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Renee Butcher

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Family Mugs

May 14, 2020 Leave a Comment

Family Mugs [Illustration by Renee Butcher]

My husband, Rick, keeps telling me we have too many mugs – that they are taking up too much space on our shelves, and I need to get rid of some of them. But which ones?

How about this one – my Mama Bear mug? It’s the companion to his Papa Bear mug. Every time I see them sitting on the shelf, I think about the year we really started to feel like a family. I can’t give that one up. It took so many years to get it.

Or how about my big green Tinkerbell mug? We got that the year we took the kids to Disneyland – our first real “family” trip together. It’s a big, two-handed mug that holds nearly twice as much as Mama Bear. I reserve Tink for my Sunday Cocoa and fill her to the brim.

How about this one? My camp sister, Dottie, has one just like it: I gave it to her for her birthday a few years back. I love the image; yellow stars peek from a black night sky, haloing a galaxy of raucous, Rubenesque women whooping around a campfire, sparks rising to meet the stars. Whenever I wrap my hands around their warm, gently sloping curves, I am lost in a thousand memories of smoky, crackling fires, campfire singing and soft guitars.

See this one with the unicorn? I think it’s the oldest in the cupboard. It sat on my desk all through college, where it held my pencils, pens, roach clip, scissors. When I hold it, I remember moving into Mehling Hall freshman year, carefully placing it on my desk beside Rick’s picture. I remember when I put his picture away.

And this one with the cowboy boots, sitting on the windowsill? If you look closely, you’ll see its broken: split right down the middle. My second daughter, Gracie, sent that one to us from Wyoming, the year she spent teaching and volunteering and waiting to go to Brazil. It was broken when it arrived, so I superglued it and set it up there to hold my basting and baking brushes. It’s been there ever since.

Maybe I could part with the volunteer mug Rick got for helping out with Emily’s Girl Scout troop. Or the one we bought on our first Valentines weekend at Hood River. No. No, I need to keep that one. You never know when a moment will change the course of your life, or the ambitions of your heart will be inspired.

Which ones should I keep? Which do I let go?

The funny thing is, most of the mugs I love aren’t that comfortable to hold. They’re not shaped exactly right. Some have rough surfaces that make my fingertips feel anxious, or lips that curl in ways that make it almost impossible to the gracefully take a drink. Some have handles that were clearly designed by someone who had never before held a mug in their lives, while others are too heavy, or uneven, slumped from the heat of the kiln.

Still, I love each one. They hold my memories.

I have learned to form to their curves and find comfort in their rough spots. Even the broken one, I have found a place for.

Filed Under: Essays, Words Tagged With: family, featured

Two Cards for Father’s Day

June 11, 2019 5 Comments

Father’s Day, 2013

A man walked by me in Safeway wearing Old Spice the other day. The smallest things are reminding me… Father’s Day is here again.

Last Thursday, I stood in the Hallmark store at the mall, searching out two Father’s Day cards – one being for my husband. My girls aren’t ready to give him a card yet – I don’t know when or if they ever will. I think a couple may, someday. One never will. He isn’t their father of course, so they don’t even think of it yet – a card. How could they? Why should they?

That card will come, if it ever comes, from a life lesson that can only be learned looking back; the one that teaches us that, while our “father” in biological terms may have singular distinction, the men who ultimately raise us – our Dads – are the men who are there for us, every day.

They are the men who work long hours to provide for us, and still find time and energy to play a game or take a walk with us at the end of the day. They sacrifice for us, and when they must choose, they choose us. They worry about us when we stay out too late. They hear our cries behind closed doors and silently wish they could do more. In a ways small and large, Dads inspire our dreams, build our confidence, and stand by us when no one else can or will.

Because they love us.

Whether we embrace or reject them, tolerate or torment them, love or hate them – they stand fast. These men – biological, adopted, grand-, step-,  or something else entirely – keep us in their hearts every moment of every day. We are lucky if we have even such one man in our lives growing up. If we have more… (I had more…) oh, we are so blessed. Because these men are the ones who help guide us toward who we will become.

The man who raised me – the man who kept me in his heart every moment of every day – was not my biological father, but he was the only dad I ever knew.

I have a bio-father, still living. He is an architect and lives a few hours south of me, but I have never met him. I’ll admit it, when I first learned about him, I was curious. I even looked him up on Facebook, where I learned that he and I share, if anything, a great love of horses and the outdoors. (But really, what girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest doesn’t? It’s hardly ascribable to genetics.) Nevertheless, I can probably also thank him for at least a portion of my artistic nature, my attention to detail, and the delay in the graying of my hair – at fifty I have only a few random grays around the edges, while my bio-mom and sister have been “bottle red-heads” for decades now.

I can see myself in the faces of his children. His son looks something like me, I think: same face shape and dark hair. His daughter’s name is Camille (I have always liked that name), and is a professor at one of our state colleges. I do not believe that either one of them know I exist.

My bio-mom made a special trip to see him just after she and I reunited some years ago, so he knows about me and has seen pictures of me grown and with my daughters. He told my bio-mom he thought I was pretty. He also questioned my paternity. (If you saw our pictures side by side, you would not question.)

In the early years after my adoption reunion, I wrote him once or twice, but he has never replied. I don’t know how I feel about that, or him, but I do know that I don’t need to send him a Father’s Day card.

I’m losing my way… so, I there I am, standing in the aisle at Hallmark, looking for cards and trying to avoid the pushy woman in the bright apricot pants who seems to have laid claim to the entire aisle; she is shielding great expanses of the card rack like an NBA point guard. I suck in my stomach and maneuver around her, and start picking up one sappy card after another, reading every sticky-sweet line, trying to find just the right one for my kind, sentimental husband and trying not to think about my own Dad.

I’m fine. No tears – I’m fine. Really.

Then, down the way, past the apricot pant lady and her very large suspendered companion, I see a young woman dressed in blue cotton, leaning into her husband (I assume, based on their conversation) to show him a card she has found.

“Oh, it’s perfect! That’s Dad! That’s absolutely Dad!” She runs her finger down the words on the front, encouraging him to read it, then opens it up with a flourish. “Don’t you think that says Dad all over?” She is excited – giddy.

Her husband reaches around her and pulls her close. He smiles and nods and they laugh quietly together. “Perfect,” she says again, “just perfect.” Her tapered fingers reach for a tan envelope and then she links his arm and they both turn toward the counter. As they whisk away, I can’t help myself: I have to see – what is so perfect? What is her Dad all over?

I move down the aisle and pick up a card from the same slot and before I can even get it open, I feel my cheeks warm and my eyes begin to well. Snoopy. It’s Snoopy.

Snoopy dancing – with his head thrown back and feet flying. It could have been any one of a billion other cards that Hallmark makes this time of year for Father’s Day, but it is Snoopy.

My Dad loved Snoopy – just loved him. Honestly, I think he had more of an affinity for Charlie Brown – he related. But he loved Snoopy. And now I’m standing there holding this card with Snoopy dancing and I can’t read the words because they all look they’re at the bottom of a swimming pool. I will never know what the blue cotton woman’s dad is all over.

So there I am, crying all by myself in Hallmark, trying to pretend that I’m not. I make my way down the aisle, away from the popular cards.

Sniff, sniff.

A little woman who barely comes up to my chest (I’m 5’3”) passes by and looks up with concern. “Sorry – allergies,” I say, and wipe my nose as I put on my best allergy face and try to look very interested in the Happy Bar Mitzvah card that my hand has fallen on.

Stupid dancing dog. Stupid card.

Father’s Day isn’t simple for me. It should be, but it isn’t. This is my seventh Father’s Day since my Dad died, and it is the first one for which I didn’t buy him a card. I know how crazy that sounds, by the way: I have six cards tucked away, signed and sealed up for my Dad who will never see them.

But this year, I didn’t buy my Dad a card. I didn’t even look for one – I no longer need the ritual. My grief, while still tender, has softened with time, and with the great peace and boundless happiness my life now brings me. Instead, this year I am buying a second card for another man, to give together with my husband – for a man who has captured my heart in a way I never expected: my father-in-law. Pop.

Pop has been married to my husband’s mom for twenty-two years now, and her kids, as far as he is concerned, are his too. He loves every one like a great treasure, and tells us all often what it means to him to be surrounded by a family that loves him.

I don’t know all that Pop has been through in his life, but my guess is that his soft, gentle soul is the result of long years of wear on some formerly rough edges. I think perhaps Pop has learned the hard way how precious family is, and how “family” is something we make, not something destined because of biology or designed by law or social mandate; but rather formed and forged through health and sickness, struggle and success, acceptance and understanding, time and unconditional love.

I will never forget the moment I realized how much I love him. On the day that I married my husband, Pop came up to me and put his arms around me, hugged me tight and said, “Now you’re my daughter. I don’t call you my daughter-in-law because that’s not how I think of you. You’re my daughter.”

He meant it. I could tell he had been waiting some time to say it, and I could feel to my bones how deeply he meant it. And just like that, right there in the middle of the reception hall floor at my own wedding, I fell in love with him.

Pop is patient, hard-working, and kind to a fault. He loves a cold beer and a good joke and he can be a little stubborn sometimes (some might say “more than a little”), but he is completely and passionately devoted to the people he loves. He loves a good country band too, and at 83, he can still out-dance most of the young people on the dance floor. Sometimes he even finds it in his heart to lead me in a two-step; when the dance is over he always smiles his widest grin and patiently tells me that I’m coming along… that I’ll get it sooner or later.

So the second card is for him – for Pop. Not my bio-father, not my Dad, not even one of the men who had any part in who I grew to become – but nevertheless a man who keeps me in his heart every day now, as I keep him in mine.

The card I chose for him isn’t fancy or sophisticated; simply stated, it reads:

We want to say
how much you’re appreciated
for your love and caring,
for everything you do
for a family who loves you
very much.

It is Pop, all over.

Filed Under: Essays Tagged With: daughters, fathers, featured

Graduation Season

May 30, 2019 2 Comments

Graduations Season {Poem} | The Harmony Cat - reneebutcher.com

A few late night reflections on parenting

When I was a young mother, pony-tailed and skipping over stairs strewn with toppled towers and dress-up silks, I was sure that by the time my baby was in high school, my floors would be clean, my laundry folded, my walls painted, my garden abundant, and the first of my novels published.

It was a fantasy.

Because as my children got older, I realized that the hitches and glitches of the Duplo generation are nothing compared to those of adolescence. Hunger, fatigue, sogginess – I can fix those. Junior high drama and broken hearts are not so easy.

And then. Mile-markers. Preschool. Kindergarten. Paper caps and gowns. Sand castles and lemonade stands. Precious pictures etched into the corners of my mind.

First concerts. First dates. First loves.

More caps and gowns.

Breathe. Just keep breathing, Mama. Pray or send it out to the universe or align your chakras or whatever you do. It’s all the same.

Just Love them. Even when they think you don’t. Even when you are the only one who does.

“Wear your coat.”
“Call soon.”
“Be safe.”

“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”

And then. Suitcases. Packed cars. Clean rooms.
Empty echoes that are not nearly as satisfying as you thought they would be.

And then. Across ten miles or a thousand, you hope that they can feel your prayers. Even when they don’t believe in them. Even when you are the only one who does.

“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”

And then. Sweethearts. Broken hearts. Celebrations. Maybe marriage. Maybe babies.

Maybe grandbabies, who come into the world with Hope clasp in tight fists and hand it to their mothers for safekeeping.

Safe Keeping.

“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”

You swim in Abundance.

And then. Broken towers you cannot fix. Deep pains and raw, ragged wounds you cannot mend, even with Neosporin and Band-Aids.

So you pray that someone will hold out some small candle in the darkness for them. Even when they cannot see it. Even when you are the only one who does.

And then.

“I love you.”

It flies, dear young ones. It just flies. Go kiss your babies right now, even if they are sleeping.

Go.

A million times. I would kiss them all a million times again if I could.

And I would not trade a moment. Not one of those million midnight kisses.

Not one.

 


 

I wrote this piece in 2015 on the eve of our daughter Laura’s high school graduation, as a gift to her. It was inspired by a season of both rejoice and heartache for our little family: in that moment, we also celebrated our youngest daughter’s junior high completion, worried and prayed for a another daughter in the midst of a serious health complication, and mourned a loved one lost unexpectedly to a heart attack.

 

Filed Under: Poetry, Words Tagged With: daughters, featured, mothers, parenting

Invisible Man

May 29, 2017 3 Comments

Image Credit: Florian Schwalsberger [CC BY 2.0]

{Portland, Oregon ~ 2004}

We choose a table in the sun this evening at Greek Cusina, my husband and I, and talk about old friends while we wait for our dolmathes to arrive. You drift toward us like coal smoke, charred and unruly, and begin pacing back and forth in front of the restaurant.

Step, step, step, step.

A car with a bad muffler goes by and sets off the alarm of a dark green Blazer parked just up the street. The Blazer toots, screams, ding-dings, honks, whistles and finally, thankfully, falls silent. My husband and I laugh that no one moved a fraction despite its noisy persistence. No one even seemed to notice. But everyone did.

Step, step, step, step.

Your hollow, tobacco-lined face twitches and shudders, animating some private inner dialog. I wonder when you last smiled into a face that smiled back. I watch, hoping you will meet my gaze and for an instant sacrifice one tiny glance of your soul in exchange for mine. But your stare is fixed on the window of the restaurant, keeping vigil with the pacing figure mirrored in the plate-glass. You never meet my eyes.

Step, step, BANG – your torn Nike comes down hard on the round metal grate – step, turn and back again.

That car alarm; so obvious, so desperate to mark its place, so futile in its insistence.  Everyone hears and no one looks up.  What it is like to be there and yet be unseen?  To scream and go unheard?  Like the Invisible Man lost in a school for the deaf.  Alarm again.

Step, step, BANG, step…

You pace all through dinner, just beyond the rope that divides the restaurant’s outdoor seating from the sidewalk like some international boundary.  A group of four at the next table (one bearded and round like a television chef) laughs uncomfortably and leaves a bit early. We stay, my husband and I, munching on pita and hummus, unwilling to give up our date.  I want to ask, “Have you eaten today?  Are you hungry?  Will you join us?”  But I am afraid. Beneath that beard and long gray coat, you don’t look much older than we are. You could be my brother.

Homelessness is an issue that I tend to deal with at arms length. Like many people, I donate clothes and money, and do the odd service project for our local shelter; for many years I even served Christmas breakfast downtown in Pioneer Square. But when it gets too close – when the problem ceases to be The Homeless and becomes my brother – I become uncomfortable and feel ill-equipped. Yet it is in this eye-to-eye that I find humanity; in this reflection of myself, I become duty-bound to act.

So I want you to know – I saw you.  Dark, grizzled beard, long gray coat… Brown Eyes…

Step step, BANG, step.

And no matter how hard you try, you will never be invisible again, because I saw you tonight – step, step, BANG, step – searching for reflection in front of a Greek restaurant.

{First publish in The Oregonian, Sunday, April 3, 2005}

Filed Under: Essays, Words Tagged With: featured, homelessness, Portland

Claudine

May 22, 2017 4 Comments

My mother is one of those fine-boned, teeny-tiny, osteoporosis-prone women. You know the ones: women who shrink so with age that you find yourself fearing they might one day simply disappear into thin air. Mom’s little companion dog, a toy poodle named Teddy, is equally diminutive and fined-boned. Both have well-manicured nails and shoulder-length white hair.

They are inseparable.

So there we all were – Mom, Teddy, and I – sitting in the lobby of the DMV on possibly the most uncomfortable chairs ever made, filling out our paperwork to get her a new government-issue ID card. What a ninety-year old woman with Stage 5 Alzheimer’s needs with a new ID card, I’ll never understand. Stage 5 Alzheimer’s, in case you don’t know (oh, how I hope you don’t know) means Mom is starting to forget even the simplest of details, like how to spell her own name. If I’m not right there with her, she usually thinks I’m dead.

Anyway, as Mom was signing her name, one careful letter at a time, inside the yellow box on the little card that they use these days to put your signature onto the back of your newly issued ID, a guy with a well-behaved young pit bull mix walked by. Of course, Teddy went ballistic like he always does when he see other dogs (read: Little Man complex).

Thankfully, the incident was over almost before it even started: the other dog passed by and Teddy barked. They went out the door and Teddy stopped. But that didn’t stop a very cranky DMV employee (let’s call her “Claudine”) from letting us know what’s what.

So, Mom and I are both sitting there on our impossibly hard plastic DMV chairs, minding our own business. Teddy is on my lap, done barking, not making a peep. All of a sudden, here comes Claudine, running our way like a wet, angry hen, planting hands on hips, sticking her bony chin out like she’s trying to poke a ‘possum out of his den.

“Service dogs,” she scolds, “are not supposed to bark.”

I look at Mom and then up at Claudine. “OK,” I say. Like, what am I supposed to do? Teddy barks. (And for the record, he isn’t a ‘service dog’: he’s a companion dog.) Then I sit there, hoping she will go away.

“They are not supposed to bark,” she says again, as if my response wasn’t satisfactory. Teddy hasn’t made a peep since the pit-bull left.

“Ok,” I say again. “He’s a companion dog – for my mom.” As if that should explain it.

“Service dogs cannot bark at other dogs.”

Hmmm. Pretty sure they can. It’s probably not a good time to correct her grammar though.

Long silence. Apparently, she wants me to apologize for bringing a poorly trained “service animal” into the holy shrine that is the DMV. Maybe she wants my assurance that Teddy will never bark on government property again.

Nope.

There are so many things I want to say to Claudine, the first being, it’s sad that your life sucks so much that you get some joyous power rush over verbally attacking little ninety-year old ladies and their tiny dogs. I don’t say anything.

In my mind, I’m already writing about Claudine. She already has a name.

Mom looks at me. She doesn’t know why Claudine is there, or why she isn’t leaving. It’s gone on long enough. I don’t need to defend us. I just say, “Thank you.” Dismissively, with a smile on my face: the same way a teenager will say thank you when they really mean “F* You.”

Claudine has no idea what to do. Her body language suggests she is bracing for an argument, but the small crowd on our side of the DMV is watching her as she hovers over my tiny mother and her equally tiny dog, and from all outward appearances, Mom and I are both being courteous and compliant. There really isn’t anything else she can do without coming off like a full-tilt witch. She narrows her eyes at me, turns on her heels, and goes back behind the counter.

Mom leans in and asks me what that was all about. I tell her that the lady was just reminding us that Teddy isn’t supposed to bark inside the building. Mom says, “He’s such a good boy.” She looks down at Teddy, “You wouldn’t bark in here, would you, Teddy?” Then she gives him a hug. She’s already forgotten about the pit bull.

Every once and a while, Alzheimer’s works in our favor.

Filed Under: Essays, Words Tagged With: aging, Alzheimer's, featured, mothers

Salvation

May 15, 2017 Leave a Comment

{Portland, Oregon ~ 2007}


I’ve lived in Portland all my life and I know my way around this town. I grew up on the eastside in the Roseway neighborhood, went to college on the Bluff above the St. John’s slough, and then moved westside to the suburbs in my early twenty’s; in the last four decades, I’ve managed to etch a map into my brain that covers nearly every neighborhood in Portland – from Mount Tabor to Montgomery Park. I know at least seven ways to get to 10th and Burnside, and where the best chance is for parking on NW 23rd.  I  know where you can still get a real old-school  fountain soda (at Fairley’s Pharmacy on Sandy), and what the city looks like at night from the top of Rocky Butte.  I even know where Ramona Quimby grew up.  But today, I find myself crossing unfamiliar ground, to a place I haven’t been for more than 43 years – since the day after I was born.

I set out on NW Thurman, climbing the heights above the Pearl, and veer onto an unremarkable side street that gently curves back and forth beside a row of Nob Hill’s scariest stilt-supported homes. At the end of the road, I come to a narrow bridge spanning a ravine, and as I drive across, a mass of trees opens to a large brick structure.  Am I in the right place?  Is this where I started? As I roll off the far end of the bridge, I’m reassured: a large sign identifies my destination – The Salvation Army White Shield Center.

I roll into the only available parking spot at the far end of a muddy lot, then take a deep breath and open the car door.  A sticky, acrid smell rushes me – hot tar – and I remember that Robin, the Executive Director with whom I am meeting, warned that they were doing a “massive” renovation.

As I approach the front door, marked “Reception,” I make a decision – I cannot cry.  I must not cry.  I’m here to gather information, find a picture, fill in an empty page in my history.  But something inside me catches just as I walk through the door, and my eyes fill, weighted with a connection I did not know I had.  I blink, distributing the water just in time.  A young woman, strawberry blonde and smiling, greets me at the door.

“I’m here to see Robin,” I say, my pitch rising at the end like a question.

The strawberry girl’s face brightens, her smile spreads.  “Oh,” she nods, “Yes, I’ll go get her.”  She knows who I am.  I am expected.

Robin approaches a moment later from the facing hall, hand outstretched.  She is perhaps ten or so years older than I am; a gentle-looking woman with light features and rosy cheeks:  My mind flashes on the notion of a Dutch farm-wife. As we ascend a flight of stairs badly in need of new carpet, my hand touches the railing for an instant, and the cool on my fingertips makes me wonder about the hands that have passed up and down these stairs.  How many have been supported here, in this place?   Layers of paint cover the railings, thick, painted over time and time again, to freshen, to clean.  Some places have chipped, and the paint shows through in layers, revealing subtle changes in tone over the years…this place is a testimony to changes in tone over the years.  As we top the landing, my fingers brush the square finial – smooth from so many hands.

“I’m so sorry about all of this,” says Robin, indicating the smell of tar, the disorder of demolition and reconstruction.  We sweep into the second floor hallway.

“No worries.” I say, distracted.  A strange, feathery feeling is beginning to gather all around me, just beyond the edges of my senses.

Robin takes me to an office, borrowed from a colleague who is away from the building for the day.  “My office is terrible, but the tar smell isn’t so strong in here,” she says.  Then, gesturing toward a small collection of boxes on the floor, “I got together as much as I could find – I didn’t know what you might need.”  The boxes are filled to overflowing with old carbons, yellowed news clippings, glossy eight-by-tens, and photo envelopes from Freddy’s and Costco.  Treasure.

She gives me the lead, unsure if I’m ready to dig into the boxes yet.  But wanting to talk a little, I ease onto an aging forest-green couch and begin asking questions of the journalistic sort.  “How long has the facility been in operation?  How has the population changed over the years?” Robin settles onto an office chair and begins to recite a well-rehearsed outline of the facility’s development; mostly, she says, gleaned from a 1978 Masters thesis by a woman named Wendy Jo that chronicles White Shield’s history.  She promises me a copy.

Slowly, the conversation turns more personal – Robin has been working at White Shield since 1983 (with time off for children, she clarifies).  She mentions that she was raised in Pennsylvania, and I nod, silently conceding to my instincts.  Many have come back, she tells me – birth mothers who lived here, children born here – and she seems honored that they…we… share our stories with her.  She tells me about the mother and daughter who drove here from Salem on the day that they met for the first time.  And the fifteen-year old Hawaiian girl whose parents sent her all the way to Portland to have her baby and would not allow her to come home afterward.  I tell her what I know about my own beginnings, about my birth-mother, about my new sister and brother.  About my daughters.  I have a fifteen-year old.  Nothing would ever, could ever make me send her away, I say.  And I cannot imagine telling her to stay away, even if she left on her own.  Times are different now, we agree.  Thank God.  Thank God.

“Is there anything left of the old home?” I ask.  I search for the words to ask if the place that my birth-mother spent six months of her life in still exists.  Is the room I was born in still there?  I can’t say the words out loud.  I know if I do, I will cry.

“Would you like to do a walk through?”  Robin asks.

“Sure,” I say.  Nonchalant.  Practically perky.

Robin checks for her keys and we head up another flight of stairs, stopping in a few single rooms that were once bedrooms, I’m told, on our way to the “Hallmark Room.”

“We used to get a lot of donations from Hallmark,” Robin explains. “We stored them in there.”  She calmly struggles with the door lock, and wonders aloud if it has been changed.  “We’re rekeying everything around here.”  Then, as if turned from within, the lock clicks, and we are inside.

The room is musty, heaped with donated clothes and toys.  An ancient light fixture, ready for replication by Rejuvenation Hardware, hangs in the far end of the room.  A stack of receiving blankets leans against a wall on the near side of the first dormer window.    “Before it was the Hallmark Room, this was a dormitory.” Robin tells me.  “Six girls slept here,”   A giant battalion of dead box-elder bugs litters the steps to what was once a fire escape.  “The rules about visitors were pretty strict,” she continues. “One woman told me that once, when this was a dormitory, someone snuck up the fire escape and left a pie there.”  I wonder to myself about rules so strict that a friend couldn’t bring a pie.

I feel tiny invisible feathers dancing all around me, like memories caught in flight.  I have to hold myself from reaching out to touch them.  I imagine six beds – three on each side, and my mind’s eye sees a girl with long red hair in the far left bed, lying with her head propped up on a pillow and looking out the dormer window opposite.  Her face is smooth, like fine china, and dust motes play in the light between girl and window.  Another girl, round faced, bobbed brown hair, is standing by another dormer, gently rocking heel-toe, heel-toe.  She smiles toward me for an instant, and then she is gone.  A stir of little feathers lights on my shoulders like a shawl, and I am warmed.

Back out in the hallway, I pause to touch the railing again, reverent.

Robin takes me downstairs; to the old nursery, and to what was once the delivery room – where I was born – and to the kitchen.  “The kitchen probably looks a lot like it did back then,” she says.  Then we walk down a long hallway past rooms filled with teenage girls, strewn clothes, damp towels, books.  Like my daughters’ rooms, I think to myself.  Then, looking closer, onesies, bottles, diapers.  Not like my daughters’ rooms at all.

Down the hall, girls of every shade and size are laughing together, rocking, pointing, playing with their babies.  Most of these girls have choices.  Most of these girls will keep their babies.  Most look younger than my fifteen-year old.

Robin tells me about each room as we pass – shares each history.  “There is a lot of energy here,” she says, meaning what has been, as well as what is.  “Positive energy,” she reassures.  “People here sometimes say they have experiences.”  She lingers on the word a moment.  “Especially at night when it’s quiet.  You can feel things.”  She chooses her words carefully, professionally.  We nod to one another, and an understanding passes between us.  There is a lightness to the air.

We walk by the last room in the hall.  I glance in to see one of the residents; a girl of perhaps sixteen, and an unexpected rush of sorrow passes through me.   No little feathers here.  No lightness. I feel, in an instant, profoundly sad.

She did this for me, my birth-mother. She lived here, for six months. No family, few friends. She did this for me.  I cannot wrap my mind around the sacrifice.  It is too big.  The reality of it all is too big.  Those hands, her little hands, on rails… gliding up and down the stairs on smooth painted rails.

I must not cry.  Not yet.

Robin and I step through a door at the end of the corridor to the outside.  “That last room…I hesitate to tell you about that one,” she says.  “It’s the only room that probably doesn’t have much positive energy.”

Once again, my intuition surprises me.

“That’s the room that they used when one of the girls had to say goodbye to her baby.  They’d let her hold the baby for a little while, and then they would come in and take the baby and literally hand it out the back door to someone from whichever agency was handling the adoption. “

“My birth-mother told me she got half an hour,” I say.  “Thirty minutes.”  Not yet.  Not yet.

Robin leads me back upstairs, and leaves me alone in the borrowed office to go through the boxes of pictures.  I ask her to close the door as she leaves, and I settle myself onto the floor with the boxes around me, and carefully begin to lift out each file.  Carbons dating back as far as 1925, perhaps earlier, have been carefully preserved.   I am hoping against hope to find some remnant of my birth mother, of me, some proof of life.  I find a letter, typed on rice-thin paper, dated the day I was born.  Something about insurance, I think.  While my birth-mother labored, someone in an office nearby was concerning himself with insurance matters.

More recent pictures show groups of girls, pregnant, mothering, laughing.  But in previous decades, it seems that great care was taken to protect the privacy of the young women who stayed at the home, and so only backs of young heads are captured in any of the pictures taken before about 1970; long after our memories – hers and mine – were floating in the wind with so many others.

I leaf through stacks of vintage black and white photographs, but find only babies, and fox-furred, feather-hatted patrons that look by turns sympathetic and superior, posing for Oregon Journal photographers and Oregonian journalists.  A picture of a basinet full of newborns catches my eye for a moment:  One looks just like my middle daughter on the day she was born.  A coincidence, I’m sure.  Still, I hold the photo and study it for a long time – I cannot help but wonder.

Two hours later, legs cramped, feet asleep, I stumble down the hall with a few carefully selected pictures and newspaper articles to make copies.  Everyone in the office is very helpful, eager to point out their new copy machine.

Robin is in a meeting when I finish, and so I leave much as I did 43 years ago; alone.  Descending the stairs, I pause one more time to rest my hand on the smooth square finial, and I wonder how many times my birth-mother’s hand passed there.  As I pull open the front door, a woman at the reception desk asks, “Did you find everything you were looking for?”  I smile and wave good-bye.  I cannot speak.

Outside, I breathe in, breathe again.  Not yet.  Not yet, not yet.

My car rolls back across the narrow bridge, and little feathers fall like snow all around.  Then, all at once they are gone, and I am back on familiar ground; and missing the feel of down on my face, my tears begin to fall like winter rain.

Filed Under: Essays, Words Tagged With: adoption, daughters, featured, mothers, Portland

Strawberry Season

May 8, 2017 Leave a Comment

Daddy once told me that he never read The Grapes of Wrath. “I lived it, sis. Why the hell would I want to relive it?” Needless to say, Steinbeck has always been a favorite of mine because he showed me the world that made my father. 


“Daddy, can I go strawberry picking with Marilee? She goes every day and the bus comes at five in the morning and drives them out to the fields on the island and she’s back by lunchtime and sometimes she makes more than $10 in one day just for picking strawberries!” The child is breathless.

Robert runs the pad of his thumb across the calloused tips of his fingers, then turns them – palm up, down, up again. Memories flow like water over his shoulders and the weight of long forgotten harvests surge through his body in a torrent.

Excited shouts and laughter of towny children echo across the fields of his memory. Children who live in houses with indoor plumbing and light fixtures and mothers who tuck them in at night between clean, crisp sheets. Children who do not move lock, stock and barrel with the changing of the seasons. From the rows, he watches them fly through the tall grass at the edge of the fields, running toward the swimming hole, where cares are peeled away as easily as clothes.

Sweat stings his eyes. He inhales miles of beans reaching for heaven. Slips on windfall peaches under his bare feet. He shakes his head, baby-fine hair falling all around, and reaches for his cap too late to stop the burn. A river of heat pours down the small of his back. Dirt and pea-gravel work their way into thin, bent knees. The long gone prick and sting of the cane berry vines with their blood-red berries stain his memories. Cotton bolls cut through gloves, lancing his palms like a scythe. Now the jolt of the truck in the morning, waking him to the fields. Now the sway in the evening, carrying him to bed.

“Well, Daddy – can I go?’ Her voice startles him back.

He looks down into her open, eager face. She is hungry for cash. Anxious to board the early morning farm bus that will take her to the fields. To the heady scent of early summer strawberries. To the youthful backache. To the blistering sunburn. To the blood-soaked fingers. To the fields that steal a childhood in a single afternoon.

“No,” he says, like a mission. “I don’t want you to pick.”

Her brow furrows. He has taught her to work, and now he is denying her the chance. He bends slightly to meet her eye to eye. His voice softens. “I’ve picked enough for the both of us.”

She looks into him with old eyes. Then she nods and blinks quickly. He wonders if her tears are because he will not let her go, or because she understands why.

He reaches behind and pulls out his wallet. Rifles the few bills. Chooses one and lays it across his palm, extending it to her.

“Here’s five. You can earn more if you want. Stay home.”

It is a month’s allowance.  Still, the bus ride, the strawberries.  She shifts.  She takes the bill and holds it, one hand grasping each end. Her gaze falls to his hands and then rises once more to meet his.  In the space between, a covenant is sealed.

“Thank you, Daddy.”  She does not argue. “I’ll earn it. I promise.”

Robert watches her walk away, and then looks down – palm up, down, up again.

Filed Under: Essays, Words Tagged With: daughters, fathers, featured, parenting

writer. artist. music maker.

In my spare time, I write unfinished novels and songs about cowboys.

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