your boss or coworkers expect less of you now that you're a mom. Prove them wrong.
7. When your husband pouts and feels sorry for himself because he has to wake up at 5 A.M. to hold the baby while you get ready for work, try to suppress your urge to kick him in the shins. Don't worry, you probably won't be able to beat him up too bad because you're exhausted from the midnight and 3:30 AM marathon nighttime feedings.
8. Try to reach back into the recesses of your sleep-deprived brain and give your husband a break. This new baby stuff is a huge strain on relationships. He's a good guy and has a full-time job too. Wait until the baby is asleep and you are both calm to talk over any problems. Give each other the benefit of the doubt.
9. Take heart. This exhausted zombie kind of life doesn't last forever. Only for about a year. Until your next kid.
10. For Christ's sake, stop feeling guilty. If you must leave your baby in daycare, if you stop breastfeeding, if you can't make spectacular dinners anymore, if you're at your desk and all of a sudden your mind goes blank - feeling guilty about it doesn't do any good.

I think all moms are different, all families are different, all babies are different. If someone tells you there's a handbook, she's lying. I'd be interested to hear other tips from moms and dads...things that have worked for you.

Moments

There's a scary seldom-mentioned feeling in our family that my father will have another heart attack, one that he won't survive.

My father, dressed in his plaid button-down shirt on a Friday night, held my daughter. Past her bedtime, and past his. In the soft light of the living room lamp, they smiled at each other. The same calloused hands that held me as I grew up were wrapped around her cotton pink blanket. Her small body swam in the comfort of his arms.

"I've got to be around to see her grow up," he said.

My Poem on A Handful of Stones Blog

Check out "Janis Joplin Lulluaby" on A Handful of Stones blog. I wrote this about six weeks ago when Baby Girl was at her muy fussy stage and we'd spend an hour and a half trying to put her to bed. I'm not the singing type but I do know one song.

http://www.ahandfulofstones.com/2010/07/janis-joplin-lullaby.html

Melancholy, Where Are You?

I suspect that I am deliriously happy, which, as any writer knows, is a death sentence for creativity. I'm lucky I dreamed up a severed toe a while ago, but for now I'm just contented.

As any woman who has endured unspeakable pain giving birth to two children knows, it is excruciatingly difficult to be sympathetic to her husband who has just gotten a vasectomy. I am so contented that I did not remind The Old Man that if he thinks getting snipped is bad, he could never handle what I've been through.

I've managed to keep the kids happy and the house running smoothly while he's laid up watching Sports Center. Baby Girl is 10 weeks old and on a sleep schedule. Things are going so well that I can't even summon angst when she pukes on me.

So, I apologize for my lack of posts. Maybe I'll try something crazy and write about happy stuff.

The Toe

I found it in the desert, west of town. I saw Fran driving the old blue truck, loaded down with tree limbs and dead branches, and then I saw her climb out and pitch the stuff off the side of a shallow arroyo. It was seven in the morning, and I was walking before the heat had a chance to start baking the trail.

The toe was severed clean, like a surgeon had sliced it with a very sharp saw. It was the big toe, with a yellowed nail and a hairy toe knuckle. The bone was surrounded by meat that had dried some. It reminded me of a steak I’d forgotten about on the counter a couple of weeks ago; the desert air had sucked out the moisture and left dried, raw flesh, rough to the touch and darkened on the edges like jerky.

It rested on the sand, next to a tree limb with leaves already curling from the approaching heat.
I wondered if toeprints were like fingerprints, and if the victim could be identified from the whorls on the pad of the appendage. Did Fran know she had a toe in her truck?

I liked Fran. I did handyman work for her and her husband Oliver about once a week. Painting, mending fence, cleaning the gutters – whatever they needed. Fran always told me I was “a fine young man, but too skinny,” so she fed me dinner often: fried chicken, thick mustard potato salad, green butter beans and apple pie. I’d be shoveling in the garden and she’d take my dirty hand in her frail, spider-webbed one, and tell me to stop and eat. Sometimes she would forget my name was Chris and call me Allen or Bill, but I never corrected her. She was in her eighties, after all.

I shrugged off my backpack and got a sandwich bag full of grapes. I sat on the sand with my back to the sun so my face would be shaded. An ant found the toe, and began chewing on the fresh end near the nail. I finished the grapes and put the toe in the bag.

I kept the rest of the hike short and on the way back, I looked down where the toe had been resting. A column of ants were milling about, probably confused that the meal one of them had found was gone.

I took the toe to Tom. He was the local sheriff, the only law enforcement for fifty miles or so. I figured a severed toe was worth reporting, but I wasn’t sure what Tom could do with it.

Tom didn’t touch it at first, just sat with his arms crossed and looked at it through the plastic bag. “And where did you say you found this?”

“On my hike,” I said. “You know the trail that goes west past the arroyo?”

“Did you notice any footprints, or anything unusual about the area?” Tom asked. “There could be a whole body up there.”

“Just the toe, nothing else,” I said. “I don’t think there’s a body up there.”

“I’ll have to check it out,” Tom said. “Do you think you could take me to the spot?”

I don’t know why I lied to Tom. It just sort of happened. I took him well short of where Fran had dumped her tree branches. I made him believe I’d found the thing about three hundred yards up the trail off the paved road. Tom knelt down and looked at the footprints on the path, mushed up and vague in the sand, and took a sample of dirt in the place I’d told him I found it.

Fran had me whitewashing the fence and moving paving stones that afternoon. Oliver, in his eighties himself, waited until the shade had found the front steps before he ventured out. He was dressed as usual in a white button down shirt and high-waisted pants with suspenders. The cane was new, though.

“Oliver, did you hurt your leg?” I asked.

“Just an accident,” Oliver said. “Can’t stay young forever.”

I noticed he had one shoe on. A white sock covered the other foot, and I could see the bulky outline of a bandage underneath.

Fran poked her head out of the door, and I smelled pot roast. “Chris doesn’t want you to start in on your stories, dear. He’s hungry. Come and eat.”

The potatoes were buttery and the carrots tender, but all I could think about was the big toe.

We finished dinner and Oliver and I sat on the porch while Fran cleaned up the kitchen.

“How did you lose your big toe, Oliver?” I asked.

Oliver drew in his lips and gripped his cane before him with white knuckles. “Did Fran tell you? I didn’t think she’d remember.”

“I saw her dumping tree branches out of her truck, and I found the toe. I gave it to Tom.”

“Why would you do that? What in the hell will Tom do with a thing like that?” Oliver asked. His hands shook.

Something metal clattered to the floor in the kitchen, and Fran screamed. I rushed in and saw Fran holding her arm, blood everywhere, and her carving knife on the linoleum at her feet. Oliver limped to her and pressed a kitchen towel into her wound. She cried and fought against him, and then Oliver began to cry. It was the most bizarre scene I had ever witnessed: Fran seemed not to be in pain from her cut, but terrified of her husband of fifty years, straining against his arms so that the veins showed in her neck, as if she didn’t recognize him.

“Shhh, honey, quiet, it’s me,” Oliver was shouting over her screams, tears on his cheeks.

After about two minutes, but what seemed like an hour, Fran stopped moving and stared at Oliver as if he had just walked in for his dessert. Her expression was calm, almost happy. We bandaged her arm and took her to the bedroom, where Oliver stroked her hair until she fell asleep. He led me out to the front porch. “If you tell Tom, if you tell anyone she lopped off my toe with the electric pruning shears, I will cut something off you myself.”

“What is wrong with her?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Could be Alzheimer’s or some type of dementia. That’s what our doctor in Flagstaff said. We didn’t catch it until the advanced stages.” Oliver paused, and closed his eyes. “The doctor thinks she’ll pass soon.”

“Pass? As in die?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. She was active. She had cooked our dinner that night, worked in the garden all day.

“Chris, there’s a lot you don’t see. She’s moved those paving stones three times now. She forgets. She gets mad at me, and comes at me.”

“How about help? A nursing home or something? All these accidents…”

“That wouldn’t work. Now drop it. And like I said, if you tell anyone, I’ll take the pruning shears to you myself.”

Then Oliver sighed, big. I should have written down the words he said: “Every moment with her is a gift. The times she’s smiling at me, the times she doesn’t know who I am and the times she wants to hurt me. Sometimes around dusk she starts crying and she can’t stop, and the nights when I can comfort her, when she knows me, I hold her until she falls asleep. The nights she doesn’t know me, well, I just sit outside the bedroom door until she cries herself to sleep. When she’s out for the night, I sit on this porch and drink beer and watch the moon and I feel as lonely as anybody has ever felt. When she passes away – and she will, soon – I’ll sit on this god damn porch and drink beer and watch the moon and feel lonelier.”


I picked a time of day I thought they would like, when the sun was setting in the west and almost down and the stars were just starting to come out. The sand crunched under my hiking boots and I could almost hear the spiders wake up to start their nighttime skitters. Broken, tinder-dry branches formed a pile up ahead, and I took the paper bag marked “Evidence” out of my backpack. Tom had looked at me funny when I asked for the toe, but he hadn’t done anything to investigate the case and wrote me off as just a weird kid wanting a souvenir. The toe was defrosted from its time in the chest freezer at the sheriff’s office and almost exactly as I had found it a year before. I placed it on the sand near the branches, and said a silent prayer for Oliver and Fran, dead within two weeks of each other, lying in graves in the Rio Luna cemetery.
I don’t know why, but it felt right to let the ants pick the bone clean, to carry Oliver’s toe piece by piece to their hill.

Thinking of You

I remember kindergarten and elementary school all the way through high school with you. I remember sleepovers and the scavenger hunt and trying to stay awake all night and not succeeding. I remember your bedroom done up 80s style and talking to you on the phone about boys and how your older brother never talked to us. I remember watching your mom cook in the kitchen and teaching you how to ride a horse. I remember church camp and your Mickey Mouse shirt. I remember you always happy but knowing there were other things going on inside that you never spoke to anyone about. I remember laughing with you in class and arguing about when to add the laundry detergent. I remember your first car and how you forgot the headlights and the Chinese firedrills and curfew. I remember agreeing with you when you told me your first boyfriend was playing mind games with you. I remember going to the same college and not speaking to each other for 6 years or longer - maybe we needed to figure out who we were without each other. I remember dreaming about you on a regular basis.

Dreams have a way of telling us who should be in our lives.

I remember your baby shower and your baby and your little boy and seeing our little boys play together.

If you didn't already know, I'm thinking of you.