I used to think I could talk to God.
When you are younger, having a conversation with God was easy because, like believing in Santa Clause, it was easy to have faith to consider the impossible.
My mother still shows, especially men that I bring home the video of my first communion. Not because she was so proud that day, but because I had the ability as a child to act like a complete idiot on what was supposed to be one of the most important days of my religious life. I wore the same white dress, gloves, veil, shoes, and yes, even socks that my sister wore two years earlier. I remember it was the only day that I actually enjoyed wearing a dress. (All the other girls had to too, so I didn’t stick out like a tone-death girl in a choir of angels.)
On the video, you can find me dancing around our dining room, singing a Disney tune and oh, yeah lifting the bell of my skirt—gravy stained from the meal earlier—to my chin, exposing the white underwear I had underneath to Jesse. My brother laughed every time the lace trim of the white fabric brushed his blonde hair. Religion and God were easy, fun. No one told you, “Hey, you might be wrong about this.”
After our dog Smokey died, I’d go out back into the cow pasture that connected our property with Van Egtern’s at the time, and sit beneath the branches of a blue spruce that grew over where my father had buried her. I asked God for a lot of things—a horse, Jenny letting me borrow a shirt, a snow day, things I believed were possible, for God was not a possibility; he just was.
As I got older, I stopped asking. Not only because prayers didn’t come true, but because I wanted less and less. I needed less and less. My mother would say, “You don’t have to need something to talk to God.”
“What do you say to him then?”
“You ask for strength to love. You ask for him to watch over the ones you love,” she’d answer.
“Well, isn’t that still asking?”
“Yes, but you’re asking for others.”
I have prayed for others, but it has taken me 26 years to pray for only strength, which I’m still unsure of what that means—strength. What I want is to know that God is still there if I returned to the blue spruce behind our house. That I could talk to him like a friend instead of a stranger.
Cold Coffee
Photographed by Paul Schonfeld
October 25, 2010
October 18, 2010
Sleeping with Mom
I used to sleep with my mother when my father went away on his almost three-month-long deer hunting binge.
My mother didn’t like to sleep alone, especially as Wisconsin got colder. “You don’t want your poor mother to freeze to death do you?”
I’d crawl in the old—every-time-you-move-squeak—bed beside her. Both in flannel pajamas, we’d prop pillows behind our heads reading for a while until we started to yawn, telling each other that it was lights out.
That is when it happened, when it always happened, like a rerun that played every night on the TV, she’d close her book, click off the bed-side lamp, and curl toward me and clamp her feet on mine. I’d scream, tell her to stop it, and she’d laugh as though she didn’t know her feet would be so cold like something out of this world, too cold to come from even Wisconsin.
It was a routine, expected. But yet every time the lights went out, I wondered if maybe that night was the night when her feet wouldn’t be cold, or she’d forget to roll over. I didn’t want to get too old for that game.
I liked to be close to my mother. She was an entirely different person when she slept—vulnerable, innocent, young as if she was not much older than my eight-year-old self. Her face appeared softer. Her breathing calm like she didn’t have to work a 12-hour factory shift at 4:00 a.m.. . . . And I thought, as long my mother could be eight in her thirties, I could be too.
I haven’t slept with her in years, but I can feel the scream that came from between her icy toes.
My mother didn’t like to sleep alone, especially as Wisconsin got colder. “You don’t want your poor mother to freeze to death do you?”
I’d crawl in the old—every-time-you-move-squeak—bed beside her. Both in flannel pajamas, we’d prop pillows behind our heads reading for a while until we started to yawn, telling each other that it was lights out.
That is when it happened, when it always happened, like a rerun that played every night on the TV, she’d close her book, click off the bed-side lamp, and curl toward me and clamp her feet on mine. I’d scream, tell her to stop it, and she’d laugh as though she didn’t know her feet would be so cold like something out of this world, too cold to come from even Wisconsin.
It was a routine, expected. But yet every time the lights went out, I wondered if maybe that night was the night when her feet wouldn’t be cold, or she’d forget to roll over. I didn’t want to get too old for that game.
I liked to be close to my mother. She was an entirely different person when she slept—vulnerable, innocent, young as if she was not much older than my eight-year-old self. Her face appeared softer. Her breathing calm like she didn’t have to work a 12-hour factory shift at 4:00 a.m.. . . . And I thought, as long my mother could be eight in her thirties, I could be too.
I haven’t slept with her in years, but I can feel the scream that came from between her icy toes.
October 11, 2010
Swallowing a Basketball
I tried to push a basketball down my throat yesterday.
With both hands gripping it tightly, as though it was a melon and I was testing its ripeness, I cupped my lips around its dimpled curve.
Leather on lips.
Grit lodged between my front teeth, from what the ball had rolled off the black top drive way where my father and I had played game after game of horse, 21, around the world. Green chalk lines graffiti the drive way: squares, numbers, and lines until the rain wash them and our game away. (If I won, it was because he’d let me.)
I pushed the basketball in farther, my tongue helping it along. Wet, wetter yet, I can never choke it down—too big, too much.
Then I realized as my lungs, a life all its own, asked me to stop as it ate less and less air. It was not a basketball I was trying to swallow but my life, a part I wanted to forget. But, I will never forget because memories cannot be eaten only tasted again and again like eating that first slice of hot apple pie or lump of coal, both bitter in their own way.
With both hands gripping it tightly, as though it was a melon and I was testing its ripeness, I cupped my lips around its dimpled curve.
Leather on lips.
Grit lodged between my front teeth, from what the ball had rolled off the black top drive way where my father and I had played game after game of horse, 21, around the world. Green chalk lines graffiti the drive way: squares, numbers, and lines until the rain wash them and our game away. (If I won, it was because he’d let me.)
I pushed the basketball in farther, my tongue helping it along. Wet, wetter yet, I can never choke it down—too big, too much.
Then I realized as my lungs, a life all its own, asked me to stop as it ate less and less air. It was not a basketball I was trying to swallow but my life, a part I wanted to forget. But, I will never forget because memories cannot be eaten only tasted again and again like eating that first slice of hot apple pie or lump of coal, both bitter in their own way.
October 4, 2010
This World inside “The” World
(From Journal: County Line Lake, Watersmeet, Michigan)
August 13, 2005
Here I’m, once again, in the stale trailer—a musty moth smell that will never retire like the old owners. The night is cold; socks are welcoming to bare feet. I lay here underneath my favorite quilt, a wedding present my parents received. Twenty four years of marriage lay under the very same cotton squares: fights, secrets, and love.
The next morning, lying on the pier, the lake appears identical to the picture taken last year, yet the sky is bluer like God turned up the cool tones. A dragonfly suns itself upon my bare belly as I try and get some sun. Two fishermen cast to the shore from their small boat, slowly and silently trolling through the water as if they don’t want to wake anything below—a creature that is not local to the lake.
On the shore, my family’s paddle boat resides on its belly, waiting for someone to turn it upright—give it some use besides a home for spiders. Stringy clear threads are wrapped around the rudder again and again like spool. A dried-out lily pad on the bottom, sucked of its green by the sun, is brown but not dead. Nothing is ever really dead, just forgotten about.
This world is far from “the” world.
August 13, 2005
Here I’m, once again, in the stale trailer—a musty moth smell that will never retire like the old owners. The night is cold; socks are welcoming to bare feet. I lay here underneath my favorite quilt, a wedding present my parents received. Twenty four years of marriage lay under the very same cotton squares: fights, secrets, and love.
The next morning, lying on the pier, the lake appears identical to the picture taken last year, yet the sky is bluer like God turned up the cool tones. A dragonfly suns itself upon my bare belly as I try and get some sun. Two fishermen cast to the shore from their small boat, slowly and silently trolling through the water as if they don’t want to wake anything below—a creature that is not local to the lake.
On the shore, my family’s paddle boat resides on its belly, waiting for someone to turn it upright—give it some use besides a home for spiders. Stringy clear threads are wrapped around the rudder again and again like spool. A dried-out lily pad on the bottom, sucked of its green by the sun, is brown but not dead. Nothing is ever really dead, just forgotten about.
This world is far from “the” world.
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