The Furious Spinner

Today after Mario and I walked the trail to Falling Creek, we looked at two houses to rent. One was in Home Valley, up Wind Mountain. From the kitchen windows, we could look right down the Columbia River, west, and see Beacon Rock. The wind rocked the evergreens surrounding the house, making that hushing sound, like fans made of soft needles stroking your skin, relaxing you in ways you never knew were possible. Nutmeg, the black and white dog from next door, kept bringing me a stick to throw as he looked at me with beautiful pale blue eyes. He had showed his love for me twice now, in exactly the way I will tolerate it from the canine species: he acknowledged I was the alpha bitch by the wag of his tail, the slight crouch, and the demeanor which said, "I will never ever jump on you, bark at you, or smell any part of your body—without your consent...in writing."

The house was all right. The kitchen was dark and narrow, the bedrooms dark and strange. But I would be out in the country. They already had an organic garden on site...However, I got a pain in my gut. Mario and the man kept talking and I kept saying, "Any more last questions, honey?" Hint, hint, HINT. Finally, we left. I rubbed my gut as we drove away and wondered if my gut was trying to tell me something.

We drove down the hill and toward town, then up another hill, still out in the country but not as far. Two black dogs barked and snarled at me as I got out of the car. Not a good beginning. I had met the owner of this house before. It was a family home, and they were asking twice as much rent as the owner of the house we had just left—twice as much as we could afford, but she wanted to see if we could work something out.

The dogs settled down as we stepped into the house. I took a deep breath and the pain in my stomach unraveled. I knew the superficial history of this house and family, and all had not always been well, which could probably be said for most any family. Yet the house was warm. It was literally warm and dry. It had a solid feel and reminded me of Eastern homes in that way. Out here in the Pacific Northwest, homes are often damp and mildewy, unless they're new. Then they feel...new. This house felt old in that comfortable way. I know, I know. I'm a writer. I should have better words than these. It felt as though I had walked into a place I had lived in forever and could live in forever. I'm not even certain why I felt this way. It was comfortable and welcoming

We talked as we walked through the house. This was her family home, and she didn't want to leave. She loved the land, but she couldn't afford the mortgage payment. We talked about how difficult it is, here, for the people who work here and love it to afford to live here. More and more it is becoming a bedroom community, and bedroom communities don't work. It has been my experience that people working in Portland or those who have summer homes here don't particularly care about and are not involved in the day to day problems, needs, politics, etc. of this community. They often have a virgin/whore attitude. Either this place is paradise and "aren't you lucky to be able to live here all year long" or "this place is beautiful but how can you stand to live with all these rednecks?"

I told her I understood her love for the land. "I lived in the fastest growing county in the United States when I was a kid. I loved the land. I thought I would live there forever." As I talked, my eyes watered. Her eyes watered. We were soul sisters, this woman young enough to be my daughter and I. "I knew every tree. I knew every curve, every smell, bird call. Now I can hardly stand to go back and see what has happened."

Finally, we embraced, and Mario and I left. I came home and called a couple of my sisters to see how the arrangements were for Mom's operation. She has to be at the hospital at 5:30 a.m. My mother has never been up at 5:30 a.m. in her life—unless she stayed up all night. It will be an interesting morning.

Of course, as I was looking for a home I was thinking about the home where I grew up. I don't remember our time in Louisiana, where I was born, or the time spent in Texas, although my mother says we spent quite a few nights in shelters riding out storms and tornadoes. She also remembers lots of dust. My first memory is in Michigan, sitting on my grandmother's lap, reaching for something shiny in the dirt as my father and grandfather worked around us. They were building our home.

Outside our home, huge old oaks and maples grew up around the house and down to the marsh behind the house. Red-winged blackbirds perched on cattails in the marsh in the day time. To this day, the call of the red-winged blackbird reminds me of home. At dusk, we listened for the bobwhites to call out their names and then we'd call back. "Whowhowhite. Whowhowhite." At night, the crickets and frogs went wild with song while lightning bugs clicked their lights on and off, on and off, like tiny lighthouses trying to confuse wayward sailors. In the summer, thunderstorms moved over our house and tried to bend the old oaks and maples; sometimes lightning struck one of the trees down to the ground, winning that particular wrestling match. If we had warning before a bad storm, Dad would pack us all in the car and race down to the Farm and my grandparents' house a half mile down the road. We'd stay in the root cellar playing while the adults sat upstairs near the door drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. (I think I've told you this story.) In the winter, the Huron River, which was on the other side of the marsh from our house, would rise up and flood the marsh. Then the water would freeze. If it froze just right, it created the best skating rink—I'd fly around cattails, marsh shrubs, and riparian trees, all surrounded by clear thick ice.

I was a country girl, Tom girl, through and through. I had one older sister and three younger sisters. My mother gave birth to five children between 1951 and 1963. My father was in the Air Force for the first few years. When he got out, he worked at Capital Airlines (which became United Airlines, I believe) while he went to college. During this time, my mother was alone in the country with several children. I don't even think she had a car. She also had severe postpartum depression, although back then I don't think the doctors understood what was happening with her. She may have even had postpartum psychosis. She had what they used to call a nervous breakdown, but what we now call anxiety attacks. Before this, my mother was one of those picture perfect mothers. She sewed prize winning clothes for us. She cooked amazing meals. She was having babies and doing all those mommy in the 50's kind of things.

After her breakdown, everything was different. She did not cook or clean or sew as much. She painted a naked woman on our bedroom wall, a la Goya. (Or was that Manet's Olympia?) She left the house by herself and sometimes went to movies with a friend or went out dancing. I admired her and was embarrassed by her all at the same time. She had quit high school as a girl to work. Her father had died when she was 12 and her mother worked in a restaurant as a cook for years to support eight children. Mom went back to high school when I was in high school to get her GED. From when I was a little girl, my mother always encouraged my writing. She exposed me to Emily Dickinson and Mary Cassatt and said it was all right to march to the beat of a different drummer.

She also got sick. Her getting sick changed her and the family in profound and subtle ways. We had to try and keep everything clean, no dust or mold or animal hair. The message I got from all this, I believe, was that EVERYTHING was dangerous. Be careful. We couldn't bring her flowers; we couldn’t use hair spray, nail polish, or perfume. Now I'm glad we didn't use those things, but as a teenager, I wanted an ordinary mother. One who didn't stay up all night and then sleep all day, for instance. When I got home from school, I would tiptoe up the stairs to Mom's room. I'd listen at the door to make certain she was breathing before I'd go back downstairs. I was always afraid she was going to kill herself. When I told her I did this, some years later, she just shook her head. "I never considered suicide," she said. How was I to know? On the Antieau side of the family, suicide was a viable option apparently—since so many had committed it.

My father became a teacher after he finished college, and later a principal. He was often angry. He'd get a look in his eyes and go away. Then he'd shake me, hit me with a belt, or slap me. He doesn't remember any of this. Fortunately my older sister remembers all this, too. My father was a young man when he got married to my mother, who was divorced with a child. He was 23 years old when I was born. That's difficult for me to even imagine. 23 years old. I was not the ideal child. I asked a lot of questions, defied authority at every turn, was more sensitive than any farm girl should be, and passed out a lot. He learned as he went, lessening the punishment with each child as he got older and figured some things out. When he was even older, he couldn't imagine he had ever taken a belt to a child of his. Or ever slapped one. But he did. When I was a teenager, I remember him slapping me nightly. He doesn't remember ever slapping me. It’s probably something in between. Once when I was a teenager, he got so angry he began shaking me in front of several relatives. I don't remember why. The top I was wearing came unbuttoned from him shaking me, exposing my bare breasts to a room full of people—and he kept shaking me.

My family had many secrets—just like most nuclear families. I suppose that's one of the reasons I think nuclear families are dangerous. They often become little fiefdoms, with Daddy as the lord and master. And because no one is allowed to question the Daddy, strange things can happen. You all know in your own family there are peculiar things that go on that you really wouldn't want other people to know. In our family, my parents locked up food at night because one of their children had an eating disorder; another child washed her hands until they bled; another child put pins in a favorite dress so that if another sister wore it she'd be pricked; the other sister then cut the dress to shreds; two sisters lived in the same house together and didn't speak for years; one sister was molested by an uncle, who continued to babysit for us and molest my sister for two years after my sister told my parents what he did. (They didn’t really understand the seriousness of what had happened, apparently.) Shall I go on? Just ordinary family secrets.

Yet my parents were (and are) good people. They did what good parents do: they fed us, housed us, clothed us, educated us, loved us, and sent us out into the world—to wonder why they didn't love us better. I hear stories of other parents and am grateful for the ones I have, and I've told them so. They did better when they knew better.

When I was in my thirties, I learned that my grandfather had been adopted. For some reason this had been a secret. My father hadn't known it until my grandmother died, although other brothers had known and didn't think it was a secret. (This often happens in families, too. "Well, how come you knew about this and I didn't? Mom always loved you best." Etc.) My grandfather's “real” name was Emerick. We don't know what happened to Grandpa’s father except that he left the family. When my grandfather was married and had a child, he changed his name to his stepfather's name, Antieau. This was puzzling because his stepfather was a bootlegger who was in and out of jail. His blind pig across the road from the hospital was closed after police discovered he was selling booze to mental patients; their currency was the lumber they stole from a nearby construction site. Another time, my grandfather’s stepfather struck and killed a pedestrian. My grandfather bailed him out of jail more than one time. Despite all this, he took Daniel Antieau's last name as his own.

When I found out Antieau was not my true name and Emerick was, I said, "OK, Emerick better be Irish. I have been French and Irish my whole life, and that’s who I am. Emerick sounds a little German and I can't be German." I didn't like the German history. I didn't want to be related to Nazis.

Right after 9/11, I traveled back home because my father was ill. One night one of my sisters and I started looking through some papers. We found love letters my father had sent to my mother. We asked my mother if we could read them. She said no, so we didn't. We also found letters from my grandfather to my grandmother when he was in the mental hospital. He had beautiful handwriting, just like my father. He called Grandma "sweetheart" and "love." He wrote that he was so sorry he had made trouble for them all and he was glad she wasn't going to visit him in the hospital. He would finish the barn door as soon as he got home again. In the second letter, his handwriting was a little less sure. He asked Grandma to come see him. He again apologized for the trouble. In the third letter, his handwriting was very shaky. He talked about the wallet he was making. He didn't talk about her coming to visit, and he didn't ask about any of his children. My sister and I figured he wrote the third letter after they gave him shock treatments. A few months after the dates on the letter, my grandfather stepped off the land he loved and put a shotgun in his mouth. He killed himself and blew a hole in our family that has never healed. I was eleven years old.

We found my grandfather's birth certificate during my visit back home. Under the name of William Emerick, my grandpa's father, was his nationality: German. It didn't matter to me any more what his nationality was. I had learned long ago that we're all descended from sinners and saints. During this visit, I asked an uncle what had happened to Grandpa’s mother, and he told me she had killed herself, too.

My grandfather had always wanted to be a farmer. They bought their land in 1926. He had terrible hay fever and had to work at another job for most of his adult life to keep the farm going. I often wonder if he ever felt at home in this world. Did he love his land the way I did?

Several years ago my family sold the land my grandparents bought in 1926 to a developer. He’s put huge expensive homes on the land. Some are selling for more than $500,000. More than my grandfather made in his life. I went there once when I visited after 9/11; I didn’t recognize any of it. The place where I was certain I would live forever was gone. Golf course-like grass covered the ground. I wondered what chemicals and pesticides they had used to get it to look just so.

I often wonder if anyone who lives there now will ever love the place the way we did. Will anyone ever call it home and mean it?

I’m still looking for home.

Has anyone seen it?

Monday, November 29, 2004

Some Good News