Karen Brode

Spirits In The Wind

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By Karen Brode

“Karen,” said the strained voice on the other end of the line. “I need to see you.”

I knew the voice well. It was my brother, John, but the urgency and fear in his voice made me shudder. Before I said anything, my thoughts immediately jumped to the worst conclusions—cancer, accident, death.

“What is it?” I asked. “Are you okay? How’s Jan? Is she hurt?”

“It’s nothing like that,” he said, resuming his usual gruff tone. “It’s…it’s something I can’t talk about on the phone.”

I could almost feel him looking around to see if someone was watching. Now I wondered if he had committed some horrid crime. My hands broke out into a sweat and the earpiece of the phone receiver stuck to my ear from perspiration.

“What did you do, John?” I asked. My voice trembled imagining what he had done.

“Nothing!” he said. “I just…it’s just…I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

I paced a hole in the floor in the time it took my brother to get to my house. When he banged on the door, I jumped. By then, I was a complete wreck. I had told myself that I would demand him to tell me what had happened before letting him in my house. If he had committed a crime, he could be endangering me or my husband by making us accessories. And I didn’t want to go to jail.

But when I opened the door, the shell of my brother stood before me. His face was pale and clammy. I couldn’t utter a single word looking at him.

He didn’t wait for an invitation, either. He pushed past me into the living room and sat down in the green chair he always favored when he visited. He leaned his head back and let out a long sigh.

“They were all in that wind,” he said.

“What wind?” I asked. “Who?” I was at a complete loss where he was going with this.

“Look outside!” he said.

I pulled the curtain from the picture window that looked out onto the street.

“I don’t see any wind,” I said. I was beginning to think maybe John had lost it. Or maybe he was on something?

“Exactly,” he said. “And what month is it?”

“John, this is ridiculous. Just tell me what’s going on.”

He bolted up in his chair and said, “It’s August!”

I just stared at him. I didn’t know where this was going and why he was so upset.

“August in North Texas isn’t exactly known for its cold wind, is it?” He leaned back in the chair as if he had just clarified everything.

“I don’t know where you’re going with this,” I said.

He nodded and closed his eyes.

“You know that property I bought from you?” he asked.

I nodded, but didn’t say anything.

How could I forget? It was my share of the old homestead our grandparents had left us in their wills. And John had essentially badgered me out of my share for a price I would never have taken from anyone else. He knew no one wanted to fight with him. He was so blustery and his threats seemed real when he made them. So, everyone in the family just gave in before things got ugly, even if it meant giving up a piece of good land at a bad price.

My silence made him open his eyes and he glared at me, thinking I hadn’t answered his question.

“Yes, John, I know the property you bought.”

“Our grandparents’ homestead,” he said, as if I needed reminding.

“Yes.”

“Well, did you know that the old home place burned last night?”

“I heard something about it, yes,” I said. I had also heard that John had arranged for the house to be burned down. It was just too coincidental that the house burned almost immediately after he assumed ownership. It seemed clear to me that he didn’t want the house. He wanted the proceeds from the insurance company.

John leaned forward in his chair. “The whole place is gone,” he said. “All those family times we had…now all that’s left is a pile of smoldering ashes and the old chimney.”

His voice shook a little when he talked.

“I thought I was going to cry when I saw it,” he continued. I noticed his hands were shaking when he lowered his head and covered his eyes with them.

I pictured it as he described, a chimney just standing there like a sentinel in the remains of the house. I remembered when they had built a sidewalk from the front porch steps to the road, and I thought of what the sidewalk must look like now, a sidewalk to nowhere. I supposed the storm cellar was still there, also. I could picture in my mind how desolate it must look.

John had raised his head and shook out a cigarette from his pack. He looked around for an ashtray.

“I don’t have one.” I reminded him.

He sat with the cigarette between his fingers and his eyes seemed to lose focus, like they were looking at something distant, some memory.

“When I drove up in front of what was left of the house,” he said, “I couldn’t believe it! This was the house they loved.”

I nodded. “They had loved that home,” I said.

“I cried, Karen!” He seemed almost in tears now, which was enough of a shock by itself. “I don’t think I can go back down there ever again!”

“I might go down there later,” I told him, just trying to calm him down. I had no desire to see the way it looked now, but I didn’t want him to know that, so I added, “I don’t want to see it right now, though.”

John fell back against the back of the chair and looked up at the ceiling.

“I got out of the car,” he went on. His voice sounded dry. “I stood there at the edge of the road, but I couldn’t make myself go any closer.”

“I understand all this, John, but you seemed urgent on the phone. Was it about the fire?”

He turned his head and looked at me. “Then the wind came.”

“What wind?” I was starting to get impatient.

He turned his face away from me. He was crying. He was never one to show emotion, at least nothing like fear or sadness. I thought about how our mother used to fret over the fact that he wasn’t like other kids. His emotions were so buried inside him—all except anger. He didn’t want the kind of hugs and cuddles I adored from our mother. And he definitely didn’t care if anyone approved of him—not like me. It upset me terribly if our mother was mad at me. John, though, he would do the most horrible things and never apologize for them. So, to see him crying now worried me.

I waited for him to answer, but he didn’t right away. He wouldn’t look at me. He stood up, walked to the window, and looked outside. He seemed to be checking if someone was coming for him.

Finally, he dropped the curtain and looked over at me. The tears had all but dried from his eyes.

“That wind came out of nowhere,” he said. “It was cold and it completely surrounded me.” He lifted his arms out and made a motion to demonstrate how the wind circled around him.

“It enveloped me and then,” he snapped his fingers. “As fast as it had come, it was gone.”

He leaned in closer and said in a low voice, “Karen I think they were all in that wind.”

I blinked back at him and tried not to smile. What he said sounded crazy.

“You think Granddaddy and Grandmother were in the wind?” I managed to keep the giggles from bubbling to my mouth.

The look John gave me made me hiccup. He was completely serious, almost terrified.

“All of them, Karen. Every last one of them who had lived and loved in that house. They were all in that wind.”

I took a deep breath. It was only wind, I thought. As nervous as John was making me, I reminded myself that at least he hadn’t robbed a bank or killed somebody. It was just the wind.

But John wasn’t finished.

“I’m telling you, it wasn’t just a normal wind,” he said. “There were presences in that wind. And…and they are all mad at me!” He looked away from me, back outside, and whispered, “They think I am a fool.”

Gene’s Proposal

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By Karen Brode

From this valley they say you are leaving
I will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile
For I know that you’re taking the sunshine
That brightened my pathway awhile

Winnie reached up to turn off the radio. It was better if she didn’t think of him. She stared out the kitchen window and sunk her gloved hands back into the plastic dishpan. She tried not to think of him. There was no way that anything could ever be worked out now.

She remembered that spring when her life had been so happy. She was 24 years old. She had graduated from college and started teaching at the community school. And then, almost on cue, there he was at church one night. Every time she peeked at him, he was looking at her as if his whole world revolved around her. She didn’t understand this. She knew she wasn’t pretty.

She had inherited her mother’s olive complexion and her uncontrollable hair. She couldn’t remember the number of times she had given up in despair trying to make it look normal. But it never did. It was easier when she was a child. She wore it in a long braid down her back, but as she had gotten older, a braid looked ridiculous, so her mother had cut it off when Winnie entered high school.

Her hair was bad enough, but she wasn’t like any of the other girls at church who wore makeup. She had no clue where to get it, let alone how to wear it! The only places she ever went were to church, work, and the grocery store. The grocery store only had basic necessities like flour and sugar and cornstarch. And even if she could get it, she didn’t know who to ask to help her with it.

Lucy Bradshaw was one of those girls who never needed that sort of help. She seemed to understand instinctively how to use makeup to make her beautiful eyes stand out more. And, of course, she did everything she could to bat her baby blues at the handsome man who had started coming to church. But, miraculously, it didn’t work. He seemed to have eyes meant only for Winnie.

His name was Gene. Eventually, she learned to accept his attention to her. It still troubled her that Lucy Bradshaw and Clara Bates stared daggers at her from the other side of the church, but it’s not like she had thrown herself at Gene. If she could’ve understood what it was that he found attractive in her, she would try to capitalize on that, but he seemed to accept her for who she was and what she looked like.

He sat by her every Sunday night at church that spring, and sometimes he was waiting for her when the school day was over – just to be with her.

So come sit by my side if you love me.
Do not hasten to bid me adieu.
Just remember the Red River Valley,
And the girl that has loved you so true.

When they took walks together, they talked of mundane things.

“The corn looks good this year.”

“It looks like like it’s going to be a dry summer.”

Among the mundane, Winnie wanted to ask him what he saw in her that he wouldn’t want those pretty girls, but she never did. After all, her skin was leathery from picking cotton under the unrelenting north Texas sun. Her hands were rough and hard. It would make so much more sense to her if she could understand what he saw in her.

She felt like she was in a strange land where she didn’t know the customs. She was fearful of saying something or doing something that would make him suddenly realize who she was.

Eventually, she decided that he was seeing her through rose-colored glasses and she accepted this, especially when she realized that her own life was nothing without him.  He completed her.

In late May of that year, when school was almost out, Gene came to her house on a Sunday afternoon. This was not something he had done before. Winnie and Gene sat together in the glider out by the shed. It was a nice day, and shady where they sat. He seemed nervous and excited. She could tell he had something very important to tell her.

From her place on the glider, she could also see her mother, Effie, pulling the kitchen curtain to the side keeping watch over everything that happened. Winnie panicked a little when Gene slid off the glider and knelt at her feet. She thought maybe he was hurt. Her first instinct was to try to help him. Then he opened the little black velvet box and asked her to marry him. He put the ring on her finger and, for the first time, kissed her lips.

It was all too much for her. She cried out of joy and wonderment. All of it felt like someone else’s life. These things didn’t happen to her!

She was so overwhelmed that she didn’t know what to say. Gene took her hand in his and told her he loved her.

But the curtain shifted at the window and a familiar twang of guilt nudge her side. She was very practical minded and was led mostly be loyalty to her family. She hesitated then and looked down.

“I…I need to let you know next Sunday,” she said in a whisper. Her eyes flickered up to his face and then beyond to the window. “I need some time to think things over.”

The spark in his eyes trembled and dimmed. Confusion and hurt furrowed his brow.

“I do love you,” she said. “I just can’t make a decision right this minute.”

He grabbed her hand and held it. His grasp was both tight and gentle.

“I got a job in Missouri,” he told her. “I’ll be going there in a few weeks. I’d love for you to be there with me.”

Winnie nodded and smiled. Tears brimmed her eyes. “I’ll let you know. Just give me some time.”

She sat as still as possible on the glider when he got up to leave. She didn’t want this moment to end. She realized she had been holding her breath after he had walked far enough down the road that she couldn’t see him anymore.

It wasn’t long before Effie was outside standing where Gene had been standing only moments before.

“What was that all about,” she asked, her tone accusing and bitter.

Winnie flinched and had the urge not to respond. She didn’t want to tell anyone, especially not her mother, and take away that moment of magic.

But she owed it to her family to know, so she held the lump in her throat and said, “Gene asked me to marry him. He got a job in Missouri and wants me to go with him.”

Effie’s face twisted up like she had eaten a lemon. “Well, you might as well just get the gun and shoot me now.” She rubbed her neck with a handkerchief. “It’s just as well. My life is almost over anyway. I wouldn’t want to go on living if you were way off in Missouri. I don’t even know where that is!” Her rant continued with the nervous energy and fear fluttering out through shaking hands. “It’s not like I could make a trip there!” She clutched her chest and fanned herself while waddling off toward the house. “Oh, my chest hurts. I’m going to lie down in my bed and hope death comes quickly. I don’t want to linger.”

Winnie sat in the glider until the shadows had started to grow long. She had always suspected her mother would be unhappy if she married and moved on, but now she knew that Effie expected Winnie to live with her and Papa for the rest of her life.

Winnie tossed and turned through many nights wondering and worrying and trying to figure things out. She was certain that Effie could not keep her there with anything but guilt. But guilt was Effie’s currency. She manipulated her husband and her children with it, everyone except for Albert. Somehow he had escaped the chokehold of their mother’s guilt.

It was three o’clock in the morning on the Wednesday before Winnie would give Gene his answer. Effie woke and went to Winnie’s room to tell her she thought she was having a heart attack. Winnie walked Effie back to her bed with soothing words, just like she would have done a child of her own, and waited while her mother slipped back into sleep. But Winnie did not sleep.

On Sunday morning, Winnie put the black velvet box in her purse and went to church. Gene was waiting for her there. He watched her walk up with happy anticipation. His face practically glowed. She took her usual place beside him on the pew.

During the sermon, he leaned over and whispered in her ear, “I love you.”

Winnie did everything she could not to let the tears fall, but they did. She didn’t say anything until after church was over, but she knew what she had to do and it was the hardest thing she had ever done.

When the last song had been sung, she asked Gene to follow her to the back of the building. It seemed an appropriate place for what she had to say. Cigarette butts littered the ground and the smell was heavy with the smoke of men who went there to smoke out of sight of their wives or the minister.

Winnie reached into her purse and pulled out the black velvet box.

“I can’t marry you,” she said, chocking on her words. “My mother is very ill and needs me to take care of her.”

She looked up into Gene’s face. Only moments before, it had had such a soft, gentle expression. Now, his mouth dropped open and he leaned against the church building like he would fall if it hadn’t been there to catch him.

Shaking, she took one of his hands and placed the box into it. And with as much courage as she could muster, she turned and walked toward her house. She didn’t look back. She knew if she did, she would never go home and she would live to regret leaving her mother.

Won’t you think of the valley you’re leaving.
Oh how lonely, how sad it will be?
Oh think of the fond heart you’re breaking
And the grief you are causing to me.

Even all these years later, the memory of Gene’s proposal left Winnie in heart wrenching sobs. She did love Gene. Why had her mother constantly stood between her and any happiness she might have?

_________________________

Karen Brode is a senior contributor for Jet Planes and Coffee. She grew up in Denison, TX and graduated from Denison High School in 1972.  She took courses at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and worked in a church office for 25 years.  She and her husband, Gary, have been married 39 years and they have one son, Brandon.  Karen’s hobbies are writing, sewing, and gardening.

I’m Going to Kill Him and Tell God He Died

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By Karen Brode

“I’m going to kill him and tell God he died!” Albert stormed through the house toward his son’s room.

His wife, Hazel, was just a few steps behind him.

“Albert, please!” she said, desperation in her voice. “Don’t talk to him now! You’re too angry.”

Albert stopped so suddenly Hazel nearly ran into him. He turned to face her, his eyes wide in disbelief.

“How in hell could I not be mad?” His chest rose and fell with the hot, angry breaths he took. His fists opened and closed in sync to his breathing. “Why aren’t you mad? You know he is just going to keep on doing these things. You sure aren’t going to stop him. It’s all up to me.”

He started to turn back toward his son’s bedroom but Hazel’s face made him stop. It was a soft, gentle face, so vulnerable. He thought back to his mother’s words before he married Hazel.

“She’s been too sheltered to weather the storm of a marriage to you, Albert.”

His mother had never pretended to like Albert. In return, he certainly had never cared about her the way a son should about his mother. He thought about a family picture his mother had shown Hazel before their marriage.

She would try anything to ruin my happiness, he thought.

In the photo, Albert stood off by himself. He remembered that day. His parents and sister and little brother all huddled together as if they were one big happy family. But he knew better. He knew they didn’t love him like they loved each other. The photo proved that. Was he supposed to smile and hide the disgust he had for all of them too, just because they wanted to be something they weren’t?

Standing in the hall with his little doe of a wife, he knew his mother had been right about Hazel being weak. He saw the pain in her face. He knew it worried her so much that he could fly off the handle so easily, especially when it came to their son John. In his defense, though, he was such a difficult kid.

Still, Hazel’s eyes plead for mercy on John’s behalf and all the fight went out of Albert. He was still angry, still bitter toward his son and all the trouble he caused them.

He threw up his hands and said, “Just let him do what he wants, then. He’ll end up in reform school or prison.” He looked past Hazel and sighed. “I’m so tired of trying to get through to him.”

He pushed passed his wife in the hall and went to the back door. If he couldn’t fix his son, he’d keep working on that darn boat he was building. Even that had pain in it, though.

He had started building it with hopes that his son would maybe want to help him with it. He wanted his son to be with him and he wanted them to have some good times. He thought if he could manage to get John to even come out and watch him as he went through the steps, maybe somehow he could reach that part of him that was like him. But he had yet to see any hint of that. His son wasn’t like his side of the family. He was a Morrison through and through.

Albert poured his frustration into sanding the board he was working on. He thought about how John had never been like him and how his wife was so taken with him, so protective. Sure, he was a good-looking kid, but Hazel went overboard. She made all of his shirts on her sewing machine in the bedroom. Even that made Albert mad, though, because when she stepped on the foot pedal of the sewing machine, the television turned to snow and static. If Albert was watching a baseball game or a wrestling match, he could just forget it. John’s shirts were way more important to his wife than anything Albert wanted.

He swore when he popped open the can of stain and spilled half of it on the ground. If he hadn’t been angry, he thought, that would never have happened.

His mind turned to Hazel’s family, her sister, Opal. This was really all her fault. If Opal hadn’t constantly told Hazel how ugly she was as a child, she might realize how beautiful she was and not have to live vicariously through their son. It didn’t matter how often Albert told Hazel how she looked like a million dollars when she did herself up, she never believed him. And so she took all her pride in her son’s looks. She thrilled at the sight of young girls walking up and down the street giggling and stealing glances at the house with hopes of seeing John.

Albert stood there staring at the half-finished boat. He felt hopeless thinking about his son. None of the things Hazel did made John any more devoted to being a good son. He knew if he even tried to talk to his son, he would look at him with that look of complete, bland disrespect. In those moments, Albert didn’t trust himself not to hurt John. He brought out the absolute worst in Albert!

He wiped his hands on an old rag and started cleaning up his tools.

Maybe it was better to just try not to be around his son. But that wasn’t the answer either. He would be shirking his duty as a father. And yet, at every turn he knew that Hazel would be there to stand between him and John no matter what.

The phone rang in the house and Albert listened when Hazel picked up the line. From what he could tell, it was John’s teacher. He could only imagine what he had done this time.

He heard Hazel apologizing and then, “I’ll be sure an talk with him.”

That’ll be the day, thought Albert.

When Hazel got off the phone, she looked outside at Albert. They made eye contact, but she broke the gaze off quickly. He knew it was bad if Hazel didn’t want to tell him what the call was about. And he knew her excuse would be that she didn’t want to worry him with these things.

Albert felt his blood pressure rise until his ears were ringing. What he wanted to do was go give that son of his a good dose of whatfor. But he was tired of fighting and he knew Hazel would be there to block him, so he picked up a hammer and took out his anger on the boat.

_______________________________

Karen Brode is a senior contributor for Jet Planes and Coffee. She grew up in Denison, TX and graduated from Denison High School in 1972.  She took courses at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and worked in a church office for 25 years.  She and her husband, Gary, have been married 39 years and they have one son, Brandon.  Karen’s hobbies are writing, sewing, and gardening.

John’s Family Reunion

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By Karen Brode

In the summer of 2005, my brother John, moved back to Grayson County in Texas where we had grown up. He was wrinkled and worn, and for the first time, I noticed that he seemed tired. I tried not to think about all the situations that had driven us apart for so long. The list was endless, and I didn’t have a lot of fight left in me.

The truth too was, no matter what had happened, I had missed him. I often wondered how it could be possible to detest and love someone at the same time. But I did. And I sensed that he wanted to try to be a family again, so I gave it my best shot.

He had been gone for ten years, living in Las Vegas. I wondered how he could live in the entertainment capital of the world one day, and then the next day live in Pottsboro, Texas, the epitome of a tiny Texas town with only one red light.

He had only been back for a week when my husband Gary and I met up with him and his new wife, Jan, at a Mexican restuarant for supper. I hoped and prayed that things would go well, that maybe we could salvage some kind of relationship from the ruins.

He looked old and so small compared to the larger than life man I had known just ten years before. There were no black hairs left on his head, just gray and white. Inside, though, he was still John. He regaled us with some of his favorite stories during supper. They were stories I had heard before, but I wanted to hear them again. I hung onto his words as he wove his stories and I watched the cigarette smoke rising from his mouth.

“I was working at an air conditioning and heating place in Fredericksburg,” he said. “We went out early in the mornings to install new units. That day, we had just climbed up into the attic of a house  when I heard a man’s voice down below asking us how things were going.”

“Well, what was I supposed to say? That it was as cool as an April morning? Hell no. I looked down toward the voice and simply told him the truth–it was hotter ‘n hell up there.”

“You actually said that?” I asked, laughing. I knew this story. I knew he had actually said it, but it had been so long since we had had times like these that I relished hearing it again.

John nodded. “Sure did. And wouldn’t you know, when I looked down through the ceiling air vent, but it was Lyndon B. Johnson opening his morning mail.”

I laughed again. “Did he say anything back? Get onto you or something?”

“Naw. He just stared down at his mail and smiled.”

Sometimes, I wondered how true any of these stories were, but I didn’t really care. It really made them more exciting and interesting.

John had always been more at home in the world than most people I knew. Even as his old age crept up behind him, he still had the confidence and demeanor of the handsome young man he had once been. He even flirted with the waitresses at the restaurant and it didn’t seem to surprise him a bit when the young girls flirted back.

From about the time his feet touched the green grass of Texas, John started talking about having a family reunion. I wasn’t against it exactly, but wasn’t exactly up to it either. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. And if I couldn’t explain it to myself, I certainly couldn’t explain it to my brother.

So, soon he was calling me several times a week to go over his list of invitees.

He kept saying “Have I forgotten somebody?”

With every name he added to the list, I felt a deeper sense of dread. So the plans marched on and one day he told me he wanted to have the reunion in July, the hottest month in Texas.

July. Sometimes the entire month went by without a cloud in the sky. The month always made me think of Momma and the song we had sung at her graveside service, “Uncloudy Day.”

Oh, they tell me of a home far beyond the skies
Oh, they tell me of a home far away
Oh, they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise
Oh, they tell me of an unclouded day

Oh, the land of cloudless day
Oh, the land of an unclouded day
Oh, they tell me of a home where no storm clouds rise
Oh, they tell me of an unclouded day

Oh, they tell me of a home where my friends have gone
Oh, they tell me of that land far away
Where the tree of life in eternal bloom
Sheds its fragrance through the unclouded day.

Months went by and John kept making plans. I tried to distance myself from all of it for a while. Something told me that he wanted me to cook all the food, just like our mother would have done when she was alive. I really didn’t want that kind of responsibility, so I kept the reunion conversations at arm’s length. Still, I didn’t want to walk into some kind of John-created chaos on the day of the reunion, so I got up the courage to ask him about it.

“Oh, I’m going to rent a boat and ferry people across the lake to the islands,” he said.

He sounded like a little kid, to be honest, and like most kids, he never really thought all his plans fully through. I felt panic rising in my chest. I still couldn’t explain why, but it was there.

“Then what?” I asked, hoping that might prompt more in-depth thought to his plans.

But he heard my worry and got irritated. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’ll have fun no matter what we do.”

I sat there on the other end of the line wishing I could understand why I was so reluctant about all of this so I could explain it to him without him getting angry.

Maybe it was my age, I thought. Maybe I’m just getting too old for things like this. So I told him that.

He snorted. “You’re still just a kid,” he said. “You always will be.”

He had always felt like I had been shielded from life’s harsh realities.

I pictured Aunt Jane riding in a boat going across a large expanse of lake in 110 degree heat. Old people would be dropping like flies on that boat and John hadn’t thought about any way to keep them from overheating, keeping everybody hydrated. Did he expect me to come along and pick up the slack?

“You can’t worry about all that right now,” I heard him say into the phone. He had gone from irritated older brother to snaky salesman. “Just think of sitting under the shade of those big trees on the islands. How long’s it been since you played a good game of dominoes? Wouldn’t that be fun to sit outside with our family and play dominoes?”

The week before the family reunion, I felt as if something catastrophic was bearing down on me, and there was no getting out of the way. How could I have stopped it? I had rarely seen John this excited.

I comforted myself by thinking that maybe the world would end before it happened. Or maybe an asteroid would hit the earth and I wouldn’t have to worry about the family reunion. I tried to appear excited when John was around.

He had contacted every member of each side of our family that he could hunt down. He had asked me a thousand questions about people we hadn’t seen in decades.

“You think Clyde is still alive?” he’d ask.

I hadn’t thought about Clyde in a month of Sundays, so I just shrugged and said I didn’t know.

Each day leading up to the reunion was hotter and drier than the one before. No cloud graced the North Texas sky. I wouldn’t watch the weather forecast because it was always the same–sunny and hot! It was the same every summer–a high pressure ridge sat over us and any possible precipitation went around us.

A few days before the reunion, the phone rang. John’s voice was muted on the other end. He sounded tired and sad.

“I hate to tell you this, but I don’t think we are going to have that family reunion.”

“What?” I asked. I was glad I had been sitting down when he called because otherwise, you could have knocked me over with a feather. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s Tammy,” he said, talking about his oldest daughter. “She’s been taken to drug rehab in California.”

And that’s when I realized it. He had planned the whole thing for Tammy. She was the real reason he wanted to get the family together.

Never would I have wanted his daughter to have the problems she had and I certainly would never have wished for her problems to be the reason we couldn’t have a family reunion. But there was a part of me that was relieved.

Still, I couldn’t show my brother that. So, I commiserated with him and did my best to sound disappointed.

And then I said, “You know, John, we can have it another time.”

__________________________________

Karen Brode is a senior contributor for Jet Planes and Coffee. She grew up in Denison, TX and graduated from Denison High School in 1972.  She took courses at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and worked in a church office for 25 years.  She and her husband, Gary, have been married 39 years and they have one son, Brandon.  Karen’s hobbies are writing, sewing, and gardening.

Family Reunion

Sherry - Petite Over 40, , , 1 Comment

By Karen Brode

Mother got into the driver’s seat of our car,  and Opal took the passenger seat.  Thankfully I had a quilt and a pillow in the backseat. I liked to watch the trees zoom past the back window. We had to drive 100 miles to get to Marble Falls.

It seemed odd to see my mother driving Opal around. My aunt usually commandeered any situation. But, in a burst of unusually rebellious energy, Mother had hurried to the car and got behind the wheel. That left Opal no choice but to sit in the front passenger seat.

I was proud of Mother for taking charge. It was something she rarely did.

We had only been in the car for about thirty minutes when my aunt began squirming.   Mother cut her eyes to watch each time she changed positions in her seat.

Finally, Opal said, “Hazel, I have to find a bathroom!”

Mother’s face blanched. “Oh no. You didn’t take your water pill this morning, did you?”

Aunt Opal shifted in her seat and dabbed her brow with a handkerchief. “You know I have to take that pill every morning! It’s prescribed by my doctor. I don’t have a choice.”

“Couldn’t you have waited to take it after we get there?” My mother’s rebelliousness petered out into a whisper.

Opal glared at her before grabbing her belly and sucking fast air through pinched lips. She seemed miserable.

Mother sighed and looked out the window. I noticed that her hands, placed always at “ten and two,” had a hold of the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles were white. I knew she had not wanted to go to this family reunion, but Opal had planned it and insisted we participate. She had spent the fall and winter contacting all of the relatives on their father’s side of the family.

Neither my mother nor my aunt had had much to do with Poppa’s side of the family. For one thing, there was Uncle Gerald. It was rumored that he had made a killing in the stock market early in his life and now lived in luxury. When Poppa was in the hospital, Gerald had visited a few times, but he always ended up embarrassing my mother in some way, like when he handed out five dollar bills to the nurses. She thought he, of all people, should be poor and miserable because he was morally bankrupt. She told me it didn’t matter how much money you had if you had no soul.

The one hope my mom had for the reunion was to see Aunt “Pet.” She had been Poppa’s favorite sister and had been with him in his hospital room as he died over the last year. My mother loved her.

We had been on the road for about 30 minutes when Mother pulled into a gas station with full service. She drove over the little tube that made a bell ring and the attendant came out to put gas in the car. He looked pretty tousled, like he hadn’t slept much the night before. There were dark circles under his eyes and he moved in slow motion to wash and wipe the windshield. When he squatted to the concrete to check the air pressure, I wasn’t sure he would be able to get back up again.

“Well, we’re out of Grayson County,” Mother said.

Opal swung her legs out of the car, but she couldn’t seem to lift herself off the seat. She made several heaving attempts, but all it did was make her sweaty.

“Karen, go help your aunt get out of the car!” said my Mother.

It was easier said than done, but after extreme effort, I managed to pull her to a standing position. She rocked back and forth a bit to catch her breath.

It was hard for my ten-year-old brain to wrap itself around my Aunt Opal’s figure. She was thin on top and wide, wide, wide at the hips. I tried not to stare when she came out of her bedroom at our house, but I just couldn’t understand it. When she walked down the hall, her whole body sort of swung to the left and then to the right. I never dared try to pass her in a hallway for fear of getting stuck to the wall on one side.

I marveled at her proportions–going from narrow up top to extra-wide in the middle, and tapering at the ankles and feet, until it looked like she might tip over should a strong wind blow by. I often wondered if she knew this about herself. I didn’t think she ever looked in a full-length mirror, and I couldn’t blame her. Perhaps this is why she always seemed very happy with her looks and confident of herself. She certainly didn’t have the personality of someone who had been beaten down by society for being fat.

In fact, she walked around unashamed in her bra and panties when she went to wash her face in the bathroom and get ready for the day. I just wondered if she special ordered her panties from somewhere. It looked like yards and yards of nylon had gone into making just one pair.

There were other things, too, that made me curious about my aunt. She never wore anything but Old Maine Trotter shoes. She was a religious woman–never cut her hair because she said the Bible had forbidden it. Her hair was long and, every morning, she braided it and wrapped it around her head a few times and held it in place with bobby pins. She could never recall the scriptures that forbid a woman cutting her hair, but she believed it and so I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe there was a scripture about Old Maine Trotter shoes too.

My aunt wasn’t completely without vanity. In an impulsive moment, she had bought a wig that she thought might make her look more sophisticated and modern. Had she bought one that fit with her coloring and age, it might have made a little more sense. But it was platinum blonde and it made her look sallow and old. Mother made me promise not to say anything. She told me that if Opal wanted to wear the wig, we should just accept it, and not mention it.

Accept it we did, as we did with everything about Aunt Opal. She was a force to be reckoned with. And so, when it came time for her to use the restroom at the hole in the wall gas station, my mother and I exchanged glances knowing it was likely not going to end well.

“We ain’t got no ladies restroom,” said the attendant to my aunt when she asked for the key to the ladies room. “But you’re welcome to use the bathroom that everybody uses.”

My aunt frowned. She squared her shoulders and with a grim look, started toward the restroom.

It was worse than any of us could have expected. The toilet leaned precariously to the left and the sink had a trickle of orange rusty water drip, drip, dripping out of the faucet.   She looked around for paper covers for the toilet, but of course, there were none.

Finally, she turned and marched back to the car. “I can’t use the rest room here,” she said. “It’s awful. I feel so dirty just being in here. You’ll just have to stop somewhere else.”

So, we piled back in the car and continued down the road. Only a few minutes had passed–just long enough to watch my aunt start squirming again–when my mother said, “You know, there’s not a lot of traffic. You could just go in that field.”

Even from the back seat, I saw Opal roll her eyes like it was a ridiculous suggestion.

“Oh, you know that the minute I got started, there would be lots of traffic,” she said. But in less than a second a pang of pressure must have hit her because she blurted out, “Okay. Stop here, stop here. I’ll do it.”

I helped her out of the car again and watched her disappear into the trees. I wondered if she knew how bright her red dress stood out. Thankfully, no cars came by.

Five minutes passed before Mother started looking irritated.

“What on earth is she doing over there?”

I remained silent. I knew better than to try to guess what my aunt was doing.

Another few minutes passed, but still no Opal.

“I have a bad feeling about this,” said Mother. “I should probably go check on her.”

“Do I have to stay here?” I asked, a little nervous.

“Our things are in the car. It will just be a minute.”

It was another 15 minutes before they returned to the car. They didn’t look right, especially Opal. Her face was dirty and her glasses sat at an odd angle on her nose. Her wig had slid to one side of her head.

She got back in the car without a word and Mother told me that Opal had taken a tumble in the woods when she stepped on a large grape vine.

Opal sniffed from the front seat. She was crying.

Mother started the car and quietly moved back on the road.

Through her sniffs, my aunt finally spoke. “Hazel, would you let me out here in this next town? I can’t go to a family reunion looking like this, but you all keep going. There’s no reason for you and Karee not to go.”

If this had been a cartoon, I would have seen smoke coming out of my mother’s ears.

“No, Opal,” she said. “You planned this family reunion and you are going to enjoy seeing Poppa’s relatives today.”

That’s when Opal started sniffling in earnest. Between sobs, she said that she had always wanted Poppa’s side of the family to like her, but they didn’t. In fact, on bad days, she wondered if they made fun of her. I felt sorry for my aunt, but kept my head down focused on the Etch-a-Sketch I had brought along to pass the time.

“You know how they are,” said my aunt. “If they saw me like this, it would just make them think that they were right about me!”

Mother pulled the car over on the shoulder of the road and stopped. She knew her sister was right. It was also true that Opal did not look her best. No matter how much trouble she was and how much of a nuisance she could be, neither of us wanted to see her humiliated. Mother told Opal that they would stop for an early lunch in the next town and then turn around and go back home.

Opal would have to call the family from a pay phone to tell them that we couldn’t make it after all.

___________________________________

Karen Brode is a senior contributor for Jet Planes and Coffee. She grew up in Denison, TX and graduated from Denison High School in 1972.  She took courses at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and worked in a church office for 25 years.  She and her husband, Gary, have been married 39 years and they have one son, Brandon.  Karen’s hobbies are writing, sewing, and gardening.

Memories of Pete Everheart

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By Karen Brode

“He was already a senior in high school when I first met him,” Mother said. She and I sat on the front steps of our house looking out into the warm, Texas night. I could tell by her voice and the faraway look she got that she still thought about him.

“I was 14 years old and nothing to write home about,” she continued. “Opal was married by then, so she wasn’t around to tell me how ugly I was, but I still knew. It was too much to hope that someone like Pete Everheart would fall for me.”

“Momma, don’t say that!” I said, grabbing her hand in mine. “You are so pretty! Whenever I look at that picture of you and Daddy on your dresser, I always think you could’ve been a movie star!”

Mother continued without comment.

“His family was well-off, but we weren’t. Going to a party at his house was almost like stepping into a fairy tale. They had Japanese lanterns all over the yards, and there was a punch bowl and all kinds of cookies. The girls were all dressed in formals and the boys wore suits. It was hard to think of these people being the kids I went to school with everyday.”

I leaned my head against her knee just picturing it. It sounded so glamorous.

“I didn’t go the first time Pete asked me to a party at his house. I thought I was too plain. I kept wondering what someone like him would see in me.”

“Oh, Mother!” I sat back up and squeezed her hand.

She smiled an apologetic smile and said, “I was afraid it was a joke. Every girl in that school had her eye on him. He had golden blonde hair and was tall and very smart. He played on the football team. He was always smiling with those perfect square, white teeth. I didn’t want him to look too closely at me.”

Heartache and longing pulled her eyes from me and into the distant past. I knew that in her mind she was seeing Pete Everheart again, as if he was standing right in front of her.

“When he finally persuaded me to go to his house for a party, old Mrs. Everheart stared out at everyone from the kitchen. She had to wonder which girl Pete would pick to bring home to her. She was so intimidating. She was heavyset at a time when not too many women were. She wore horn-rimmed glasses on a chain around her neck. Her dresses were sewed by a professional seamstress, and you could just tell that she didn’t feel as if she had to be nice to anyone. She was the main detraction to Pete, at least in my mind.”

“Besides that, though, there were all the other girls who wanted his attention. You know that I was the only freshman girl at his parties. That was enough to make me feel threatened in every way. Some of the senior girls wondered why he would even want me there. The measuring way they stared at me made me so uncomfortable. If I hadn’t really cared for him, I would not have gone to those parties.”

“So, I spent a good deal of time standing alone, watching the senior girls flirt with Pete. I always knew that there would be someone ahead of me, someone prettier, someone smarter, so I never had the nerve to approach him. But, he always sought me out and asked if I was having a good time. Sometimes, he would catch my eye from across the room. He made me feel as if I was the only girl there. Somehow, without ever saying anything out loud, I knew how much he cared for me. I don’t think I was just imagining and wishing this.”

“Did you and Daddy have that sort of connection?” I asked, thoroughly absorbed in what sounded like a storybook tale. My dad wasn’t Pete Everheart, so I had to know how Daddy had won Momma’s hand.

“Daddy just loved me outright,” Mother said. “I never had to wonder or guess how he felt about me.”

The mention of my father seemed to wake her up to present day. She shook her head and it was as if her old beau disappeared. But I wasn’t done yet. I still wanted to know what had happened that she hadn’t married him.

“Where does he live now?” I asked. “Does he have any children?”

Mother looked at me for just a moment and then back into the darkness. A tear rolled down her cheek and I wished I hadn’t asked.

“It was Labor Day weekend of his senior year,” she said. “He caught up with me that Friday after school and asked if I would join him and some friends for a picnic at the quarry the next day.”

“Did you go?” I asked, sitting on the edge of my seat.

She nodded. “There were about eight people that day at the quarry. My mother had fretted and worried that I was too young to go on a picnic, even if there were a bunch of people there. She reminded me that sometimes boys got ideas on picnics and wanted girls to go for a walk with them. ”

“Your mother didn’t want you to go for a walk with a boy?”

Mother looked at me with a tired smile and said, “Granny just wanted to avoid the appearance of evil. Our family had a reputation for being fine Southern folks, except for my brothers. They got to do whatever they wanted. Granny never did get her sons back into the fold at church after they went wild and left home. She stayed mad at Poppa the rest of their lives that he had let his boys run wild.”

I stared at Momma and tried to envision what “running wild” was. I decided that my brother, John, was probably like Mother’s brothers. John didn’t answer to anyone. Even his sergeant in the Army couldn’t make John good.

“The sun was shining so bright that day,” continued Momma. I’ll always remember that. And we were, all of us, in the mornings of our lives. It was one of those days that seemed perfect. The way I felt that day – if it could be bottled and sold – stores would sell out immediately. I was happy in every cell of my body. We spread our tablecloth on the ground, and each of the girls unpacked a picnic basket she had brought. The boys looked over the different foods and chose a girl to sit with.”

I saw another tear escape down Mother’s cheek. She took in a breath and I knew without being told that Pete Everheart had chosen to sit with her. It was so romantic! I could picture his smile and his dancing eyes as he let Mother feed him. I was certain that her hands were shaking and that her eyes were darting about to the other girls, hoping that Pete wouldn’t decide to go sit with one of them.

“After we ate,” Mother said, “Each girl put away the food and covered their picnic baskets so the flies wouldn’t come. Two of the girls pulled their dresses off over their heads. I looked away for fear of what they might have on underneath. They were wearing swimsuits that by today’s standards were quite conservative, but at the time, they were scandalous. I didn’t have a swimsuit. My mother probably didn’t even know they made swimsuits. I was glad I didn’t have to take my dress off in front of everyone. Even if I’d had something presentable on underneath, just the thought of taking my dress off was unthinkable.”

My poor mother, I thought.

“A black haired girl in a swimsuit came to take Pete’s hand. She wanted to race with him to the edge of the quarry. They had all been there before and knew the best places to dive and swim. Pete had the body of an athlete. He had on black swim trunks and a white undershirt. I will never forget the contrast of his pure white skin against the black swim trunks. He represented all happiness to me that day. I let my heart soar just a bit to think that such a wonderful, happy boy would even look at me.”

“Did you go swimming?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t know how to swim, and I didn’t have a swimsuit. I was happier than I had ever been just watching him have fun.”

“Did everyone else go swimming?” I asked.

“I can’t remember anyone but him. Isn’t that odd? There were other people there, but now it seems as if all their faces were blanks. Then George Stephens pitched a quarter in the air, and told Pete it was his call. Pete glanced back at me and called heads. George told him he could dive first.

“Pete backed up a ways to get a running start. Then he executed the most perfect dive I’ve ever seen. We all watched in happy anticipation of seeing his shining face burst through the surface of the water. But then time slowed, and we were in a sort of trance trying to make time run backward. All at once, George panicked and ran down the bank to get into the water where Pete had dived. Not long after, he yelled for the other boys to come help him.

“I watched in slow motion as they pulled his body out of the water. His eyes were open, but there was no longer any life in them. Several of the girls screamed and held onto each other. The boys carried him to a rock and laid him on it, but it was far too late.

“I remember George’s voice. It was confused, scared, and sad at once. He started to tell us that they had been there before and the water had been deeper, but his voice trailed off before he finished. None of it mattered anymore. There wasn’t anything else to say.”

“I kept thinking of a poem I had memorized for Mrs. Johnson’s English class. It was a Robert Frost poem:

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

“Eventually, I looked away. I couldn’t watch any longer. People were screaming all around me, but I just shut down. I leaned against a tree and looked up at the bright cerulean sky.”

Asleep in Group Therapy

Sherry - Petite Over 40, , , 3 Comments

Editor’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

By Karen Brode

Every Tuesday afternoon we had group therapy. I dreaded it with all my heart.

At least it was better than individual therapy. There were other people there to fill in the silent places. People like Mrs. Travers who always wanted to tell her story over and over and over.

I had been in the loony bin for three months and I knew the whole story by heart. Any one of us in the group could have told it. Yet, for some reason, Dr. Henshaw let her tell it every time she wanted to. I wondered if I was the only person there who noticed this. I looked around but no one else seemed to notice we were hearing the same story every week.

Or maybe they were all just pretending. I learned early on that it was best to appear extremely stupid. To speak up with anything of intelligence might be interpreted as rebellious. It might lead to more medication, or worse, restraints.

So I sat there like the rest of them looking at the ceiling tile while Mrs. Travers dove into her story for the millionth time.

“They fired me!” she screamed. I jumped. I wasn’t expecting her to tell the story with such high volume. Sure, she always had a note of desperation in her voice, but this was a little different. I kept my eyes on the tiles above, but listened for any sign she might explode completely. 

“I gave my whole life to that company! When I started working there, my babies were little. I left both my babies in that baby prison so I could work and make our lives better!”

The first time I heard her mention baby prison, I had no idea what she meant. I learned later that she was talking about daycare.

“My babies had everything they wanted because of me! That horrible excuse for a father was only good at doing drugs and going to prison. I had to shoulder it all.”

She paused for a moment, almost panting. I dared a glance at her and saw that her eyes were wide. It was like she was reliving her life with her ex-husband. 

“He told me he was just barbecuing steaks. I couldn’t imagine why you’d barbecue inside the shed, but I never grilled anything in my life. When the shed went up in flames, he tore out of there and left the three of us to die in his fire.”

She squinted her eyes until tears came. “He was cooking meth, you know.” She shook her head. “No. Idiot. He wasn’t cooking meth. He was too stupid to cook anything. He just thought he could do it. Instead, he nearly cooked his whole family. Poor Joey and Donnie….”

I forgot the ceiling tiles and leaned forward toward Mrs. Travers. This was taking a little bit different turn from the weeks before. Normally she focused on the place she had worked for 35 years. She had been a bookkeeper at a roofing company. Everything had been great until they bought a computer and told her to keep records on it. She usually talked about how ridiculous she thought computers were and how she continued keeping books in the same way she always had, on paper. She didn’t think anybody at the company would notice or really care, as long as she got her work done. To this day she didn’t understand why she was fired.  

Nothing she said was funny, not even the fact that she had told her story so many hundreds of times before. Still, it never ceased to surprise me that she couldn’t understand why she had been fired from the roofing company. This woman had withstood so many things, but it was the firing that got her. She could never quite come to terms with it.   

All the sudden, her voice got even louder. She started rocking back and forth in her chair, wringing her hands. I looked over at Dr. Henshaw. His head was down, but I couldn’t tell if he was taking notes or sleeping. I hoped he wasn’t asleep because I didn’t think Mrs. Travers was going to make it through her story without some professional help.

“I got fired the year Donnie graduated from high school!” she continued. She stood up and paced the room. I clutched my arms to my chest, just in case she started throwing punches. “How was I supposed to buy him anything without a job? I couldn’t even make the payments on his braces!”

She walked around the room. Her eyes were wild. And was it me? Or did her hair look like it was standing on end?

“I didn’t care about my own teeth! My teeth were always in terrible shape.” She clenched her terrible teeth together and curled back her lips to show no one in particular just how horrible they were. There weren’t many left. “I was always glad when a tooth fell out because it saved me from having to pay a dentist! But they kept falling out!” She reached a finger up to her mouth and tapped on one or two. “I’m not sure how many I have left.”

Then her arms started flailing and her face went wild again. “Joey and Donnie’s father was in prison from the time they were little. They hardly remembered him. It was just me! All alone! I never had any help! And NO ONE CARED!”

I was getting seriously worried now. Her face was red and the veins at her temples were throbbing. It was then, too, that I realized Dr. Henshaw was asleep. How could he sleep during this? 

Mrs. Travers stopped talking. I looked over at her and saw she was staring at Dr. Henshaw. Her face was contorted like an angry bull. She leaned over the back of her empty chair and said, “Hey.”

She snapped her fingers and clapped her hands. “Not you, too,” she said in an eerily calm voice. “You don’t care either!”

She let out a crazy hyena scream and charged through the circle of chairs toward Dr. Henshaw. He woke up just as she slammed into him. His chair went backwards and his head hit the floor, knocking him unconscious. Mrs. Travers didn’t seem to notice that he was already out. She sat on top of him and punched him over and over.

“How dare you sleep through my story! What kind of doctor are you?” She cried and screamed at the same time. She was in a blind rage. Her whole body shook with anger. “You’re like all the rest of them! You don’t care!”

I’m not sure how long it was before the paramedics broke down the door. They pulled Mrs. Travers away and put her in a straight jacket. She fought valiantly, but there were more of them than there were of her. She kept screaming until they injected her with some sort of sedative.

The rest of us just sat there silently watching. It seemed no one wanted to be implicated in that moment of insanity. We were all curled up in different ways. Some had their feet up in their chairs with their arms around their legs. Others were crouched against the wall in a fetal position. I just sat there with my arms pulled to my chest, trying to pretend what was happening was absolutely normal. Even when the paramedics left to take Mrs. Travers away, I just sat there and looked at the bloodied, unconscious body of Dr. Henshaw. They were back soon enough with a stretcher to carry him out, but it was so strange to be left alone like that.

In the silence that followed, I wondered what we were supposed to do. I looked around the room and heard whimpers from different ones. Were we supposed to leave now? Were we supposed to wait? I never knew what I should do in that place.

Karen Brode is a senior contributor for Jet Planes and Coffee. She grew up in Denison, TX and graduated from Denison High School in 1972.  She took courses at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and worked in a church office for 25 years.  She and her husband, Gary, have been married 39 years and they have one son, Brandon.  Karen’s hobbies are writing, sewing, and gardening. 

Flashes of the Future or Crazy?

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Editor’s note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

 

By Karen Brode

This was the part of the day I hated most of all. It was social time. I sat alone at a table in the corner. The top of it was covered in some sort of worn laminate that was supposed to look like wood grain. I smudged my finger into a worn spot, so bored I thought maybe I could make the spot bigger if I did it long enough. But then I stopped. Someone was watching, somebody who could make me take more pills. I didn’t need any more pills.

The worn spot on the table was just another reminder of the quality I was living in. I’d seen pictures of other places. Some of them even had real wood tables and chairs, but that would be too fancy here. This place was the bottom of the barrel cheap.

The walls were painted pale yellow. I wondered if it was that color so we’d stay calm. Or maybe so we’d chipper up somehow. It was hard to be chipper knowing I’d probably never see what the walls were made of on the outside. I was locked in and there was no way out. I’d already thought about escape on several occasions. There were too many nurses who probably knew what we were thinking before we did. They were too observant.

There weren’t any books to read. It would have helped me pass the time if there were books. I thought of my bookshelves back home. I once had whole walls lined with books I loved. I wondered what had happened to all those books, to all my things. A tear slipped out of my left eye. I wiped it away quickly so as not to appear vulnerable. That would be the last thing I’d need.

The radio crackled from a thunderstorm moving through. It grated my nerves a little, but at least it was some kind of distraction from the infernal boredom.

I scanned the room for the hundredth time, hoping I had somehow missed seeing a window before. But there were no windows so I couldn’t be certain whether there was a thunderstorm. It sounded like it.

I tuned my ear to what I thought was thunder. Between the scratchiness of the radio and all the other women making noises in the room, I couldn’t be certain. I wished I could just get a peek outside, just to be sure. A thunderstorm is exciting if nothing else. I would have felt better knowing if it was raining hard outside.

It was a mistake for me to be there, but there was no convincing the others of that. Most everyone in the room could appear normal for short periods. The first day I arrived, a blonde-haired woman came to sit by me at the table. She looked to be in her forties. She could’ve been much younger than I thought. Age didn’t really exist in this place. I probably looked much older than I was after all the medication they gave me, but I had no idea what I looked like anymore because there were no mirrors.

The blonde shook a cigarette out of her pack and asked if I wanted one. I told her I didn’t smoke. She lit up her cigarette and blew out the smoke in a slow, methodical exhale. She looked as normal as anyone I’d ever met.

“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, hoping it came out friendly.

“I killed my family.” She said this as if she was talking about the weather, then she flicked the ashes of her cigarette into the ashtray sitting on the table between us.

It felt like such a regular conversation, she seemed so nonchalant and bored, that I momentarily forgot where we were. So I asked, “Why?”

For a split second she locked eyes with me. Hers were blue and they went steely in a flash. She jumped from her chair and overturned the table on top of me. I screamed and hit the ground, landing on my back. People came running, but before they got there, she was on top of me, snorting like a bull and pounding me with her fists. I held my hands over my head to keep her from slamming into my face and head.

The staff managed to wrestle her away. After that, I never saw her again. I don’t know what happened to her, but I was relieved to say the least. I learned a lesson that day: Don’t talk to anyone.

Still, when I looked around the room watching the other women, I wondered if anyone else was like me—there by mistake.

Many of them danced, pretending to be ballerinas. Some shuffled forward, never quite lifting their feet off the ground. They seemed so out of it, their heads empty. I had read about the thorazine shuffle before, but it wasn’t until I “social hour” my first week that I actually got to see it. I wondered if any of them knew where they were, who they were before the windowless walls. It didn’t seem to matter to them. If they took all the pills given to them, they were sure to forget.

I closed my hand around the pills I had saved from breakfast and lunch. I couldn’t tell what they had me taking these days. I couldn’t trust any of the doctors or nurses to tell me what they were giving me. All I knew was that these were not the same pills I had been taking before.

I looked over at the nurses’ station. It was a little box of an office with a large window that looked into our social room. The nurses were safely ensconced behind that window. The glass was thick and it had wire criss-crossing through it. It was no use to approach the window. They didn’t acknowledge anyone unless you banged long enough. They wanted to make us feel like we didn’t exist. They wanted us to believe we were invisible. But I wasn’t invisible!

I felt a little shiver go down my back when the doctor walked in. He walked through the room with his clipboard and a nurse following him. He watched each of us in turn like we were zoo animals and then scribbled notes onto his pad. He never said anything to us—just scribbled and walked away.

There were so many things I needed to tell him—for his own sake! I closed my eyes and watched the scene play out on the back of my eyelids. I didn’t know when it would happen, but I knew the car crash would happen on a stormy night in a secluded area when he was on his way home from work. I also knew that he drove to that area for the express purpose of meeting his mistress. And I knew that the accident would prove fatal for him.

If he would just listen to me, he wouldn’t have to die. But no one believed me. I was just a crazy woman in a loony bin.

When I was a child, I had not realized what I had was a gift. I’d used it for entertainment when I was trying to go to sleep, but now I’d seen too much. After what happened to those people in that terrorist attack, I knew that all the things I saw were things that eventually came true. It was only when I started talking about what I saw that I ended up in a mental institution.

Doctors didn’t believe me that I was just trying to be a good citizen. I begged them to get the President on the phone. I wouldn’t have done it if it hadn’t been a matter of national security. All they did was take their glasses off and look at me, like I was some sort of alien species. I was beginning to think maybe they were right. And yet, if they had listened to me, they would have caught those men before they boarded the planes and used them to kill thousands of innocent people.

I guess I can’t blame them. If I had known then what I knew now, I might have saved myself a lot of trouble. I might not be locked like a hamster in a cage. I saw my future long before it happened. I had seen this place on the backs of my eyelids. At the time, I didn’t understand how it related to me. I wish I had.

Now I understood it everyday. I was marched to different parts of the hospital in single file with all the other crazy people. I knew this place by heart. I knew it was Monday and I knew that there would be Chicken al a King for lunch, along with some canned vegetables. If Gertie was working, there might be squares of cornbread. Otherwise, we just got a piece of white bread from a store-bought loaf. Martha stood by the bread and kept tabs to make sure we only took one piece each.

“People misjudge their appetites,” she had said to us on the day of orientation. She paced back and forth in her thick cafeteria shoes. They squeaked across the linoleum tile floor. Her eyes burned with anger and her hairnet slipped down on her forehead. “When I see even a little piece of bread get thrown out, it just ticks me off!”

I remember watching her and wondering how it was she was allowed to roam free when the rest of us were being locked up. I didn’t know any sane person who would go mental over a piece of bread. Still, her tactic worked. None of us took more than one piece each. And we all made sure to eat the one we took. Nobody wanted to make Martha mad.

I kept my head down and tried not to make eye contact with Martha. It seemed wiser that way. In fact, I kept my head down a lot now and tried not to talk at all. It seemed talking got me in trouble. Telling people what I had seen on the back of my eyelids made people nervous. And I usually ended up having to take more pills.

I stared down at the pills in my hand and closed my eyes, feeling them lie there against my skin. I pushed back the scenes crawling up in front of me. It was no use to pay attention to them. It didn’t matter that I had seen things before that ended up on the news months later. No one would listen.

The first time it happened, I ran screaming around the room pointing to the television, telling anyone within earshot that that is what I had been talking about. That plane crash. I had tried to warn them before it had happened. I had even written down the numbers that were on the plane and given them to my doctor. But like everyone else, he had ignored my warnings and, as payment, I got two more pills added to my prescriptions.

That’s when I stopped talking. That’s when I gave up. None of them wanted to know the truth behind what I said. And, really, why would they want to know? Even I thought it was too much. I didn’t want to know about the wars that would happen or the murders. I didn’t want to see the crashes and the fires.

I squeezed my eyes tight until all I saw were flashes of abstract lights. Then I threw the handful of pills in my mouth and swallowed them all without water. Maybe it was better not to know.

____________________________________

Karen Brode is a senior contributor for Jet Planes and Coffee. She grew up in Denison, TX and graduated from Denison High School in 1972.  She took courses at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and worked in a church office for 25 years.  She and her husband, Gary, have been married 39 years and they have one son, Brandon.  Karen’s hobbies are writing, sewing, and gardening.

A Visit with Aunt Mavis

Sherry - Petite Over 40, , , 2 Comments

By Karen Brode

“Here ya go, Betty.” Aunt Mavis had just vacuumed the shag carpet in the living room and handed me what looked like a small rake. “Take this and make all the little shaggy pieces go in the same direction. Do you think you can do that?”

It didn’t matter that I was 10. My mother’s oldest sister always spoke to me like I was a toddler.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said pretending enthusiasm. Aunt Mavis had a rule in her house that we couldn’t watch television during the day. I thought if I helped out, though, she might bend the rules a little.

“Do you think after I’m done here I could watch The Mickey Mouse Club? Please?” I asked with as much politeness as I could.

“Oh, honey, no,” said Aunt Mavis. “We can’t turn the television on during the day.” And with no further explanation, she turned and walked back into the kitchen.

I sighed and set about the work of raking the threads of carpet until they looked like brushed hair. Since arriving at Aunt Mavis’s house in Beaumont, I had been bored to the extreme. I knew going into it she was strict about pretty much everything, but the rule about not watching TV during the day just about killed me. At home, I never missed an episode of Mickey Mouse, and for the last couple of days, I hadn’t even gotten to sing along with the opening song.

The thought crossed my mind that this no-television-during-the-day might be a religious rule I had missed out on. Aunt Mavis was the most religious person I knew. I wondered with fear if I had somehow sinned by watching it everyday. And then I worried that I might have to give up TV in order to go to heaven.

“It was raining, dear when I met you,” sang my aunt from the kitchen. “You smiled, the sun shone through.”

For all her rules and restrictions, she had a beautiful voice. But she stopped mid-verse and came barreling back into the living room.

“Oh, Betty,” she said. “I just remembered I’ve invited Althea Morgan to dinner, along with our other guests from church.”

I stopped raking and stared at her. It was probably the first time she had spoken to me like I was halfway grown up.

“I don’t know if I’m going to have enough food,” she continued. She counted on her fingers. “Let’s see. There’s your mother and you. That’s two. Plus Brother and Sister DeMent. They’ve never been here before.” She held up four fingers. “Then Sister Morgan and myself. That’s six!” Without another look at me, she turned back to the kitchen and said, “I know I’m not going to have enough food.”

I listened for a moment while Aunt Mavis’s thick-soled shoes squeaked on the linoleum floor. She mumbled to herself about salt for the ice cream maker and more green beans. She probably didn’t realize I was listening because I heard her say, “That Althea can eat as much as two people.”

I bit my tongue to keep from laughing. Aunt Mavis was no skinny minnie herself. In fact, as I meandered through the dining room to join her in the kitchen, I noticed the treadmill that sat in the corner. I couldn’t imagine that she had ever used it. She certainly didn’t look it, at least not from the waist down.

“Aunt Mavis,” I said. “Could I go to the park?” I looked out the kitchen window to the kids playing and chasing each other just beyond. If I couldn’t watch TV, maybe I could at least go have some fun with kids my age.

She stopped her muttering and looked at me with what came across as a warning. “No, you may not, young lady. Your mother is asleep and I don’t want to have to explain to her that you went to the park and got yourself kidnapped. You have no idea what kind of people hang out there, just waiting for little girls like you to go there by themselves.”

Outside the window, a couple of little girls giggled on a swing set. They seemed to be having a race to see who could go the highest. They squealed every time they flew a little higher. I didn’t see any of the bad people Aunt Mavis warned me about. It took everything in me not to make a run for it.

“When was the last time you brushed your hair?” she asked.

Just then, Mother wandered into the kitchen yawning. “I slept too hard” she said. “That bus trip yesterday just wore me out!”

“If you and Betty would just get in your car and come here rather than taking the bus, it would be a lot easier on you,” Aunt Mavis scolded.

Mother had many reasons for not driving on long trips. Usually it had something to do with drunk drivers running us off the road, but she didn’t say anything in response to my aunt. She knew better than to argue with her older sister.

“We’re going to have to make another run to the grocery store,” said Aunt Mavis. “I forgot that I invited Althea Morgan. She eats as much as two. Besides I forgot the rock salt for the ice cream maker.”

“Betty, go get your shoes on,” Mother said.

Before I could move, Aunt Mavis stopped me with a touch on my shoulder.

“I’ve got a cake in the oven,” she said. “I need Betty to stay here and watch it.”

“But Mavis,” said Mother. “Leave her here alone? After what happened to you?”

The tone in my mother’s voice sent shivers down my spine, but that was nothing compared to what it did to my aunt. She swayed and leaned heavily on my shoulder. The blood ran out of her face and her eyes glistened.

“I’m sorry,” my mother said. “I shouldn’t have….”

Aunt Mavis moved to a chair and plopped into it with a thud.

I looked at my mom and whispered, “What happened.” She shook her head and put a finger to her lips.

“She’ll hear about it one day, Mildred,” said my aunt, her voice sounding milky and sad. “She might as well hear about it now.”

“She’s too young,” said my mother, but Aunt Mavis held up her hand and my mother bit her lip. When it came to my aunt, her rule was law.

“Betty, you need to know,” said Aunt Mavis. “Come sit.” She pointed to a chair next to her. When I sat down, she grabbed my hand and closed her eyes.

“There are bad people out there,” she said. “One of those bad people crawled through a window one night and robbed me.”

My hand tightened in hers. I looked around at the windows that I could see in her house and wondered which one he came through.

“But that’s not all, honey,” she continued. “I came home before he got out of the house.” She exhaled a rattled breath. “And he…he forced me onto the floor in the dining room and…raped me.”

The word rang in my ears. I had heard it before, but I didn’t know yet what it meant. Even without the meaning, I knew it was more horrifying than anything I could imagine. I felt sweat drip down my back and I shuddered.

Aunt Mavis squeezed my hand while my mother picked up a napkin and blew her nose.

I shut my eyes and tried to block it all out, to forget about it. But it was no use. Now everything in the house was tainted with this horror.

“Where was….” I could hardly breathe, much less speak. “Where was Uncle Lloyd?” I finally squeaked.

“Oh, honey,” Aunt Mavis sobbed. “He and your cousin Bruce were already gone.” She pulled a napkin from the table and wept into it.

“I’m sorry,” she said pulling herself upright. “I just never get past losing my son.”

Her son? I thought. What about that man and being…. I couldn’t even think the word.

“If only Lloyd would’ve handed me the phone that night,” Aunt Mavis continued. “I would have gotten to talk to Bruce one more time, but by the time I got there.”

No family ever admits that one child is more loved than the others, but everyone can see in all families that there’s the favorite one and there’s the not so favorite one. No parent would ever admit to loving one child over another, but it is a fact. And in Aunt Mavis’s family everyone knew that she worshipped Bruce while she only tolerated her other children. Even I knew that and I had never met him.

“What happened to him?” I asked. I had heard the story before and it didn’t scare me as much as the other one, so I asked, hoping it might take away some of my fear.

“He was a traveling salesman,” Aunt Mavis said with a sniff. “He died taking a corner too fast. His car slid off the road and he hit a utility pole.” She trembled while she dabbed at her eyes. “I never got to say goodbye.”

Mother took Aunt Mavis’s hand and gave me a look that told me to keep quiet.

“Come, now, Mavis. You’ve got guests coming. Let’s get to the store before it’s too late.”

“But somebody’s got to stay with the cake,” Aunt Mavis said, her voice still shaky.

“I’ll do that,” Mother said. “You take Betty with you. She’ll be good company and won’t ask you any questions about bad things. Will you, Betty?”

“No, Mother,” I said, relieved to hear I wouldn’t have to stay in the house by myself.

Aunt Mavis stood and lumbered to the oven with the napkin still crumpled in her hand. When she got there, she pulled open the door and jiggled the pans inside. Not satisfied with how done they were, she closed the door and turned back to face Mother and me. Her face was stony, like she was trying to lock all those memories back in the shadows of her mind.

Her voice was far away when she said. “I learned long ago that life isn’t fair and there’s nothing I can do about it.” She looked at Mother and then at me. Her eyes didn’t really focus, though. I felt like she was talking to ghosts instead of real people. “I can’t let these things bother me. I’ve got to pick up and move on.”

“Betty, go get your shoes on,” she said. I jumped to hear her say my name. She just seemed so distant. I halfway didn’t expect her to know I was standing in front of her, let alone to know I needed to put my shoes on. “Maybe change your dress while you’re at it,” she continued. “You look like you’ve been living in that one.”

Somehow I took comfort in hearing my aunt tell me what to do. I was more used to that than to the woman who stood in front of me, vulnerable and sad.

It didn’t occur to me until after we got on the road that Mother was left behind in the house by herself. My worry for her increased until Aunt Mavis had checked out with all her groceries and we started back.

But my worries began again as my aunt wove her way through streets I didn’t recognize. I had taken the route to and from the grocery store enough to be familiar with certain landmarks. As we went along, though, residential streets gave way to strip malls, fast food joints, and seedy motels.

My heart hammered. I knew we were getting lost. We were getting further and further from Mother and that tainted house. I didn’t dare say a word, though. I was too young to tell my aunt what to do.

Finally, she looked at the local businesses we were passing and must have realized we weren’t where we were supposed to be.

“Oh, now, Betty,” she said looking over at me and smiling. “We’ll make our way back in time. Don’t you worry.”

But I was worried. I knew that look. As much as she tried to hide it, she was confused. I was afraid we’d never get home and that some horrible man was in Aunt Mavis’s house hurting Mother. Still, I had been brought up respect my elders, so I nodded and attempted a smile.

It wasn’t long before Aunt Mavis pulled the car over to the side of the road. She looked out of her window toward a river we had followed for several miles. The sun was starting to set in the distance. The sky was orange and purple. After a few minutes in complete silence, she turned and looked at me as if seeing me for the first time.

“Do you know where my house is?” she asked.

_________________________________

Karen Brode is a senior contributor for Jet Planes and Coffee. She grew up in Denison, TX and graduated from Denison High School in 1972.  She took courses at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and worked in a church office for 25 years.  She and her husband, Gary, have been married 39 years and they have one son, Brandon.  Karen’s hobbies are writing, sewing, and gardening.

No Pit of Ashes for Me

Sherry - Petite Over 40, , , 2 Comments

By Karen Brode

The nursing home door was just across the parking lot from where I stood. There were no hills to go up or steps to climb. Even so, I felt as if I trudged through waist deep molasses to get there.

Mother had been in the nursing home seven years. Each year that passed, I wondered how much more I could take. I wanted her to die and be out of this misery. But then I felt terrible for having wished my own mother dead. Seeing her like she was, surely death was better?

I’ll admit there were times when I thought she might outlive me, when it seemed death was a disappointing friend—never there to relieve the suffering of my poor mother, never there to take me from the dread of seeing her suffer like that. It always hovered, always lingered somewhere in the shadows, but it never came. Maybe it was a blessing that at least one of us didn’t know what she had lost.

There were times when I arrived to find Mother in the dining room and she knew who I was. Little glimmers of the past, of the woman who had raised me, given me everything. Other times, she looked at me as if she had never seen me before. Every single time it hurt just like the first time it had happened.

Then there were the times when she saw me walking up to her and she would start crying.

“Where is Albert?” she’d ask, clutching and unclutching the arms of her chair with despair. “Why doesn’t he come visit me?”

The questions of my long-dead father always broke my heart almost as much as her not remembering who I was. I got to the point where I didn’t even try to tell her the truth that he had died when I was seven. It seemed cruel to tell her the truth. I would cry later, but not in front of her. In these times, I tended to tell her that he was out in west Texas, but he would be home at the end of the week and he would see her first thing. This is all she needed to hear.  She settled down after she knew where he was.

Other times, she asked me about her mom and dad. Somehow, even when she didn’t know who I was, she knew I represented her family.

“How are Momma and Daddy?” she’d ask.  “Are they okay?”

I tried to allay her worries and fears with little lies.

“They’re doing just fine,” I’d say, knowing they had long since passed on. “Why, just yesterday I ran into Granny at the grocery store and she was buying ingredients to buy a cake.”

This almost always made my mother’s face light up, as if she could see it clearly.

“They were planning to play dominoes that evening with some neighbors,” I’d continue to encourage her happiness.

I know you’re not supposed to lie, but it gave my mother peace of mind when that’s the one thing she hardly ever had. I discovered that my vivid imagination was an asset after all.

It surprised me that she never asked about my brother, John. I would like to have told her the truth about him if she ever mentioned him. He fled to Las Vegas to escape the nightmare she and I lived in. He left me to handle it all alone. I couldn’t tell if I was more angry or hurt that he had found a way not to be involved. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to be left holding the bag (again), but I was surprised. I think I expected him to rise to the occasion. What a foolish expectation.

The one thing I felt good about was that we could put her in the nice nursing home, the one with cheerful wallpaper and high end decorating. I took comfort in the fact that we put her in the best place possible. There wasn’t much else we could do for her. That was the most frustrating part.

I attended Christmas parties every year with my mother at the nursing home. Personally, I hoped to forget about the holiday. Seeing how  she deteriorated, I never felt as if there was anything to celebrate. The Christmas Carols sounded like funeral dirges. So many people sat in their wheelchairs asleep even as we clapped and sang around them. Mother was lost wherever the mind goes when it is deep with Alzheimer’s. She didn’t seem to realize it was Christmas.

Still, the nursing home tried to give all the folks something to enjoy. One year, someone dressed as Santa and went around the room ho-ho-hoing. When he stopped at our table with some goodies, he asked Mother what she wanted for Christmas. She just stared out somewhere in the distant past.

I glared at him and had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, “What do you think she wants, Santa? A little piece of her mind back, maybe?”

It wasn’t his fault, of course, that we were in this place. It’s just that every Christmas since she had gone to the nursing home had been a reminder of what she had lost—what I had lost—and it got to be too much.

The first Christmas she was in there, it seemed that every store I entered immediately began playing “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” on their intercom system. I often had to leave my half-filled grocery cart in the aisle and walk out of the store crying.

After one particular Christmas party, I started to wheel Mother back toward her room, but felt a gentle grasp of someone’s hand on my arm. It was Harriett Mercer, a woman I had known in passing at church before her health had failed and she had to go to the nursing home. I didn’t know her well, but I could see her mind was still sharp, even if she was wheelchair bound. It didn’t take long for me to realize that she knew the score. She knew she was in a nursing home. She knew she would never get out. She knew she would never go home again. Mother also would never go home again, but at least she didn’t know it.

When the nurse came by to push her down another hall, I waved goodbye and vowed to visit her next time.

True to my word, during my next visit I stood by her bed and held her hand while she told me about the life she had lived. Her husband, Floyd, had taught woodshop classes at the high school most their married life. He was killed in a car accident on a Sunday afternoon on the way home from a football game. She no longer cried as she spoke of that horrible day, but I could see the toll it had taken in the heaviness of her voice.

“He and his buddies had gone to see the Cowboys play,” she said, staring out into the difficult past. “Floyd drove. The others walked away with scratches. Floyd….” Her words drifted off with the pain that, even years later, came to the surface. “At least it had been a good day,” she said with more courage than I could imagine. “His friends, Merle and Bill, told me they’d had the time of their lives.”

I remembered then the accident that had killed her husband. He had been impaled by the steering column. I shuddered thinking about it and didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t want to think about it more than I had to.

Their only child, Floyd, Jr. had died of cancer when he was 45. No amount of time passing could keep the tears from leaking from her eyes as she told her son’s story of chemo and radiation and prayers that didn’t work.

“They gave him a 21 gun salute at the funeral,” she said. “But I hated it. My nerves were already gone. Hearing the guns go off finished me.”

I squeezed her hand a little harder as I listened. She stared at the ceiling for a while. I had the impression she was thinking back to more normal times, days when her family was intact.   “I never imagined things would end up the way they did,” she finally said. “I had a regular life once. And then I lost everything.”

I gasped at her words. Like Harriett, I had a husband and a son. And, although I have not known the pain of losing my husband, I came way too close to losing my son during his senior year of high school. He survived, but he lost his dream of being on the varsity track team and he nearly missed half of his school year. When he finally went back to school, it was with a walker and neck brace.

All this while my mother withered away under the influence of Alzheimer’s. The weight of it broke me down. I cringed when the phone rang. Was it the nursing home? Was my son in yet another wreck? Or maybe it was my husband who had met with disaster. I no longer expected things to go well.  Just getting through a day at work or a day at home seemed all I could do. I lost any hope of my life ever being normal again.

I looked at Harriett and felt a kinship with her. It seemed cruel that she still had her mind to remember all of that. It seemed oddly a blessing that my mother couldn’t remember the hard times she had experienced. Maybe she was better off not knowing where she was or what had happened to her.

Harriett’s eyes were magnified behind the thick glasses she wore. I asked her if I could get her something to read.

She shook her head. “I can’t see to read,” she said. Her voice broke over the words as if she mourned yet another loss. “And even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to concentrate.”

She made a heavy wave with her curled up hand in the direction of the woman who shared her room. “She keeps that infernal television on night and day. Half the time I can’t even sleep.” She sighed and let her head drop back onto her pillow and closed her eyes. “Sometimes I feel like I’m in hell.”

I wanted to do something for Harriett. I tried to think of something, some measure of peace I could leave with her, but there wasn’t any. I looked to her bedside table, thinking I might read her a chapter from the Bible, anything to comfort her.

She saw me looking and guessed my thoughts. “I threw away my Bible years ago. I don’t have any use for a God who takes everyone I loved and everything I had and leaves me to languish in this place of complete misery.”

At first, I thought maybe I should defend God to her, remind her that He is good and has our lives in His hands, even when it feels that He doesn’t. But, to be honest, I could see her point. I sort of felt like she did and I wasn’t really happy with God either. I was becoming increasingly clear just how much she and I had in common and I was afraid of ending up just like her. It was a sobering thought.

Even so, my upbringing always brought me back to the Bible, searching for understanding and comfort. I thought of Job, the ultimate sufferer. I tried to remind myself what he said to his wife when he lost everything.

“Shall we accept good from God and not trouble?” (I didn’t dare bring this up to Harriett.)

In the midst of his fiery pain Job was able to remember the many wonderful things from God before asking, “Should I expect to never have anything bad happen to me?”

I think Job was in better shape than I was. He seemed to take a lot of comfort in that pit he sat in with ashes on his head. I had no such pit, no ashes to give me peace. I had to keep going and try to make the most of what was left of my life. Somehow I envied him getting to give up and grieve. I didn’t have time to grieve!

Almost overnight, I felt as if everything in my life as I had known it was over. And it was. I was broken and I didn’t know how to put myself back together. And yet, standing there, holding Harriett’s hand, I realized something else. I could walk out of the nursing home anytime. I could go to my home and cook supper and take the trash out and mop the floor. These were activities that she would never do again.

_________________________________

Karen Brode is a senior contributor for Jet Planes and Coffee. She grew up in Denison, TX and graduated from Denison High School in 1972.  She took courses at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and worked in a church office for 25 years.  She and her husband, Gary, have been married 39 years and they have one son, Brandon.  Karen’s hobbies are writing, sewing, and gardening.