My Father Calls My Mother a Cheap Date

My father calls my mother a cheap date, not because she doesn’t eat much, though she doesn’t eat much, but because her idea of a gift is a stone, a rock, a boulder—whatever size as long as she can carry it with two hands.

My parents go on one bike trip a year. Squeezing into their second layer of skin—their leathers—and packing only sun tan lotion (SPF 2) to venture out in what they call a yearly trip that saves their marriage: “It’s something we can do together.” They see new states, meet new people, pick up gifts for all the kids to come back home a week later beet red with sunglass lines.

Souvenirs are expected. Dad always gets a new Harley Shirt from a state they pass through. Jenny used to get shot glasses, but now married with a little boy she gets magnets for the fridge. I get coffee mugs cause well, I drink a lot of coffee, and they’re useful. Like my mother, I like things that have a purpose. Jesse used to get t-shirts, but he grew up and got picky about his clothes, so he gets a deck of cards that we only use at Christmas time when the whole family gets together to take money away from each other.

And my mother, she’d bring home rocks. To her rocks are useful, they are decorative, and they are free! When out in the Dakotas on a family trip with Dad and Jesse, my brother had to be the lookout while my father watched my mom roll a stone from the sandy shoulder in the badlands. She had spotted the rock just yards away, “Oh, that’s a good one! Pull over!”

I wasn’t there, but I can see it. Jesse, arms crossed leans up against the corner of the rusting van, trying to act like it is no big deal as he watches for a black and white, but also ready to hide behind the van if the cops did come. “That’s not my mother. I’m just a hitch hiker they picked up in Minnesota.”

Dad would be standing beside my mother asking her, “Are you serious? Do you really need another one? You are going to run out of room. We’ll have to buy more land to have room for all these rocks.” He laughs.

My parents’ country placed is lined with rocks: around the trees, the house, the garage, the life-size statue of a buck . . . Most of them are field stones my uncle drops off every season, but the bigger ones, the special rocks are from my mother’s travels, and as long as she can lift them, she will have another story to tell.

Grandpa Hibernates

Grandpa Strupp, the grizzled man, always smelled of silage, sweat, and the handmade soap that was in their bathroom shaped like sea shells.

Jenny and I had a step stool that we placed behind his recliner, so we could comb his hair while he napped. Sometimes with just our fingers and others with a black comb, the only comb they had in the house, the kind they gave you to fix your hair right before class pictures in grade school. We’d dip the comb or our fingers into a cup full of water and began to sculpt. His black and white streaked hair felt like sewing thread between our fingers as we parted it to the left, the right, into a Mohawk. We’d cup our hands over our mouths, our fingers tasting of salt, as we laughed at Grandpa as he snored away, at times, unaware of our play.

Our grandpa was a tall, slender grizzly when he slept. You’d think he was hibernating, but that’s what farming did to ya.

Falling Hard

Alongside the property line that connects our lawn and the DNR, vines of concord grapes grew in triangular clusters. Each vine, thin like a shoe lace, intertwined, wove through and around the chicken wire that served as a lattice—scrapes from my grandparents’ coop no doubt.

Jenny and I would gather bunches in our shirts that we cupped next to our bellies as our baskets, staining our shirts polka dot purple. Beside the back wall of the garage, we’d climb the four by four pool deck that someone had also not wanted and given my parents. Swimming season was over, so we used the deck as a fort and a ladder to climb up to the roof of the garage, the only place where you could eat concord grapes.

Straddling the peak, we devoured the grapes. Pinching one after the other, we popped the slimy, tangy green insides into our mouths. Warm sticky juice ran down our fingers and chins. We spit the seeds, always at least two, onto the driveway below along with the tough skin.

One day we got caught by our parents. Mom yelled, “Don’t ya waste those grapes!”

While my father hollered, “What the heck ya trying to do? Break your necks?”

We didn’t care about wasting. We didn’t care about breaking our necks. We ate until our stomachs soured. . . . We wondered what it was like to fly.

It was the only place where we could see the tops of our parent’s heads. Being on the roof, gave us a power we couldn’t get anywhere else.

We kept returning to the roof every chance we got, sometimes to act like we were falling. I’d lay on my belly, hands clasped around a shingle that was peeling back, and ask Jenny if she’d save me. She asked, “Would you save me?”

When we were younger we had no idea what it meant to fall and fall hard.

Gathering Glass

My parents used to take Jenny and me to the U.P. just past the paper mill and before the Porcupine Mountains, to walk along the beaches of Lake Superior, the same place where they rented a cabin for their honeymoon.

While our parents shuffled along behind, we ran ahead kicking the water with our feet and gathering stones from the piles that lined the shoreline just under an inch of polar-cold water. Our pockets bulged and two dark circles formed from the wet stones inside, so that we looked like we had growths on each hip.

I remember bending over and retrieving a very bright green stone, the size of a large marble that had pierced my toe. I rubbed the stone between my wet palms, smooth like a very worn quarter on both sides, and when I brought it to my eyes like a single spectacle, it was clear—my parents turned green.

Jenny and I would fight over these clear white and green stones, especially the green ones for one reason: there weren’t many of them. To find one was like catching that faint look between our parents that said, “Yes, yes, we are in love” even though they weren’t much for hugging or kissing. But they had those once-in-a-while-looks, a glance that let us know it was "good."

It wasn’t until many years later that I found out that those clear white and green stones that we had fought over, the ones we thought must have come from a different world, where nothing more than pieces of glass from bottles fishermen had tossed into the lake that had been worn and worn again and again by the waves that lapped them a shore.

But that look between my parents, though few like those stones, was something out of this world. Even when they had and have worn and stretched each other down, they still find that look, that love.

The Difference Between Orange and Yellow

When I was a little girl, my mother remembers me telling her and Dad that I was never going to get married. I was going to live with them forever.

When you are young, simple things seemed to be the most difficult: Clipping your nails, slipping that hook over the button of your bibs, even putting eye drops in were mountain-movers. They were skills that, at the time, you thought you would never be able to do yourself.

Likewise, when the simple acts seem so impossible, it is the big decisions that come easy when you were young because being young made honesty come easy. You knew the difference between right and wrong, good and bad like you knew the difference between orange and yellow. You weren’t afraid to call people out: “You are orange. You are yellow.” For when you are young, you are honest with yourself first—everyone else came later.

Though I can clip my nails myself, and I have learned the trick of placing eyes drops in (You have to squeeze it in the corner of your eye and then tilt you head, so that it seeps in as though a tear receding back into your eye.) I find that I still need my parents, for their kind of love is honest; it is orange. They put you first.

Some days when I wake up, I think about what would have happened if I had listened to that little girl, but I find that I am no longer in the bottom bunk sleeping below my sister.

I have to be honest with myself. I have to know what is yellow, and what is orange.