A little something

Tonight, for the first time in a while, I desired to write in meter, to create within that beautiful order, to struggle to find the right words as if they were moral choices between good and evil.

I left most of my poetry in North Carolina but found a few lines I jotted down sometime last year. I easily reworked them; for though it's summer and the poem is set in fall, what I felt then--disconnectedness from the world of the poem's characters, heightened by the perplexity that followed my initial curiosity--is much like the elusive emotions I'm experiencing while settling in a new place.

As I prepared to leave for Colorado many remarked to me, "Transition is hard." Yes, it is. It's wonderful and expansive and humbling too. So I'm not surprised that I'm feeling a little strange and listless; neither am I worried as I recall these wise words from a woman I recently met: Life is life. God is God. Don't let life define God. God is good no matter what life is like.

The first day of fall

Today between my coffee sips, I caught
a piece of conversation from the women
a table away. I read their whisper lips.
One woman said, "She's fine." The other replied,
"Her husband thinks he's watching her die."

The End

One of my more experimental autobiographical pieces:

The End (Part 1)

The road ahead curved into the night as two friends leaned in, loving the nearness of one another—something needed to be said but both were waiting to hear the words in the sound of the other’s voice. Mac drove with one hand gripping the steering wheel and the other free to change the radio station and shift the gears but never to hold Liza’s hand. She wished for that. She wished for a lot of things at seventeen. In the fog and moonlight, the windows down and the wind whipping her hair around her neck and face, she was full of impulse and joy and asked Mac to pull the car over into the grass along East Fork. She loved the smell of honeysuckle and told him so, loved the way the flower’s pestle can be pulled through its body from among the petals, the color of vanilla pudding, out the end, bringing with it one glistening bead of nectar. She loved him, she thought.

They left the gold, box-like Honda running and picked some of those magical flowers from the bush on the side of the road. Laughing and breathless, they got back into the car, muddying its old carpet, and drove off. Liza would write about that one day, tell it as part of her love story with Mac, she thought.

I did think that then, and sometimes I wonder if I made Mac stop and collect honeysuckles with me just so that I could write about it. Maybe, but it wasn’t long before I really did have something to write about.

A few weeks after the honeysuckle drive-by, he took me on a picnic. After I had slid into the front seat, I noticed a little wicker basket between us, filled with honeysuckles. I loved their smell and told him so; he said he knew, and I can’t remember how that made me feel. I was hot and worried about the sweat that was beading above my upper lip.

We had made a bet during the basketball madness of March: whoever predicted the most winning teams on their bracket would take the other person out to dinner in April. I won, and we were both surprised. And before May and short sleeves, I was called, picked up, and picnicking with a boy. He had done some preparation (I remember the individually wrapped turkey sandwiches), but I don’t think either of us were ready for what we both wanted—first love.

On the edge of the lake, we spread a blanket over patches of grass and dirt and gravel. I masked my nervousness with questions or short monologues punctuated by laughter, and Mac fought off the geese that approached our claim of land in the public park. Geese, turkey sandwiches, and humidity hardly make for a romantic evening, but we didn’t know.

I’m not sure why, but after finishing all the food in the blue and white cooler, I suggested that Mac and I sit back-to-back, leaning against each other until we were done talking and he was ready to take me home. I think it had to do with those sweat beads again and my certainty that they were the reason Mac kept shifting his gaze between my eyes and lips. I felt more comfortable without him staring at me; he was probably relieved to talk into the night air.

After that night, there was coffee and prom and ice-cream and his home and dinner and the movies, but we never dated. During our senior year of high school, my confusion about the fact that he never asked me to be his girlfriend turned to hurt, and then, to anger. It was hard to be friends, and graduation was a relief. We stopped talking when we moved to different cities to start college, but when we both returned home for Christmas break, he called and asked if we could get coffee. “Definitely!” I couldn’t wait. At the end of the evening, he gave me a Christmas present—it was honeysuckle lotion. I didn’t say anything accept thank you, searching his eyes for the meaning behind the gift. He looked away, and I watched some lighted airplane in the sky.

*****

Mac brought me back a painting from his trip to Jamaica the summer between eleventh and twelfth grade. It hangs in my bathroom. Two trees, rooted in a river bank, lean in towards one another. They are black against the orange and pink sky. A yellow ball suspends above the horizon. Sometimes I think it’s setting—sometimes, rising.

I invited Mac to my apartment for dinner at the end of last Christmas break. After a couple years, it was time to catch up. I looked forward to seeing him but took down the canvas he gave me for the night.

Mac leaves Liza’s small apartment, still a little hungry—he didn’t have seconds of her homemade lasagna, because he’s lifting with the guys, trying to lose some weight—it’s not that he didn’t like it though, it was really good. He’s surprised that as he opens his car door he thinks about the time he put a basket of honeysuckles between the two front seats because he knew Liza loved the smell of them. He felt stupid then, and now. She had moved on. Why couldn’t he? Maybe I should just call her and invite her to coffee—as a thank you for dinner? Did she really mean that she hopes we don’t go so long again without talking? She still laughs the same way and just as often.

Mac realizes the next exit is his. The strip of road to get off the highway curves around a large, grassy mound, causing him to lean towards the empty passenger seat

I’ve tried to write his next thought—the one where he realizes he loves Liza—but I can’t live in that moment before sunset—beautiful, before the sun drops and all is dark.

When I hang the canvas back up the next morning, it slips off the nail in the wall, landing face down on the floor.

I’m staring at the frayed edges of the coarse cloth, pulled taut around the wooden frame.

A cry, heard

A paradox exists in a writer's life, and especially, I think, in the life of a writer who belongs to Christ: she must share with friend and stranger what she receives in the secret place.

That place could be her bedroom, office, or car; a subway seat, a coffee-shop table, or a shaded spot under some tree; but that "secret place" is more a secret space, a space no one else can go: her heart, mind, soul.

For Chrisitan writers, the secret place is all that and more; in that "place" we experience God intimately; from this "place," we convey what we have "seen, heard, and tasted" of God with others, so that they may see, hear, and taste as well...though, most assuredly, their experiences will be different from ours.

Why do I feel compelled to let you look through the door into my secret space, even come in and sit for a while if you will? I'm not sure. Sometimes it is because I am lonely there. But then there are times when I am acutely aware that I am not alone but am intimately and perfectly loved. I rarely write from that place of deep satisfaction and joyful rapture, but I find that writing can help me get there when I am somewhere else (usually despairing or distracted). The result: I am growing in my love of writing about the process of coming to the lover of your soul, Jesus, from wherever you are in your journey: seeking, returning, rejoicing, repenting....

I long for you to taste and see for yourself that the Lord is good and any man or woman who takes refuge in Him will be blessed, soul-happy!

A look into my morning:

I woke up feeling distant from the Lord, knowing the right but desiring and doing the wrong. After being unable to accomplish any work, I began to write the below poem. As you can see, it is full of questions. Truthfully, I wasn't expecting God to answer me...I was the one writing the poem, the one in control of the meter and diction, the issue. I would come to my own conculsions; thank you. But how amazing, the Lord answered me...and I heard Him!...He wrote the last line...and led me to Psalm 34. How awesome! "This poor [woman] cried, and the Lord heard [her] and saved [her] out of all [her] troubles." (Ps 34:6)

A cry, heard

Three steps forward, two steps back. A dancer
or a drunk? Who moves before you, Lord? A drunk
or a dancer? A daughter or a dim-witted child?
Who do you see on her knees? A daughter, a dim-wit?
Who do you lift and lead? A dancer, a drunk?

No matter. I am here. Press in and on.

Casmerodius albus

Taking a break from the short story. Enjoy a sonnet for Resurrection Sunday.

Casmerodius albus, the Great Egret
in the Wilson Library at UNC-CH

The single bulb casts shadows more than light
around the egret on display in a box
of Plexiglas. Behind the bird is a slight
sketch of its habitat without the stocks
of a public beach: towels, chairs and beer.
Its spindle legs are bound to snap;
the feathers, gray like a rotting pear,
to disintegrate. A curator will wrap
its long-dead body up in cloth. I watched
an egret stand in water at low-tide
last summer, still as death, until the blotched-
red, evening sky darkened. His flight became a glide
above marsh grass and the bull rush; he cast
his shadow, black like thunder clouds that have passed.

Close

In honor of my wonderful father:

Close

His book never deterred me, or his closed eyes. I was sure that as soon as my dad felt the mattress rise under him as I climbed onto the green comforter with small blue flowers, nuzzling next to his warm body, that he would set the book face down on his chest and tilt his head until he was gazing at the top of mine. His chin would graze my red hair, but I’d wait a moment before leaning back to meet his gaze, my cheek against the soft flannel of his shirt, listening to his heartbeat in the silence of the sleeping house (it was “quiet time,” Sunday afternoon). We’d laugh and for a moment the heartbeat would disappear. Then it was back, steady, reminding me that he was there and I was next to him and sleep would come after counting the light thump until it was hooves on a country road, a turning jump rope, a boat bumping against some dock….

All of my life, I’ve put my ear against the door in an attempt to hear the turn of a page like the sound of a piece of paper slipping out of my notebook, like a light wind, an invocation for me to come listen and dream beside my dad; I’ve knocked and jiggled the locked door handle, called “Dad?”, and seen his face emerge as he cracks the door open; I’ve barged into the bedroom to find him asleep with his “good ear” towards the pillow, a closed book in his hand. He rests—head propped by a few pillows, a book held upright on his chest, legs extended and crossed, his socked feet rubbing against one another. That image has changed very little over the years though his hair has gone from dark brown to “salt and pepper” to grey and the wrinkle between his eyebrows has deepened and now reading glasses perch on his large, but handsome, nose. His cheeks still look like they hide 25-cent gumballs when he smiles; his skin is still ruddy and smooth as leather.

Sometimes he would read to me from the book he had chosen that day from the five or six that are always stacked on the night stand. His voice—the voice of an army medic, then a preacher, able to send “Yes, sir!” rumbling through an open field and “Praise God!” through a high-ceilinged sanctuary—was, to me, deep enough to engender respect but soft enough to soothe and still. I tried to retain in my maturing mind the theology or biographies or science fiction or scripture that reached me just a few inches below with slight puffs of breath that tickled my forehead. He must have known that words like omnipresent and Pelandria wouldn’t mean anything to me, but he also must have known how much sharing his world would mean to me. He would listen to my interrupting questions and answer with a precision that astounded me. Words gushed from me, but he wasted none. As I grew up, joining him less often while he read, I started to resent the frequent periods of silence between us if I didn’t monologue or ask him questions when we were together—I wanted him to start the conversation, ask me about my life. I thought only then could he ever understand me. He proved me wrong, in seventh grade, the first time I experienced heart-break.

At the finale dance of the Beta Club NC convention, my “boyfriend” danced with another girl for two songs, her head on his shoulder, their bodies close. Justin was the first boy I had ever not treated like one of my brothers. I kept each note from him and filled my journal with thoughts about our relationship. A phone call from him was “like the greatest thing ever” as long as my parents didn’t find out. For the month that we “dated,” I never considered what would happen when we “broke up.” The pain was as new as the feeling of having a crush had been; it was like the rejection I had felt when my BFF started sitting next to another girl at lunch, but fiercer.

After a friend’s mom dropped me off at home that night, Dad was the person I had to talk to, no one else, in my room, as soon as possible, please! He listened to how Justin had asked Anna to dance, how I had been okay with it until the first song ended and they kept dancing, how I cried alone in the bathroom, how I never ever wanted to look at either of them again. He wrapped his arms around me as I wept into his chest.

* * * * *

During summer beach trips as a child, my dad used to take me out into the ocean where only he could stand; I clung to a boogie board with both hands, afraid to let go and wipe my eyes that would burn from the splashing salt water. From behind he would push the board, lifting me up and over the white foam of the cresting waves, then whip me around towards the shore so I could catch the next breaker. After the moment of fear, when my dad released his hold and I felt the pull of the hungry wave, came the freedom of being carried in the surge, wet hair flailing behind, eyes wide until the skid of sand under the boogie board, the water swirling about and someone’s beach chair just a few yards in front. I would pull my legs under me, hop up, hoist the board under my arm and run to meet my dad who was swimming towards me. We’d head back out into the turbulent ocean until my feet were unable to touch its bottom. My dad gripped the sides of the board; when I would forget myself and start kicking with excitement, his arms were there.

*****

There were his arms around me. I was safe. I was grateful that my dad didn’t say anything for a long time, and when he did speak, his words were tender and few. I’ve forgotten what he said, but I haven’t forgotten the feeling of being weak and miserable but accepted and loved in his strong embrace.

It may be that feeling (the one from seven years ago) that seems so tangible to me now, or a feeling much like it that I had a couple months ago when I stumbled into my dad’s study at home, sitting next to his desk. I needed counsel about a recent break up: “Dad, I was so cautious, waited so long before dating him; he liked me so much, I mean, he pursued me for months. I liked him so much too. I still…how do I let him go, how do I trust? and move on?...Does it get easier?” I really was unsure. The emotions and questions surged like the waves at Figure Eight Island.

Dad got up from his chair and knelt next to me to hug me.

His slate-colored, wool sweater smells like toast and peppermint and Polo cologne.

I’m leaning against his chest. I hear his heartbeat in the breath between sobs.

Allie

At a party last night, I found myself sharing about how my "balloon-making" skills (or lack there of) made me a popular volunteer with the kids in the UNC pediatric unit.

Afterward I was thinking about my dear Allie (her last name is changed in the story) and felt prompted to share a story I wrote in honor of her precious life. At her funeral, the preacher shared how he led Allie to Christ shortly after the doctors became aware of her tumor. I am confident, and await the day, that I will see her completely healthy and happy in heaven.

Spring 2007

Seven-year-old Allie walks in front of me, wearing a pink pajama set. Her thin arms are visible; the sleeveless top stretches around her swollen belly (a tumor inside refuses to shrink, making a grave for itself). Her bald head is soft with the hair struggling to grow back. She is using both of her hands to hold six pink and red cards, so I wheel her I.V. It is twice her size.

Often, on the bus ride over to the children’s hospital, some homework assignment or broken relationship or sense of loneliness would leave me leaning against the window, eyes closed to the smile of the friendly bus-driver in the mirror. But as the hospital elevator rose, my problems became small and selfish. It was wonderful to leave them, to step through the doors of the elevator, opening at the sixth floor.

I have on my Carolina blue polo (“UNC hospital volunteer” stitched in maroon thread over my heart) and photo I.D., clipped to my collar, in the corner, a glittering flower sticker that Allie gave me. These allow me to be here, to draw closer to Allie and her family with each visit—however unprepared and inadequate I feel.

Allie looks over her shoulder at me—that big smile on her wan face, bright as the afternoon sun that gleams through the windows and those life-filled eyes, blue, completing the smile: “C’mon, Lizzie! You’ll pull out my I.V. if you can’t keep up!” (A frightening thought. I laugh with her but match my step to her shuffling slippers.)

We’re on a mission to deliver special valentines that Allie has made from the new packs of Crayola markers and multi-colored construction paper her mom Ruth bought her at Wal-Mart. As we walk down the hallway, Allie waves to the small boy in the room next to hers (his door is opened and the T.V. is on; his parents are gone); he’s “sick too.” We round the corner, approaching the reception desk where young nurses in colorful scrubs—pink, green, and blue; floral or polka-dot patterned—pull and replace charts, chat a moment before darting to answer a patient’s call, and laugh at the two of us “rolling up.”

“What have you been up to Miss Allie? What’s that in your hands?” The nurse’s name is hidden by the long, brunette pony-tail that has fallen around her shoulder after bending to grab Allie’s hand and smile into her face.

“I made a card for you; well, actually I forgot to make one for you, but I’ve brought some for a few of the nurses…and I can make some more.” It was the truth, so she said it.

Allie loved honesty and animals and arts and crafts. We strung beads, colored, and made ornaments on the tray that folded up from the side of her bed where she also ate the cafeteria food she mostly disliked (and the McDonalds and Chinese she begged for when her appetite returned after chemotherapy) and where she finished her homework, assigned by the hospital teacher (whom Allie also mostly disliked). She’d sit upright with her covers around her waist like the large skirt of Mother Ginger in the Nutcracker.

After a few months of visiting Allie in the hospital, I brought in a balloon animal-making kit. She pumped air into the flimsy balloons that looked like oversized tadpoles and passed the sausage-like result to me to tie its end. Two twists, maybe three, and “Pop!” We’d laugh until she held her stomach and moaned a little behind her smile. At the end of our time together that day, we gazed in pride at the pink dog, neon-green rabbit, and the white swan which we were most proud of. As I left the hospital room, on Allie’s strict orders, I placed the swan by the sink to prevent it from meeting its end like the other rubber creatures we had spent the afternoon making. The next day when I returned the swan was gone, but I didn’t ask what had happened to it.

Summer 2007

When I arrived at the Jones’ trailer home, Ruth hugged me, longer and tighter than usual, as if to say, “We made it. She’s getting better…for good this time. Can’t hardly believe it, but I’ll sure try!” I stood in the kitchen tying grass skirts on Allie’s fourth-grade friends (she wanted a Luau for her 8^th birthday party), cutting Allie’s birthday cake, laughing with her mother, sister, aunts, and grandmothers before Allie tugged me out the back door into her huge yard. Seeing Allie run over the grass, short and yellow from the summer drought but lovely when trampled under her bare feet, was surreal, she: no longer bound to some iron pole or machine or the fear of death.

The trips around the children’s cancer unit or down to the hospital’s basement for chemotherapy were as far as we had gone together; and now, she was grabbing my hand, running towards the shed to show me her hatched chicks, laughing and yelling, “C’mon Lizzie! Keep up!” Her face was softening, her cheekbones hidden under full and flushed skin; her hair looked like she had buzzed it, but it would be just under her chin in a year’s time.

The party was over but the leis still hung around my neck where Allie’s arms had been. Allie drove away from me in her “big surprise,” the golf cart her father and brothers had painted Giotto blue with “Allie Cat” in black on the front. Allie wanted to drive a tractor and help her dad on the farm when she grew up. I backed out of her gravel driveway, puffs of white emerging in front and behind me from wheels crushing the rocks as if they were in a crucible. We had said goodbye for the last time without knowing it. One evening, a year later, my thoughts were on applying enough sunscreen to avoid my annual “bad burn,” whether tacos or pesto pasta was for dinner, and how blue the sky and ocean were, when I listened, through static, to a voicemail from Ruth:

“Allie passed away Monday….”

I climbed the stairs to the top deck of my grandparent’s beach house to find my mom; she was dozing in a porch chair. I wanted to tell her what had happened, but the crash of the waves—the waves breaking on the sand drown everything out—those waves roar and say it all.

June 26, 2008

My mom had driven with me from the beach to Allie’s funeral. After the graveside service, we found a gas station near Allie’s home. The sun and air must have conspired together: the humidity made the heat almost unbearable. We left the car running so we could have the cool blasts of the air-conditioner while I finished pasting pictures that I took at Allie’s eighth birthday party into a Carolina-blue photo album.

After about ten minutes, an older man with a worn cap and overalls approached us, smiling (a few teeth missing). We rolled down the window, only catching the end of his question: “…all right?”

“Oh, yes. My daughter’s just finishing up something for the Joneses…. Did you know Allie?” She asked the question with an ease I couldn’t understand—I didn’t look up; instead, I picked up the pictures that had slid onto the carpeted floor.

That scuff of his shoe against the pavement, that clank as he tugged on his overall strap, that pause—I had to make sure—that look past us into the fields across the road—he had known her.

“She used to come down here just a-sittin’ in’er daddy’s lap, drivin’ that tractor-a his—or she was a-thinkin’ she was drivin’. Mr. Jones, now he mows that field just over there for me. She’d buy candy from ma-store. Just the brightest little thing you ever laid eyes on—never stopped talkin’ for a minute; that is, once you got’er started with some question ‘bout Tom ‘er dog or that cow-a hers. I’d take’er favorite candy up to’er when she couldn’t make the trip down the road no more. Sure is gonna miss’er, that Miss Allie—me and everybody….”

Ruth and I are standing in the kitchen of the trailer home as she turns and fingers each page of the album. She speaks of the party as if Allie were playing with her friends in the next room, planning her ninth birthday. Somehow we are both able to laugh when we remember how Allie chased everyone around the yard with a can of pink silly string.

I don’t know anything about Allie’s last few months, days—her final moments—and how can I ask Ruth now; she’s smiling. The last picture in the album is of her squatting by the picnic table, hugging Allie—it makes us both choose silence over some comment that will lift, flutter, and fall through the air.

Ruth has a quiet strength; Allie had it too—head bent, her bangs covering her eyes, tears and words finally come:

“When it got real bad and we knew we couldn’t hide it from her anymore, I went into her room—we’d spend all day and night with’er, you know, she couldn’t get out of bed; she’s in so much pain. I said, ‘Allie, Jesus needs you up in heaven; he needs another angel.’ She didn’t say a-thing, just shut her eyes real tight, and asked if she could have a minute to herself. I says, ‘Sure you can, honey.’ When I came back a little while later, she acted like nothing had changed. She said she was ready to die when the pain got real bad but she never said nothing else about it right up to the end.”

Second Oldest

Second Oldest

Why is Katie calling me? I’m driving the few miles home from our neighborhood’s country club, and it’s almost midnight. “Hey, Katie! I wasn’t expecting to hear from you for at least a week.” Two hours ago, sparklers had burned and crackled under the winter night sky, raised in the hands of whistling and woo-wooing guests, as my older sister and brother-in-law ran into a waiting car. The rain had waited until the wedding reception to come. While we danced, it poured, but then only a cool mist fell. Katie and Nathan leaned out the back window; Katie’s blonde, damp curls were blown across her neck, reaching towards Nathan, who kissed her on the cheek with childlike rapture and then continued to smile and wave. The car rounded the curve of some back road, out of view.

“I know,” she laughs, and as she continues I think she must be eating pretzels, “but Nathan just remembered that in the pocket of his tux jacket is some money an uncle gave him—he left the jacket in my room. Do you think you could bring it by tomorrow—just leave it in an envelope with the desk clerk for us?” They were staying the night in the Proximity, a posh hotel in our hometown, before driving to Charleston, S.C., the next day. “Can you hang up my dress too? I left it lying on my bed. Oh, and my bouquet—I want to preserve it. Do you think you could find a way to hang it upside down?”

“Sure,” I want to talk about the day but know I can’t and so remain quiet, unsure of what to say next.

“Thanks, Liz. I love you and can’t wait to talk in a couple of weeks. We’re doing great—so happy. Send my love to the family! Bye!”

“Bye, Kade. I love you too.”

Her requests dance in my mind, along with the memory of my Aunt Barb attempting the electric slide as I walk into the mud room of the only home I can remember. What a relief to slide my feet out of the black heels from Payless and pair them against the wall next to my dad’s tennis shoes. During the last hour of wear, my toes began to throb, pressing against the tip of the shoes. I notice that my sister’s and mom’s heels are against the wall too.

In the living room, my mom is icing her swollen ankle, still wearing the gold dress she had searched for in five different department stores. Storage boxes, filled with vases, red berries, ivy, candles, and silky pieces of sparkling fabric, are scattered on the floor. It reminds me of Christmas morning four days ago after all seven of us kids had finished opening our presents. The scene doesn’t change from year to year: as we tear into our gifts, throwing the wrapping and tissue paper next to us on the floor, my dad crumples it into large wads and shoves them into the trash bag by his side; but, despite his efforts to maintain order, after an hour of opening one gift, one child at a time, starting with the youngest and ending with my mom and dad, and repeating until the Christmas tree has nothing beneath it, the unwrapped presents are in separate piles throughout the living room and the rest of the carpet is covered in bows, boxes, bags, tissue, and wrapping paper.

The white boxes in the kitchen hold the leftover wedding cake that I am beginning to pick at with a fork. I ate a breakfast of cereal and munched on carrots all day and was (naively) counting on having a plate of the dollar-a-piece meatballs and, well actually, I cannot remember what else was served at the reception because all that I ended up getting onto my plate before it was time to give the Maid of Honor toast were two slices of cucumber and a cherry tomato.

Leaning against the archway between the kitchen and living room, I attempt to talk about the day with my mom, but she is tired and tearing up. All day, I watched her from a distance, moving between the wedding planner and her assistant and the musicians and the flower arrangements with her beautiful smile only lost to a frustrated look when we were standing in front of the mirror an hour before the five o’clock wedding ceremony and she couldn’t get her hair to curl. I had imagined what our conversation might be like at the end of Katie and Nathan’s wedding day. Would we say how we can’t believe that the first child of the Held clan is married, six more to go, or would we laugh about Katie’s declaration that “Where Nathan was concerned, her heart was a locked door…and she had thrown away the key!” just months before they started dating? Or would we be content to sit silent on the couch, my head leaning on her shoulder, gazing at the lights on the Christmas tree until they blurred into tiny sunbursts.

My mom is falling asleep. And the icepack is slipping off her foot.

“I love you, Mom. You looked radiant. I’m going to head to bed, I guess. You think you’re going to fall asleep on the couch? You’re neck might hurt in the morning if you do.”

She squeezes my hand. “Thanks, honey. G’night.”

I head back through the kitchen and mud room. The backstairs of my house lead upstairs to the T.V. room, painted a bright periwinkle, off of which is Jane’s room to the left and Katie’s room to the right. I can hear Jane and Joseph laughing in her room—the door is open and Joseph is impersonating Aunt Barb, bent over slightly, crossing one leg over another with pretended difficulty, and then stumbling onto the floor. “Hey guys!” I haven’t hugged Jane all day—she was stunning in her cranberry-colored bridesmaid dress. She’s sixteen but danced with Nathan’s college-aged cousins and David whom she begins to talk about on her Hawaiian-print comforter. Sitting next to Jane on her bed, ten-year-old Joseph on my lap, we continue to laugh about Aunt Barb. None of us want to go to bed. My desire to stay up all night and discuss all that happened from the morning until now is just as strong as Joseph’s, maybe stronger, for Joseph really is a kid and I only want to return to being one. I suggest we sleep in Katie’s double bed together—Joe can stay until we all decide we better go to sleep so we can wake up and say goodbye to all of our extended family members before they drive or fly back to their homes.

The door to Katie’s room is closed but we enter without knocking this time, knowing that she is gone. Her yellow comforter has slid onto the floor, bunched against the dark wood of the bed frame. Lying on the white sheets where she used to sleep is Katie’s wedding dress, a purer white. Small white flowers are sown onto the sheer piece of material that wraps around the top half of the dress like the snow flurries, there, against the cold glass of her window then, a moment later, a trickle of water, moving on. I hang the dress onto the one remaining hanger in the closet as I tell Jane and Joe Katie’s instructions about the bouquet. “How about if we tie this red hair-ribbon around the stem-part and hang the bouquet from the ceiling fan?” Joe suggests. It works.

We pull the comforter back on the bed and the three of us snuggle under it. Now I can finally talk about the day, freely, like they do. As I watch the bouquet of a dozen red roses sway back and forth above us, the movement almost imperceptible, Joseph’s energetic voice becomes distant. Fresh memories, preserved from the day, are opening: how I missed when Katie and Nathan cut the cake, caught in a conversation with the Elswicks who wanted to know when I thought I would get married; how, after gathering the bridal party in his church office, my dad prayed for Katie, holding her hand, slender and fair against his large, ruddy hands; how beautiful she was, walking up the aisle with her arm in my dad’s. My contentment surprises me.