Finally we're almost settled
in: family portraits and beloved works of art cover the walls, The Joy of Cooking, which I took from my mother's kitchen when
I left home forty-four years ago, is crammed on a shelf with other cookbooks I
never read. The dog and cats adjusted immediately, didn't skip a meal or lose
any sleep. But I don't feel like I'm home.
There's a melancholic
feeling in this low-ceilinged house. Each room has a single window. In my
office the fierce, late-summer sun is amplified by the front yard's white rocks.
White light, like a slab of ice, intrudes into one side of the room but does
not make it into the dark corner where I sit.
The weight of what I left
behind is heavier than my beaded Indian tapestry which I probably should have
hung on the other wall where light would have bounced off its tiny
mirrors. Where it is the deep colors
blend into a muddy dullness and nothing sparkles.
The weight of what I left
behind calls for burial, mourning, remembrance. My teaching, which sprang to
life eighteen months ago, has trickled out and died. Oh how I loved those
Thursday mornings when I packed my satchel with a new lesson and headed out to
hear what the students had written that week. Sitting at the front of the class
I felt like I was on a ship, sailing into each writer's story, carried along on
their memories and emotions. Afterwards
I felt full of gratitude that an idea I
presented created stories and poems that brought tears to our eyes, made us
sigh, made us wonder.
In that tiny office on Rogers
Circle I completed my memoir. I relived the first twenty years of my life,
revisited photographs, did research on the internet, re-read my calendars,
called and questioned friends. I brought
back to life my father, family friends, my first husband, my first true love,
my first psychedelic friend.
In the Rogers Circle house
I wrote the monthly profile for the Kerrville Business Magazine. In the ninety-minute interviews, each person opened
up about their heartaches and triumphs. I
remember when the octogenarian jeweler described how the army recruitment
office was packed, a line around the block, the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed.
He and his college friends were told to go home, the army could not process so
many men. I had to ask the old man for a Kleenex, I was so moved visualizing the
passion of those young men.
In the time I lived at Rogers
Circle I found Unity Church. During that
first meditation tears streamed down my cheeks because I knew I had found my
spiritual home.
In our two years at that
house my recently widowed mother went through a series of "helpers",
doctors, psychiatrists. She had hallucinations, gave thousands of dollars away.
Eleven months ago she broke her hip, spent a month in rehab, moved into a posh assisted
living facility, and suffered a series of strokes, bladder infections, cuts and
bruises. She spent a month crying every day until hospice took over and put her
on Zoloft.
At Rogers Circle I knew
who I was, a writer and teacher with an elderly mother; new to Texas, every day
seemed full of possibility. Now I feel like I don't know who I am. Of course I
know I'm a wife and daughter, sister and aunt, mother to my pets, friend to good
friends far away. But who am I to myself?
I squint out the window at
the enormous prickly pear, magnificently malevolent in the blazing sun. Proud,
invincible, it seems to know who it is. Here
inside I look at cherished objects from my past and wonder what heartache, what
happiness, will fill this house and make it become home.
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