Writer in the Forest

Chapter 15

It was me, a radio, a clumsy pile of empty cardboard boxes from the liquor store like Mom taught me, a donut, and a cup of steaming coffee.

All my life I wondered what this would be like, only I thought they’d be dead when I got to this point. Instead, I needed the money to pay their nursing home bills, which meant I had to break their hearts and sell my mother’s little cottage. All around me were the mementos of our lives: our pictures on the wall, the old coffee table book about Jesus, and the dining room chairs with the seats still covered in their original plastic.

I set down my coffee and plugged in the radio, as alone as I’d ever been. I squinted through watery prisms at the doorstop screwed into the wall above the archway where we used to hang our dry-cleaning and ironing.

Fourteen year-old me made a skirt in Home Ec. It was easy, and the material only cost about $3 because it only took a little scrap to make a mini skirt. I’m on a chair in the archway, slowly twirling around while Mom pins the hem.

With my parents as reference points I always knew where and who I was, but today I felt lost. I hummed Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” as tears ran into my mouth like rain. I unscrewed the doorstop and stuffed it into my purse, then grabbed a role of toilet paper, blew my nose, and started moving.

In the kitchen, I opened the door to the little wall-mounted ironing board that was tucked into the wall disguised as a spice cabinet. This was where I learned to iron by practicing on pillowcases and hankies.

I was in California again, standing at the utility sink dunking Bob’s shirts into the warm blue starch. I  ripped the cover off the ironing board and threw it away.

In the refrigerator I found all the fruit and vegetables I’d bought them for the last three or four months. Brown lettuce and soupy radishes were afloat in their own rot. I carefully picked them up and ran the liquid down the drain. I filled the first of many garbage bags. What in the world they were eating was explained later when I found several dozen Oolong teabags–the kind you get when you buy Chinese take-out.

I opened the cupboards and examined the Melmac dishes I bought my folks two years ago. “I can’t hold the heavy kind anymore,” Mom had said. That Christmas I had shopped all over and finally found the dishes. Who in the family will want brown plastic dishes that taste like cigarettes?

After a few hours of packing, I sat on the old movie loveseat and unrolled the toilet paper for a good nose blow. My throat burned. I could see the bedroom doorway and there was Mom, holding out her pillbox to me, a reminder of why they weren’t here anymore.

I was so floaty with fatigue I wondered for a moment if I’d become transparent… unaware that somewhere down in the depths of my DNA the strength of a forest was behind me, my ancestor’s roots intertwining with mine to hold me up straight as the winds blew through.