Radiant Heat

This is a revision to a January post entitled "Heat". I plan to submit it to Skirt Magazine at the end of the month for publication. Please feel free to offer feedback and criticism of the piece.

We are out of firewood in our small Atlanta rental house. This means we are left to the strength of the aging heat pump to keep warm, and tonight it’s one of the rare icy winter evenings of the south. In general our house has very little to brag about; but the small fireplace blazing up with split pine might as well be a bank vault filled with gold on a cold night. Said gold is usually transported in the trunk of my car from my dad’s wood yard in Alabama. But on this night, my car is up on blocks in the driveway. I’ve been waiting weeks for my husband to replace the water pump, and now he has to wait for the temperature to raise enough to loosen the proper bolts in order to proceed. His procrastination has triggered a chain of events that has left me wrapped in resentment and my grandmother's quilt here on the bedroom watching the sheet rock cracks. Held hostage by the lukewarm air falling flat around me like the dirty laundry strewn around the room.

When I was a kid, we lived in a house whose sole source of heat was fire, actually a wood burning heater. It sounds romantic but being anchored to one cast iron box for warmth only highlighted the reality of the cold world that existed mere steps away. Most winter mornings were greeted with the sound of newspaper being crumbled into the stove while my siblings and I crowding around the front waiting for the heat to come. We’d lay our school clothes on top and circle our palms across the fabric until the balance was struck between soaking warmth and singed fibers. We’d throw them on with the quick change skill and lack of modesty of runway models; safely escaping the tight pinch of cold creeping up our shoulder blades. My father was a pulpwooder so we managed to always have an endless supply of wood, but the fire had to burn hot to reach all the corners of the house; and in order to reach my room it had to have the trajectory of an Oliver Stone inspired bullet. One person would add logs to the fire while another had to open a window to avoid heat stroke. The heat was uneven, not to mention a lot of work stoking and stacking kindling; or walking outside to collect wood. I dreamed of the affluence where comfort could be activated by the touch of a button in the steadiness and consistency of air was only an afterthought. My parent’s relationship reflected this absence of balance as well. Mornings were often met with heated arguments or pots banging in cold silence over lack of money, intrusive in-laws, or alcohol. As a family, we were trapped between the extremes of icy breath and sweltering walls.

Around junior high we built a new house. My parents used subcontractors and paid as they could or did it themselves. Occasionally someone in the extended family took pity on us and decided to pitch in with some cash to cover the cost of say, sheet rock. I remember the debates over how we would heat the new house. Daddy wanted the ritual of the wood burning stove carried over to the new abode. He saw no need to make improvements while my Mama lobbied hard for central heat and air. After years of summer afternoons spent in front of the single window air conditioner with three kids, she was ready for an upgrade. My adolescent hopes on the subject went no further than the dream of a window unit for my bedroom. The compromise ended with a wood stove in the living room which inevitably threw off the thermostat in the hall, so on most nights we had a 90 degree living room and 40 degree bedrooms along with a bigger electric bill. My dreams of our new house elevating the quality of my parent’s relationship pretty much went the way of the new heat pump. A lot of money and resources used up to get pretty much the same results; only now they couldn’t blame the thin walls or lack of storage for their hatred of one another. This hatred ossified into my adulthood and my parents never spoke through three weddings and four grandchildren.

On my wedding day the two stood stiff on either side of me in complete silence as the photographer snapped away. I wondered what the point was of capturing such an artificial moment, how a hatred of another could live so long. On my wedding night, my husband and I fed each other wedding cake under an open skylight in our snug room at the inn. We exchanged stories about the day and I when recounted my moment with my parents, he reached for me and held tight for a long moment. We vowed to never let our relationship become so paralyzed by ego. It was a perfect September evening.

The temperature here in Atlanta is slowly rising. My nose isn’t cold anymore and I can wiggle my toes under the quilt with a little more comfort. My husband is in the kitchen trying to defrost salmon. It might be just warm enough to put some socks on and walk to the kitchen for some supper. But I'll stay wrapped in the quilt. After all, it's just warm air blowing through a vent.

Camping

My first backpacking trip with troubled youth had me outfitted with a borrowed pole tent and a trash bag for rain gear. Of course this would be the trip we let the kids make all the decisions. About 2 hours into hiking in the rain after dark I was rethinking everything about every decision I had made in the last two months. The layers of wetness on my person had become like second skin. The first layer of rain had mixed with sweat and formed a layer of grease over my skin that was close to my core body temperature; which was about as warm as shared bathwater when you are the youngest in a family of three. The new rain was getting colder to match the dropping temperature and hitting my uncovered head like nails dropping from the sky. I was carrying the rear of the group, supposedly making sure no one was attempting to run away. In truth, the only one even contemplating running was myself but I had no idea which direction would provide relief the quickest so I continued to follow the herd of troubled kids.

The trail was flat with the mountain to our right. When I say the mountain to our right, I mean you could hold out your right hand and steady yourself on the incline with not much lean. As we rounded to a creek I could see gear being shed through the black wetness and assumed this would be where we were staying for the night. I was one of two adults in charge of this operation and had no idea our coordinates or if the entire party was still with us. I found a flat ground and laid down my wal-mart tarp as my footprint and went to work securing shelter, my shelter that is. The damn kids were on their own. They had to go and snort Benadryl or break into a liquor store and now we all had to be miserable. That cool 22k I was bringing in for my new job with benefits was not in the front of my mind at that particular moment. I threw my pack into the opening of the tent and set the structure up with my gear inside. The tent had no rain fly so the footprint would have to be taken up to keep the rain from spitting through all night. By the time this was all taken care of my bed for the night was a puddle of water. In a panic I pulled any and all dry clothes from my pack to mop up the moisture, not thinking that I was breaking all ties at that moment with myself and anything dry for the next 48 hours at least. I caught my error just in time to retrieve my down sleeping bag and lay it on the borrowed thermarest. Water was already begin to pool around me on the tent floor. The sleeping bag was soaked at the head and foot but the middle was still dry. I recalled hearing from an eagle scout that the way to get the optimal warmth from your sleeping bag is to sleep in the nude. This worked out at the moment as I had no dry clothes left. So there I was, naked in a fetal position in the sleeping bag clamoring for the last few inches of dry as the water continued to fall and creep around me. This was my first job after quitting graduate school, my first venture out of science and into humanity as a profession. I still had a broken heart from a love lost that spring to the west coast. But I slept sound that night, curled in warmth, the stillness keeping me dry as I waited to be reborn in the first light of sun that would show me where I was in these dark north Georgia woods.

40 Words

He struck me as overly good-looking for someone both a preacher and a murderer. It was his physique, I would see him coming and going from the gym. That he tried so hard was the most troubling.

Maternity Ward

My mother did not call the entire last month of my pregnancy.  This was not unusual.  Ever since she became a minister her life was supposedly no longer her own and therefore we as her children had to get in line behind the endless tasks associated with guiding her flock.  And as if this were not enough, she had recently expanded her work to include an outreach ministry to the homeless.  Against the urging of her plaintive congregation, she had taken on the oversight of renovating Sunday school rooms to house the homeless in her small community on the Florida panhandle.  It was a visionary idea but quickly became the undoing of her life as a traditional member of the clergy. When she began her appointment at this particular church it housed your basic congregates of faith found in most protestant churches in the south.  There was a church secretary, vacation Bible school, a choir.  But the skyline from her pulpit changed significantly shortly after her endeavor to make her work as she put it more “transformational”.  Every 7-hour drive I made down Hwy 231 for a visit culminated in a knock on the door from law enforcement. A member of the church overdosed, a troubled youth kicked in a door, a pimp was hassling one of the shelter residents, and it went on and on. “Why can’t you just write sermons and preach to normal people?” I would wail. After all, we are Methodists; it’s not exactly a high maintenance denomination. My family blamed her new husband who seemed to have jump-started the whole thing by holding AA meetings in the church.  In the days leading to my first child being born I felt pretty sure she would not be involved.  Then I got a call late Saturday night as I was sitting in the bathtub in the early phase of contractions. She would be driving up after her church service the following day and planned to be there for the birth. Twenty-four hours later she held my son with tears in her eyes as I laid in my post partum bed laden with sleeplessness, epidural and post op drugs from the c-section.  The next day in the hospital my mother was a no show until 6 PM.  We had just got the baby to sleep when she stuck her head in the door.  She and her husband were on her way to dinner and quickly informed me that they would be returning home the following morning.  She had a paper to write for a graduate class she was taking in some minister education program she was in; church duties were calling her back, blah blah blah.  I didn’t have the energy to listen or respond.  “My HMO is more reliable than her” I cried to my husband after she left. The c-section had me stuck in bed for days trying to recover as I bonded with this new baby. My husband was still in school and only had a few days home with me before I was faced with new motherhood on my own.  My resentment toward my mother and her choices started to solidify in a way that could not be reversed.

Then, fourteen weeks later I returned to work and she came up for a week and half to stay with us and help me in the transition. I half expected the same manic, unfocused craziness I saw each time I went to visit. I was sure half way through there would be a crisis that would send her home early and my husband and I unexpectedly juggling childcare. The visit was anything but what I expected. She got in late Sunday night and met me in the baby’s room at the crack of dawn to help change him. Our laughter woke our husband as my new baby’s pee stream interrupted my rundown of where everything was. She cooked, cleaned, organized, and interacted with the baby non-stop. My husband was actually able to keep up with his school work for the first time since the baby’s birth. I greeted most mornings with tears over leaving the baby. Transitioning back to work was not greeted with much support from my workplace. One morning while my husband was letting me cry on my shoulder my mom came in. I wiped my eyes, and stiffened waiting to hear a superfluous metaphor that would end with “God Bless You” but instead she opened up. “When you were a baby you were on my hip all the time and I didn’t have a career. I know it’s hard but you are providing so much for your child by being independent and able to do both. I know it doesn’t feel like it now, but you are giving yourself so many more options.” I took in her words as if I were in the third grade soaking up her wisdom from my twin bed. Back then I knew no other source for where to get my advice and strength.

She was right. I remember how trapped she was all through my childhood. How much more she always wanted to do. I have worked in prisons, hiked the Appalachian trail with troubled youth, moved cattle in the rain for 14 hours straight, but this moment- motherhood is my pinnacle, where I see myself in my finest hour. I realized that for her, being a mom was not her greatest moment, it was now as she changes lives on a grander scale. We are two women, moving toward our dreams from two different polarities and in this moment we were meeting in the middle of a shared experience. Mom stayed the whole week and a half, she and her husband went and got us a load of garden mulch, took us to the Varsity, and my sock drawer makes more sense than it has in years. I’m planning a trip down in a few weeks and am sorting through my book collection to take a box for donation to the shelter. Mom says the women there need so much, it’s hard to know where to start.

Note to our Wedding Guests

Please do not be alarmed by the sheriff parked at the entryway to the inn. Please park on the left side, opposite the veranda.

Daily Bread

One of the most prized pieces on my over inflated bridal registry was a Cuisinart breadmaker. It oozed urban homesteader with the brushed chrome and ability to churn out whole grain goodness hands free in a Sunday afternoon. Upon registering for it the husband even got in on the excitement citing a morning ritual of coffee and warm homemade bread to begin our days of married bliss. Not to mention Barbara Kingsolver’s husband wrote an inset in his wife’s book about how to impress your wife with a breadmaker. When we opened the box our first Christmas from my mom, we felt we were so on the pulse of married trendiness we could hardly stand it.

We put the breadmaker to use probably more than the average person uses a small appliance with such limited output. Our Sundays were in fact filled with good bread, pizza dough, angel biscuits, and banana bread. We grew dill our first year of marriage and the husband churned out dill bread until Thanksgiving. When the economy started to fall apart and we were both faced with potential layoffs and the husband made the voluntary cut back to go back to school, the breadmaker took the place of store bought bread because we could always scrap together whatever kind of flour was left in the pantry to produce a small loaf for the week. The breadmaker fueled our creative survival as it could receive the most mundane ingredients stacking liquids under solids topped off with yeast to produce fluffy white decadence and make us feel like rich gourmets even if all we had to go with it was peanut butter or hummus from the back of the fridge.

When I was pregnant I made bread with rye or flax seed meal to fulfill my whole grain needs. Sometimes my shifting appetite would outlive the loaf which was left to mold in wrapped cellophane and the breadmaker parts would acquire layers of gunk while they sat in the sink waiting for the husband to wash them in between classes and all nighters. Little did we know our negligence of the breadmaker was the foreshadowing the relinquishment of sane living that comes with having a baby.

Today we have a one month old child and the breadmaker sits in a prominently displayed location in the dining room, set up by my mom who saw it necessary to spend the time I was in the hospital cleaning and organizing my house, beginning with washing our breadmaker and removing it from the very uncool location of on top of the dryer. While mom was swiffering and scrubbing our house the husband and I were drowning in a river of sleep deprivation. I was recovering from major surgery and learning to breast feed my son without falling asleep while the husband learned to change baby while figuring out how to balance his next week and a half of missed classes and freelance deadlines. Neither of us had a clue what we were getting into and had both assumed I would naturally push out an intuitive little soul who would sleep and feed naturally and life would snap back to normal in a matter of weeks. On money we would say “how much does an infant need in the first months anyway?” On childcare “the students at my school bring their dogs to class, I can certainly bring my baby” or “I’ll just set up a pack n play in my office, all he’ll do is eat and sleep those first months anyway .”

All this seemed life faraway fantasies concocted by very naïve people on the first day of my son’s life as as I, on my knees peeked out of the hospital bathroom at my husband soothing the baby in the rocking chair after his most recent crying spell. I had forgotten that the epidural was still flowing through my body and the painkillers from the C-Section had masked my lack of strength so much that the simple misstep of one foot had sent me to the ground. I pulled the emergency cord and the husband looked at me with total baby versus spouse conflict. I told him I was fine but when hospital staff didn’t come quick enough the baby returned to the cradle and he hoisted me back to my bed. Later that day as he e-mailed his freelance clients on the delay in getting his work done (and the delay of us then getting paid) the WIC woman stopped by to inform me that I qualified for vouchers for weekly food items for myself and the baby. As a nursing mom, I qualified for the “whole grain option”, meaning a weekly loaf of whole grain bread from any local large chain grocery store. I signed my name with relief on the government paperwork as my son rested on my chest in between feeding.

It may be months (even years) before my life evens out to one of homemade whole grain bread again. In the meantime I reach for the pre-sliced Sara Lee whole wheat without even bothering to toast it. These days, I can’t even keep night from day. But when it does, the breadmaker is still standing like a beacon of social savviness reminding or taunting us that we were once adults who sought a life of leisure in the form of warm simple carbs. I brush the crumbs of my Sara Lee slice off of my son who perpetually sleeps on my chest now and try to type over his tiny limp body to draw myself back into the world that was once myself. I hope to do it all again tomorrow.

Albuquerque, 5:57 AM

It’s at this time
I think of you the most
As I wait impatiently
For my ride
Always a little late

It was at this time
I’d hear
Your razor splash in the sink
Tap the porcelain edge
To wake me for school

It was at this time
I’d hear
Old newspaper crumple
Into the rusted wood stove
The clank of logs
Onto the chilled floor

And your voice
Cut through the thin walls
Asking
“Who wants grits and eggs?”

I never did

I start to call from the curb
To see if you are up
But know you have been
For hours now
Behind the motor of the carriage mill

Logs run over the blade
Send woodchips in every direction
And you
Safe behind the Plexiglas
Dry knuckles on the gears
Face West

Motionless

Headlights pull up
I look once more
As the light
Slices over the Sandias
And I think of you
Safe on the other side
Of a complicated world
I choose to battle everyday

I jump into the warmed seat
And begin to wind my path
Through desert mesas
And locked cell doors

Like water over time
Chisels away stone
Carving my life
Out of a sunrise, morning red

Eve

There was nothing soft about the café where Cyndi and I met. The floor was industrial linoleum that we swept and mopped every night at closing and the kitchen red clay tile with grout stained black. The décor was all steel and rusted metal- homage to found objects of the rural south but a rough reminder that even when you run your hands through smooth wet grass in Alabama you are liable to get tangled on a rusty stake from a plow or railroad tie. Eve was the only thing that fluttered through the concrete counters and stainless steel with lightness and grace. She wore white linen everyday back then and her black hair down to her shoulders flowed behind leaving a barrier between her and the world of college students bent over chicken croissants and veggie pitas. I rarely spoke to her then because she seemed too much of an enigma. Sometimes I would look at her and wonder if she were real or some ghost that haunted the space below the stairs and was simply looking at me through some ectoblastic haze. Cyndi and I opened the café in the mornings with Cisco coffee and big pots of boiling water for the sweet tea. I could never get the vegetables cut quick enough before the lunch line was out the door and I was standing over a griddle making a reuben by 11:30 AM. We would go non-stop until 3 pm, dead on our feet with one guy running the dishwasher in the kitchen until the entire back room was like a steam sauna. Cyndi became my best friend and was in my wedding. She just flew down from Colorado to throw me a baby shower this weekend and see me pregnant for the first time. Eve started wearing brown in 1998 around the same time I moved back to Alabama. I’ve never seen her wear white again. Instead of gliding through a room she would waddle with a dark hat on her head and the smile of a witch who knew the spell that would put you down for good. She came to the shower wearing red and is now a therapist. We all stuffed out faces on chicken and veggie pitas that someone else made and propped our feet up at the end of the day laughing at the intertwining of our lives at Behind the Glass.

Road Trip

It was the peak of hay season. The boys had gotten used to the routine of solitude by now. The rest of the family had gone crazy in the divorce. Their mama was living in Atlanta, Daddy was wearing Reeboks and spending all of his time in Panama City with his new wife, and their sister was living in a town neither could pronounce somewhere in California. The family land that had been so vehemently fought over in court sat idle and neglected. They had cut and mowed all week fixing the tractor in between with pliers and sparking wires between black grease creased hands. The evenings began with cans of Miller Light and usually ended with one rebuilt truck digging another out of the middle of a muddy creek with a come along. It was around dusk when the idea was first mentioned, but not until after 9:30 and several Millers that they backed the least ragged out truck up to the farm gas pump. The boys filled every milk jug and plastic container they could scrounge and laid them neatly in the bed of the truck. They were no stranger to siphoning gas from the state trucks parked on the side of the road but neither had ever been west of Selma so there was no way to count on this practice to sustain the trip all the way to California. The house their parents built sat dark and unshaken as they cleaned out the cabinets of canned goods grabbing a handful of dirty clothes to stuff behind the seat. On the back of an unopened insurance bill they wrote “Dear Daddy, We’ve gone to California.”

In the summer 1995, I was living in Central California in a studio duplex with a view of the drug park across the street and a 300 lb neighbor named Rudy; who instructed in no uncertain terms upon moving in to not call the cable company because he had rigged the duplex so we all got it for free. I was standing in front of the swamp cooler at the end of the day trying to dry the sweat in my hair before a blind date at the Red Robin with a rock climber when the phone rang. The familiar shrill of my Granny’s voice blasted into my ear “Do you know your brothers are coming to see you in California?”

At this point it had been 24 hours since their departure. Apparently they had called from Dallas to confirm that it was true. I knew immediately why. They saw Dallas as a safe distance from the family, their first step out of the true south. No sheriff could pull them over past this point and if the truck broke down they were really on their own. But what I was really thinking about was what my two brothers must be feeling and how I wished I could see them driving through the western states right now. This was long before cel phones were part of our reality and from the family’s perspective, the only reference point anyone had was the time it had taken me to drive out a few months earlier. We were all calculating where they might be based on my solitary haul west. I could barely sleep that night. My dad’s family was furious and convinced I had put them up to it, possibly even sending them money. My dad’s brother called my mom’s sister, a line of communication that had not been crossed since the divorce to try to gather information on who exactly knew what and when. It turned out we were all in the same boat for a change.

I hardly slept the night I heard my brothers were driving to California. There had been no word for over 24 hours as to where they were but the thought that they were headed my way was like believing in Santa Clause on Christmas Eve. The center of our family was shifting west for the first time ever. How long would they stay? Were they planning to move in with me? Would the three of us set up house and have the family neither of our parents had been able to hold together? I fantasized into the early morning until the phone rang a little before 7 AM. It was the 15 year old. He was calling from Barstow to ask exactly what the name of the town in California was and which direction they should go from there. I frantically gave him directions and then asked “What do you think of California so far?” I had decided to take them camping while they were here. “So far it stinks” he quipped back “I mean literally, it’s smelled like rotten eggs ever since we crossed the state line.”

A few hours later the three of us crammed into a Denny’s booth over 5 blue plate specials when the boys deduced the rotten egg smell had really been the battery dying on the truck. They had driven in the night with flashlights shined out the window somewhere in Oklahoma when they realized the battery wouldn’t make it. The truck arrived in a state in which it had to be pushed off in order to crank which included a nice backfire in case the spectacle of 2 boys hollering “punch it” to one another didn’t grab enough attention from onlookers.