By Bell Roe
Before her “breakdown,” my mother would rip up the countryside with girlfriends half her age… plague area drive-thrus with unreasonable Happy Meal requests; cruise back roads half-seeking, half-fleeing the monsters raised by those “value-added” famers (the sudden apparition of a llama prompted screams of dread and delight, the flash of an ostrich…don’t ask).
These young women enjoyed my mom’s family stories and her way with a catch phrase. “Did you seen me, Lippert?” and “Hands up, Pickle!” embroidered into conversation with brilliant ease.
One girlfriend tried to set my mom up with her father, a farmer who lived up in the northern part of the state. I don’t think my mom suspected, or she never would have allowed herself to be placed in such a situation.
Upon their arrival, the gentleman, dressed in crisp overalls, showed my mother to a hay rack with bales of hay wrapped in silk. Once ensconced, she was driven into the woods to a pond, where he plunged his arm underwater to produce an ice-cold six-pack of beer. My mom fled to the house where her friend was waiting hopefully.
After a fitful night of sleep in an upper room of the farmhouse, my mother declined an invitation to accompany the man and his daughter to church. He must have thought this woman one strange fish to resist both his incredibly tender courting and God.
But this has how she has always been, from her days as a young beauty sniffing at wall paper samples to her nights now as a wizened senior sipping chocolate milk from a jug.
The downstairs of the house I grew up in was remodeled in an effort by my father to save his marriage. The pine pocket doors and trim were ripped out to make way for a sliding glass door that opened onto a five-foot drop. A Mt. Rushmore-looking fireplace saw a few smoldering sticks before it was closed up for good.
My mom grew up farmer royalty outside the town of Norway. A tiny town named after a full country should be a good sign of wild hopes if not hubris, and my mother’s family claimed the blackest dirt upon their flight from Bavaria with a rumored haul of gold.
To hear my mother tell it, her childhood on this farm was mix of mist and myth, set on the verge of an old-growth forest they referred to, in hushes, as “The Timber.”
There were the stories of aunts who darkened their hair with black walnut hulls and the hours she hovered over her own mother in a sewing room at the top of the house painstakingly separating the gray hairs from black.
Further back, when she was little, my mother would meet her girlfriends in the timber. They would gather in the northeast corner, converging from their respective directions and farms: the clique of sisters from the family to the north who raised Gloucestershire Old Spots, also known as lard hogs; only-children from the clay-tinged soil to the south, doomed to lives as spinsters or nuns. Once the group was gathered, my mom would take the helm. She remembers having had each girl bring something: a flower, a fern, an arrowhead. She doesn’t remember what they did with these things. I wondered if each child was gently commanded to make some sort of report from the center. She said she didn’t remember much of what else took place. “Did you play out stories, make up characters?” I asked. No, she did not think they did.
The day of the big party came and everyone had a blast. I remember it well. The yard was full of cousins, aunts and uncles. Watermelons were split. It went later than any family party before. I remember hearing the reassuring sound of voices in the hay mow; the lights were on in the attic.
This memory had come to her as we started north (from our former movement west) on one of our excursions, usually toward the promise of the brief incandescence that live music brings.
“Doesn’t north feel different?” she asked.
“How?” I asked.
“It feels like going up.”
“So south feels like down,” I said, naturally.
“No, south is a feeling of comfort. East is clear, and west is…jumbled.”
My siblings and I were white-hot envious of our cousins who grew up on the south side of the timber. They built exquisite forts, caught crawdaddies and essentially “ran away from home” every time they stepped off the back stoop. They were wilder, from the look in their eyes to the way their fingertips burned our skin when they touched us “it” or pulled us from our early graves of potato sacks and salamanders during hide-and-seek.
This envy has never worn off and I suppose that is the root of my own disrespect for order, the reason I headed in the jumbled, mixed-up direction when I had the chance. I realize now this was all in relation to those woods and my outlaw mom, her secret regimens of metoprolol and pine cones, her requests for odd luxuries like her childhood tributes of arrowheads and ferns.
She stays in bed now nearly 24-7 watching satellite TV. She is equipped for and capable of doing nearly anything or going anywhere, yet she chooses to stay locked in what she refers, in hushes, to as her “dungeon.”
“What’s there to do? Where’s there to go,” she moans, poster child for a depression that is still all disappointment.
I remember the time our farm played host to one of the annual family parties. We didn’t have a timber, not even a grove. Partly to remedy our embarrassment, I think, I proposed to my brother that we come up with a “haunted house” to run guests through. We worked for weeks, cooking various types and brands of pasta, for various durations, to come up with the best bucket possible of guts and brains. We transformed a downstairs closet into a horror chamber where guests could be poked with long twigs of broom straw and prodded with vacuum cleaner attachments.
The day of the big party came and everyone had a blast. The yard was full of cousins, aunts and uncles. Watermelons were split.
It went later than any family party before. I remember hearing the reassuring sound of voices in the hay mow, the lights on in the attic, shining out like a beacon.
It was such a success that my mother and father forgot all about their promise to talk up the haunted house part of the party and corral party-goers onto the porch where we waited in vain by the “portal,” which we’d crafted from a refrigerator box and rusty chicken-house hinges. We begged our parents to advertise the attraction as guests filed out. Just gloss over the fact that Halloween was months away, we said, and don’t mention they might end up spattered in ketchup. My parents told us it was too late. They were sorry, but couldn’t we just be happy that the party had gone so well?
I remember so clearly the crushing sensation of total disappointment. Because it was the first, I think it was the worst. I couldn’t believe that life could do this to someone. I remember my bottom lip trembled, literally trembled.
I’ve had worse disappointments since: romances ended, loved ones killed, dreams shattered; they were all brutal. But the haunted house was the ultimate letdown.
My mom had her Timber. The second-youngest of five, she went on to be the first in her family to attend college and procured a teaching degree from the Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls. She married the guy in her class who was a dead ringer for Elvis. She remembers him showing her off at gatherings on his side of the family. Life was only getting better…
So I think now I can give my mother’s stories credit (even if they don’t add up, even if they are only distance voices from a barn or lights glimpsed in an attic) for keeping me going for that jumbled mix of the imagined, and gracefully restored.
MAINTENANCE ENDS 