My Summer Mother

                                                             “Elders” Contest Honorable Mention

by Sharon Frame Gay

The corridors in the nursing home were quieter than usual. It was a Saturday, only a skeleton staff striding the halls.

I slipped into her room and found her sleeping. Nodding at her new roommate, I set up a small table from home, fitting the little Christmas tree on it, lighting it, and fetching decorations from my bag, I placed them around the tree.

"Mom," I whispered, "Wake up. See what I brought you.” Her eyes opened slowly, then widened with happiness as she looked at her surprise. "So pretty,” she murmured.

"It's your own tree, from home, Mom," I reminded her, and she nodded, staring at the fiber optic tree that she had bought several years ago. She smiled sweetly, drinking in the sight, then turned and peered up into my face.

"I want all my money, my checkbook, bank account statements, and credit cards, right now," she hissed, " I am canceling Medicaid, leaving this place, and I am completely finished with you. You're a liar and a thief, and you have even tricked your poor brother into believing the things you say."

So begins another day, channeling through the sundry personalities that morph like the lights on the Christmas tree, daily, hourly, minute to minute. My mother. My jailer, my muse, my genetic partner, and my childhood fairy princess, now turned into an evil witch who smears poison apples against my teeth and begs me to swallow.

Stumbling out the nursing home door in tears and rage, I was like a dog hit by a car, wanting to bite whoever comes near.

At home, I crumpled into tears, keening as I rocked back and forth in exhaustion from spending months handling my mother's medical affairs, finances, household, and pet, while she languished in the nursing home in a flurry of psychotic dreams.

"Your mother is suffering from delirium, visual hallucinations, delusions and confusion. She has progressive dementia and failure to thrive. She is likely terminal."  I nodded thoughtfully as the doctors and nurses, practitioners and psychiatrists gave me their diagnosis, but inside I thought, "Oh no, she's not. She is far from terminal, only a dream away from coming back into the swirling world where she has always reigned. She is going to rise again, for she is immortal.”

I was first introduced to my mother under a bright white hospital light on an oak-lined street in Chicago, pulled from her womb, wet and squalling. But I did not truly meet her, nor fall in love with her, until I was four years old, as we left the city behind one day on the way to our lake house in Michigan. I was bundled into a small red sweater, stuffed into the back seat with our old spaniel. Peering up at the front door of the bungalow, I saw my mother emerge in a flash of long legs, her sneakers skipping down the steps, hair in pigtails under a cap, with the brim snapped over her Nordic blue eyes. This was not the Ice Queen who came home each night from work in the dark, trailing the cold of January on the hem of her long, grey coat. Nor the enigmatic young woman, seated with her parents and my brother and me around the kitchen table in the golden lamplight after dinner. Then, she was more like a bigger sister, sharing her day with her two young siblings and her parents. No, this was the Lake Fairy, gliding into the car with a grin plastered on her face, her troubles left behind in the rearview mirror, as we departed the curb in a flurry of joy and laughter. My Summer Mother. I felt a flash of excitement and mystery with just a hint of fairy dust as we headed to the lake.

"Come with me,” my mother smiled, one hot July afternoon. "I am going to give you the greatest gift in the world. Books.” I followed her down the dusty road to the public beach, where a dingy tan Book Mobile sat, low on its tires in the shifting morning, the lake in the background like blue silk. Inside the musty bus, a treasure trove of books waited on shelves, motes of dust in the sunlight glinting off the spines as though they were enchanted. On the bottom shelf were children's books. "May I borrow one"? I asked tentatively. "You may borrow as many as you can carry", she grinned, and I filled my tiny arms with volume after volume, excitement rising as we hurried back down the lake road and into the cool glade of the front porch. She read to me into the evening, sharing pirates and ponies, puppies and faraway lands. I hung on each word, my head on her chest, hearing the rumble of her voice and knowing I would recognize it anywhere.

And so began the enchantment and bewitching, the blessings and the curse that came with being my mother's child.

One day I walked into the nursing home and found her in tears. "What's wrong, Mom?" I asked, alarmed. She sobbed, "I am thinking of Troy". Troy. My brother who died a year ago, but until yesterday, my deluded mother thought was on a ferry boat with her on their way to Germany in happier times, he forever nine years old. She had been sending me out into the facility hallway for days now, to call him in for supper. Now, she remembered the truth. I nodded in empathy, as she raised her sorrowful blue eyes to me. Then, she began to cry again. "Look at me", she sobbed, "I'm a cripple." She reached out her hand to me. I clasped it between mine, staring down at her. "What have you DONE to me!" she wailed, and I felt every word like an incantation, hexing me, driving me down with her into an abyss so dark that the night seemed bright by comparison.

She had been lying in a pool of misery for over three months. The doctors and physical therapists had given up on her, recommended only comfort care. Mom did not eat, she did not drink, and needed round the clock assistance. I called my brother to discuss if we wanted her to be tested for a cancer. The doctor said she was declining, and not wanting to add another layer to her grief, we agreed not to have her undergo painful biopsies and procedures.

Two days later, a physical therapist called me. "It is a miracle", she trilled. "Your mother suddenly stood up by herself, and walked! The aides came running to my office to bring me in to see it. Your mother can WALK after nearly 3 months bed ridden."  I thought, "No. It is no miracle. She has simply decided to wake from her dark dreams and start moving again".

When I was twelve, she married a terrible man. A man so rank and evil that ravens began to nest on our roof tops, so dark that even now when I tell the tale my heart skips and I tremble inside. And for eight long years we lived like paupers in a snake's nest, going from town to town in hopeless abandon while my mother alternately tried to kill herself, then him, and succeeded only in killing the spirit of my brothers and me.  Beneath the terror and the heartache, Mom was sweet and guileless. We thought she was a victim, too. We gathered around her, shielding her from coming storms. At all costs, we protected her, we as drones and she as the Queen Bee. Protect. Get hurt. Protect again with our young bodies, our frightened souls. Still, the scales did not fall from my eyes. I returned again and again to drink at the pool of confusion, as she was the only adult now in my young world. I thought all families were like this. I rejoiced at the magic, and cowered at the curse, losing myself in canyons so vast, that it took me years to find daylight again.

I can remember her on a summer swing, her laughter trailing softly in the coming dawn, singing songs with me as trout breached the still waters, the smell of wood smoke in the air. Mom was a nymph, skirting in and out of my consciousness like quick silver, while my grandmother was the one who held my head over the toilet, washed my hair in the bath tub, or brought me lunch while I lay, prostrate in bed, too terrified to go to school, afraid that when I returned, it would be to an empty house, and I would be left behind down some dusty road with no map, no way to find my family again

.

I can remember her screaming at me, her hands like talons, reaching to grab and scratch at me like a trapped cat. And I remember her calmly beside me, my heart broken over a lost love, her hand cupping my head like an eggshell, as I find solace at her knee.

Now we bring flowers and candy, promises of spring, all to lay before her feet as she travels first down one road, then another in her delirium. I am left forever behind, always trying to catch her long enough to gather some warmth on a sunny day, or to turn the corner and find her waiting for me, hand outstretched, as she says, "Hurry down the road with me, for the moon is coming up and the hills are awash in starlight."

I had followed her through canyons at midnight in the Arizona high country, my small legs barely spanning the back of an old mule, as her horse picked its way through the gullies, heading true north under a promising star. I had hid in terror as she ran through the house screaming with a shotgun, had felt my heart thud when I found her standing on a chair with a noose around her neck, threatening to jump.

 My brother and I rode in the back of a pickup truck as we moved from town to town, stopping by the side of the road to cook. We left pieces of our souls from one end of this country to another as she chased demons up and down the highway. We were in limbo, ghosts passing through town after town, pausing each summer to return to the lake, finding our reflection in the water. Our love for her was fierce, our gypsy spirits held in her thrall, children of her rebel soul.

"It was magical,” my brother said one dreary afternoon, and I paused. Yes, I think. It was magic. And still is. For how else can she rise from her bed and enchant the entire nursing facility? How else can she drive me to my knees in fear and distrust, and keep me wandering through so many sleepless nights? How else can I hate her and love her all in the same breath, while she continues to dance in the shifting change of darkness and light, sweetness and cruelty, while the world spins on in stoic indifference?

My brother sighed. "Nobody would ever understand.” I nod. Nobody can. For it has been a lifetime of colors and threads, wafting and weaving into something so beautiful, so cruel, that my eyes burn if I stare at it too long. "She can't live forever, you know,” he said. "Life's impermanent. This, too, shall end.”

I scoff, take a sip of jasmine tea. "Oh no, you're wrong, my friend. It stays with us forever,” I say as I hear the sound of laughter and tears trailing down the nursing home corridor, across time, to the dusty road by the lake.

Sharon Frame Gay grew up a child of the highway, traveling throughout the United States, playing by the side of the road. Her dream was to live in a house long enough to find her way around in the dark, and she has finally achieved this outside Seattle, Washington. She writes poetry, prose poetry, short stories, and song lyrics. Her work can be found in Puppy Love 2015, bioStories, and Romantic Morsels.

"Elders" Contest Winner Announced:

John Messick of Homer, Alaska has won the Spring 2015 contest with his essay "The Fisherman and a .410 Shotgun".

Honorable mention selections went to: Sharon Frame Gay, Susan Lindsey, and John Scrimgeour. Many thanks to all those who submitted. Watch the bioStories website for publication of their fine essays.

 2014 Winter Contest Winner

bioStories

sharing the extraordinary in ordinary lives

The Old Spiral Highway    

by Liz Olds

A

t 15 I read On the Road and wanted to be Jack Kerouac. I wanted to live big and travel far. I wanted to hop on a freight train and go to the edge, to get picked up hitching by road-crazed hippies in beater cars going nowhere. I often put on my orange aluminum-frame backpack and, with nothing in it, walked to the edge of my suburban Maryland subdivision and imagined I would stick out my thumb and hitch to San Francisco, land of Ginsberg and Kesey. I had read Howl; I had read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I was well-educated in the ways of the literary travelers, although I never walked that extra mile to the highway. But I dreamed, despite the lightness of the empty pack on my shoulders.

        At 18, finally free of the constraints of family and subdivision, I chose Idaho for college. Idaho represented the frontier and freedom to me. More practically, I picked Idaho because a high school friend also went there, although I chose Moscow, up in the northern panhandle, and she chose Pocatello in the south. I had the idea that we would see each other on the weekends, not realizing that we were actually 700 road miles apart. On my map Idaho looked like Maryland sitting on its edge. I had no idea how vast it was.

I had only hitched once, during my freshman year, down the Old Spiral Highway from Moscow into Lewiston, to scrounge in the Goodwill for the men’s shirts and pants I felt most comfortable in. But I had dreamed many times of a longer trip and looked forward to the time when an opportunity would present itself. How hard could it be? I would just stick my thumb out and magically a real Kerouac would appear to whisk me back up the Old Spiral Highway home.

T

hanksgiving weekend of my sophomore year, 1976, I decided to go to Corvallis, Oregon to visit an old flame I’d met at Girl Scout camp and hadn’t seen or spoken to in three years. I didn’t call ahead because it would rob the trip of its Kerouac-ness if I did. 

On Wednesday I took the Greyhound to Corvallis. Dusti, the object of my affection, wasn’t home. Her confused mother stood with the door slightly open and advised me to come back Saturday. I took the ‘Hound back to Moscow on Wednesday night, and on Friday night, with only the price of a one-way ticket left, took the red-eye bus back once again to Corvallis. My desire for a dramatic reunion replaced whatever common sense my 18-year old self may have possessed. I would trust to the gods of the road to get me home somehow.

The romance part was a bust. In the end, Dusti and her mother did put me up for the night, and Dusti agreed, rather too hastily I thought, to drive me the ten miles from Corvallis to Interstate 5, the inland highway that followed the line of the Oregon Coast. There I could catch a ride to Portland and then on east to Idaho. Early on the Sunday morning after Thanksgiving, wisps of fog curled around the pine trees and swaddled the foothills. I caught a ride after just a few minutes and was in Portland by 9 AM.

I bought a pack of strong, foul-smelling Egyptian cigarettes in Portland to pass the boring wait between rides.

Still lucky, I was picked up by a travelling salesman in a Datsun 240Z and we cruised down Interstate 84 past the series of Corps of Engineers Dams on the north and the little streaming waterfalls coming down the high hills on the south. We topped the speedometer at 90 MPH which made me nervous, but the little sports car was built for speed and so was the highway.

The salesman was a chatty guy. He talked about his own life on the road, which was pretty straight and not what I was dreaming of with my romantic notions. He said he had thought I was a 14 year old boy standing by the side of the road when he picked me up. He bought me a hamburger and fries and I thought that was nice. Closing in on Walla Walla he suggested that I spend the night with him in his motel and I wasn’t sure if that was nice or not but since he didn’t push I didn’t need to know.

We reached Walla Walla, just 2 hours from Moscow, at 3:00. With plenty of daylight left and a stream of students heading back to school at the end of the long holiday weekend, I thought for sure I would get an easy ride and be home by dinner. The salesman dropped me off at a small strip mall on the outskirts of town. All the stores were closed. There was a bank with a time/temperature sign in front of it at my end of the mall. When I got out of the 240Z the sign read 3:00 PM/20 degrees.

I stood under the sign, smoking with one hand and hanging my thumb out with the other. For warmth I had on an old green parka with a fake fur hood and an orange lining I had bought at that Goodwill in Lewiston. It looked warmer than it was.

I measured the wait in cigarette puffs, drawing the smoke in deep while watching the number in the pack dwindle. I noticed the temperature numbers gradually going down as well. Apparently a cold front was coming in. But, not to worry. A ride would surely be along soon.

As time passed, so did the cars. No one stopped. No one would even meet my eyes as they sped by.

I could hear the buzz of the sign and watched the numbers on the temperature side falling. At first I didn’t feel it getting colder, but numbers never lie. Then the wind picked up.

My feet numbed. I wore high-top Chuck Taylors and some wool socks I had stolen from a friend. I hopped from foot to foot to keep the circulation going. No gloves, I didn’t like gloves. Can’t hold a damn cigarette with gloves on. The numbers on that temperature sign were rolling like a pinball score going the wrong way.

So was the sun. I would like to say at least it was a beautiful sunset, but the outskirts of Walla Walla are flat and that stretch of road with the little shoe repair shop and H&R Block office in the strip mall was pretty ugly. The sun just went down.

And the cars kept going by.

By 5:00 it was dark and 6 degrees. I had to admit to myself I was getting a little afraid. I didn’t really think I would die out there, but I would be in for a miserable night. I lit my last cigarette.

I jumped up and down, waving wildly as the cars passed. I could see into the warm interior of the cars, surprised at how clear the faces of mostly young students appeared as they averted their eyes when I tried to implore them with my own.

Now it was dark, a couple of hours into my wait by the side of U.S. 12 in Walla Walla, Washington. Time slowed, my blood was slowing, and the only thing going fast was that damn temperature sign, now at minus 2.

I’ve experienced colder temperatures, but never for so long and never so exposed. Every breath I took hurt my lungs and froze my boogers solid. My eyeballs felt like they were freezing. Shutting them didn’t help, they hurt closed and they hurt open. And I was getting pissed. There were plenty of cars on that road, occupants ignoring me as they drove in heated comfort home. Home. Why the hell wouldn’t someone pick me up and drive me home?

I stood by the side of that road for 6 hours.

Then, over a little rise came an old white Chevy panel van. I nearly cried when the yellow blinker came on and the van slowed. The driver reached across the passenger seat and opened the door.

“I’m just going ten miles up the road but at least you can get in and get warm for a while.”

The man seemed old to me but he couldn’t have been more than 35. He had a long, slightly disheveled and thinning blonde ponytail and a big full-faced beard. He asked was I going up to Moscow and I said yeah and that was the sum total of our conversation. The weak little heat fan blew on me from the dash and everything tingled.

After 15 minutes he pulled into a gas station, filled up the tank, went in to pay and came back with two Styrofoam cups of hot coffee.

“I believe I’ll drive just a little further up the road.”

We drank the coffee in silence. I knew I was taking a risk as he drove “a little further up the road.” It occurred to me that he might be a serial killer. In my young teenage dream I had not imagined this freezing, lonely trip, nor possible outcomes other than absolute safety. It was too late for second thoughts now; I was committed to this ride. But after a moment of doubt I opted for trust. Even though he didn’t say anything there was no menace in his demeanor. All I knew for sure was that the coffee was warm and so was I and the miles were rolling by under my butt. There didn’t seem to be much to say. We didn’t exchange names.

S

ixty miles later we reached the bottom of the Old Spiral Highway, the pass from Lewiston that rose 2000 feet in 9 miles of switchbacks, a two-lane monster road with 7% grades and no-shoulder drop-offs into thin air. This wasn’t all the way home, and I had a nasty stretch of road ahead, but it was a major crossroads with two 24-hour truck stops and plenty of cars and semis, a place to get more coffee and be inside, warm and safe until I could snag a ride up the pass into Moscow.

As I was getting out of the van I calculated the miles and realized his generosity added up to hours rather than minutes. He still had the ride back. I hoped he had music to keep him company. I didn’t really know what to think. Both the tough Kerouac part of me and the little kid who bravely carried an empty backpack to the end of the subdivision were astounded by his generosity. I didn’t know how to simply be present with his kindness. For the first time in an hour I felt compelled to say something.

“Thanks, uh, give me your address; I’ll send you some money.”

“No need. I’ve been where you are and I know how it feels. Just pass it on, man, pass it on.”

It seems important to me now that he did not take me all the way home. I noticed it then, but didn’t think about it much. Who in the world would want to drive up and down that Old Spiral Highway in the middle of the night? One moment of inattention could send a car over the side into oblivion.

Now I think that it was more than self-preservation. He did not patronize me by assuming I couldn’t take care of myself. I felt welcomed into the brotherhood of the road, the home I wanted at the time. A home I knew more about when I asked a young couple going up the hill for my last ride of the night than I had at the beginning of my long, cold day. Whether he realized it or not, he was treating me not as the fourteen year old boy I appeared to be, but as a fellow-traveler, and as someone who really would remember when I got the chance later on in life to “pass it on”.

Liz Olds grew up in Maryland and fulfilled her dream of traveling the U.S. by Greyhound, Amtrak, a 1969 red VW van, and her thumb in her salad days. She finally settled down 35 years ago in Minneapolis, MN where she currently supports her writing dreams cashiering at a big box store. She has been published in Inside Bluegrass, Paid My Dues, The Grapevine and was the recipient of the 1983 ALA’s Children’s Recording of the Year for the song “Just like Sally Ride”, which the late Ms. Ride especially enjoyed because it did not use her name as a pun. Liz plays the banjo and is a blues programmer on KFAI-FM. She recently graduated from the Foreword Apprenticeship Program through The Loft Literary Center.