Social Distancing the Bath Toys

My mother is washing her vases. She has about three dozen of them lining the tops of her kitchen cabinets. Her best friend knows to text me if she ever goes over there and finds them cluttering the counters, waiting like SUVs queuing at the car wash to spray down with suds. We both understand what it means. It’s her signature cry for help. Stress abounds and she’s grasping for something to control. Her world may be crumbling around her, but at least the vases will be spotless. 

Me? I make soup. Something about the methodical therapy of chopping vegetables, the smell of a mirepoix simmering on the stove infuses me with a sense of domestic accomplishment and I can momentarily forget the sky is falling. Okay, that’s bullshit. Usually I rip open a bag of peanut M&Ms.  My sister purges. It’s really quite impressive, considering on an average day her house looks like something out a of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. If things get really bad, she’ll need to move onto my closets. Her sense of catharsis would be off the charts.

But, we all do it in some form or another. Bite our nails. Stress clean. Binge reality tv. Drink. I have a friend who alphabetizes her spice cabinet. Another rearranges her bedroom furniture. An old neighbor used to run a twelve-mile loop whenever she felt overwhelmed. I know, eye roll.

Two weeks ago, I was still skeptical. Maybe it’s more accurate to say I was living in cozy denial while secretly envisioning every possible apocalyptic scenario of how this pandemic was going to play out. If I accounted for it on my list of atrocious outcomes, it couldn’t possibly come true. Could it? Either way, my stash of peanut M&Ms was still unscathed.

In my almost forty years, it seems as though tragedy often delivers the strange courtesy of occurring as a surprise – that way we humans can’t perseverate on it in advance. But, something changed this week. Something shifted in me as I read the articles by epidemiologists and scientists and mathematicians, scrutinized the news updates and reflected on the charts demonstrating how social distancing can flatten the curve, easing the burden on our hospitals and medical staff and effectively, save lives. I watched the incidence numbers tick up exponentially in other countries, stared at photos of the Duomo at midday, forsaken, desolate, the only sign of life evidenced by the smattering of confused pigeons. I began to digest the reality that this microbial adversary was indeed coming, the virus—the proverbial ant that brings a giant to his knees.

In fact, it was already here.

In Illinois, the schools are now closed, my fridge is stocked, and our order of watercolor paints and Frozen II Legos arrived without delay. (Thank God for Amazon Prime.) We went house-bound t-minus 48-hours ago and we’re in it for the long haul. However, just yesterday on the evening news, I witnessed a slew of party-goers clutching beer bottles, decked out in green, beads draping from their necks, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in mass crowds. I got angry. I thought, are these individuals so obtuse, so divested, that they truly don’t care about anyone over the age of seventy?

I hear people politicizing the outbreak, claiming that it’s a democratic hoax, propaganda being fed to a panicking public, and I’m left grappling to understand how an international health emergency came to be regarded as a partisan issue. To me it’s on par with attributing cancer to a blue state or a red state or arguing that a virus prefers a bleeding liberal over a staunch republican as its gracious host.  

I know we are all collectively grateful this virus doesn’t seem to pose a fatal threat to our children. But, I feel the need to ask the question, what if it were the youngest members of our society, our toddlers, preschoolers, and preteens dying at a rate of 3% around the globe from this pandemic? What if doctors were being forced to triage our first graders, to decide which child gets a ventilator or a hospital bed? I can pretty much guarantee Chicagoans wouldn’t be out, carousing in the streets, clanging together pints of Guinness. Don’t our mothers and nanas, our dads and grandpas, not to mention those in our society who are immunocompromised, deserve the same reverence?

My mom and I spoke on the phone this morning and before we hung up, we both agreed that it’s a blessing that my dad is no longer here. We didn’t say it to be callous, but after years of fighting to keep him alive with less than 15% heart functioning, it’s a relief not to be worried about him during this crisis. I think about all the families with elderly relatives in nursing homes and loved ones in hospitals around the globe. How terrifying it must be to live with that vulnerability every day, the fact that they have no control over an invisible threat that would be catastrophic. They must rely on the goodness, the generosity and moral obligation of strangers to socially distance, so that their beloveds may be granted a fighting chance.   

It’s true that it goes against human instinct to retract in a time of crisis, to abstain from reaching out a hand, offering a hug or seeking solace in someone’s touch. And yet, I’m buoyed by the resilience I’m seeing on local social media sites and though my calls and chats with friends. People are posting academic e-lessons and sharing ideas for safe outdoor scavenger hunts and shamrock searches.  I’ve spoken to my sister and brother more in these past few days than I did during the entire month of February.

“Let’s touch base every day,” my sister says and I hear the same innate need to connect reflected in her voice.

“Yes, 100%,” I answer. “It’s something to look forward to.” 

My husband told me the other night that he overheard our five-year-old talking to her Barbie mermaids in the bathtub. King Triton had lined up all of his daughters and was interviewing them one at a time, inquiring if any had contracted the coronavirus. One brave mermaid spoke up and admitted she had been sneezing and was bleeding from her tail. Later, as I was collecting the damp towels off the tile, I spotted the lone mermaid squatting in the corner of the tub, quarantined from the rest.

She’ll be fine though. She’s young and healthy with a two-inch waist and an enviable frock of thick magenta hair. Besides, I’m confident they have some solid Netflix programming under the sea. All this to say, if my preschooler can figure it out, please, respect the call to socially distance. As much as you can. It’s quite literally saving lives.

And if that isn’t enough of an incentive, I promise when this is nightmare is all over to visit your home and adulate you with compliments on how impossibly clean you keep your vases.

Baba and The Mouse

Disclosure: Animals were harmed in the making of this blog. Fair warning to all PETA advocates: I support you, except for rodents (and bugs).

The mouse and my 94-year-old widowed grandmother have been cohabitating for six weeks now. It is far from a consensual arrangement. The woman survived a world war, childbirth in a 1940's Catholic hospital, a rare form of blood cancer, several hip replacements, and the loss of Downton Abbey on PBS. And yet, somehow this meager rodent has enfeebled her.  She is beside herself. And truthfully, I don’t blame her.

It started with a single squeak in the cavernous black of night. Baba flung open her eyes, alert, anxious, unsure if she had dreamt the sound. She waited, stiffened her limbs under the sheet, straining to decipher fact from fiction. When it came again, a high-pitched whimper followed by a rustling in the hall, she hollered into the vastness, her voice hoarse with age and fractured sleep. She struck her cane against the bed frame, making such a racket that her intruder wouldn’t dare mistake her room for a recreational playground. In the morning, after limping to the kitchen to brew her chicory coffee, she spotted five inky turds dotting the countertops.

Evidence.

Baba closed her eyes, remembering what her late husband had spouted over the years when they suspected vermin had breached the basement. “There’s never just one.” 

She knew right then, she was no longer alone. In fact, she was probably outnumbered.

The cavalry (aka my mother, my uncle, my siblings, my husband, I, and a few selfless neighbors) arrived in shifts throughout the next day, bearing traps, glue boards, and peanut butter. Baba drummed her fingers on her cheek, waiting for evening, picturing her nocturnal interlopers rousing from slumber, stretching their joints, their pointed noses curiously sniffing the air, now subtly perfumed by peanut oil. As she dressed for bed, Baba wishfully beckoned them out of crevices and closets and cracks, inviting their whiskers to fan out, to become bewitched by the delicacies lain bare on innocuous rectangles of wood until…SNAP.

Right before dawn, still tortured and awake, she rejoiced in the metal-clanging glory of two traps ensnaring prey. With that behind her, she was able to succumb to the delirium of early morning slumber, the peaceful sleep that rewards a host after bidding adieu to unwanted guests.

“We got them both,” she bragged into the phone a few hours later, swirling the last of her coffee in the chipped mug painted with red poppies.

I could hear the smile lingering on her face.

“I’m so glad, Baba,” I answered, cracking my neck, relieved our arsenal had worked.

It was then I heard the yelp, so suffocated I almost mistook it for a hiccup.

“There’s a third,” she strangled out, her voice low and muffled. “She’s staring at me right now from the corner of the kitchen.”

“She?” I probed, briefly amused by the assuredness with which my grandmother had assigned the feminine pronoun to an androgynous pest.

“It’s definitely a she. I killed her brother and her husband and now she’s taunting me. She knows I can’t move fast enough to catch her and now, just watch; she won’t venture onto any of the other traps.”

“Baba, that’s ridiculous. It’s a mouse. It’s brain is the size of a dust mote. The only thing she knows is instinct, not logic.” I halted, recognizing how quickly I had adopted the “she”.

“No, she’s smart,” Baba countered. “You’re not the one looking at her.”

The next morning, Baba lumbered into the kitchen and found a desecrated bag of Skinny Pop, half-gnawed popcorn kernels strewn over the linoleum. Three days later, with peanut butter dehydrating in the open air, we replaced all the traps with Skinny Pop.

“Maybe she has a nut allergy,” I suggested to my mom that evening. “She’s meticulously evaded the peanut butter, but I think she has a weakness for salt.”

My mom flashed me a wry smile. “So, you think it’s a ‘she’ too, huh?”

“I’m starting to agree with Baba. This mouse seems to possess an uncanny amount of intelligence. You know, for a varmint with an infinitesimal sized cerebrum.”

Each night thereafter, Baba listened helplessly for the third SNAP or for the frantic squeaks billowing from one of the glue strips, but the mouse avoided each pitfall as if she'd memorized the battlefield. When I came over to check on the traps, the popcorn had been stealthily stolen without activating the traps.

She was a clever old girl.

A week elapsed before we added another dozen, supplementing the bait with bacon and aged gruyere and relocating them to the mouse's favorite hangouts. Behind the microwave. Next to the fridge. Under the walnut dresser in the front bedroom.

But the cured meat failed as spectacularly as the peanut butter and popcorn.

“My neighbor thinks it’s the nitrates,” Baba lamented. “That she can smell the preservatives in the bacon.”

I shook my head, scanning the kitchen for any shadow of movement. “That’s absurd. Unless we have the Ratatouille rodent on our hands, I don’t think she’d be that picky or give a rat’s ass about the long-term health effects of sodium nitrates. Sorry, no pun intended.”

Baba didn’t laugh. I could see her weariness in how her head slumped to the side, how little she had been sleeping, her eyes clouding with exhaustion and worry. Her back sagged into the chair.

“Emily, I can’t take it anymore. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can’t cook without worrying about leaving behind some minuscule remnants. I can’t lay in bed at night without wondering if she’s crawling around under my mattress. I don’t feel like myself. My house isn’t my own. It’s been invaded. I feel like selling it.”

I stroked her back, smoothing the fabric of her sweater, trying to comfort, to remain steadfast in my belief that we would catch the invader—that she’d be gone by the end of the week.

The mouse had begun visiting every morning while Baba ate her breakfast. She’d scoot out from behind the oven, race along the baseboards, leap over the sticky traps, and then skid to a stop in front of the fridge, vetting the air with her whiskers.  

“This morning she almost ventured close enough to me to whack her with my cane. She peered up at me, begging for a crumb, but then I shouted for her to leave me alone and she sped into the hall.”

“We’ll get her, Baba. I know we will,” I whispered, but my voice thinned out as if afraid to make promises it couldn’t keep.

Thanksgiving came and went. Weeks elapsed. We purchased a Chinese ultrasonic rodent repeller that claimed to emit a high-pitched sound, intolerable to rodents, but inconsequential to humans and other pets. The device sounded too good to be true, but I happily paid  $29.99 through Amazon Prime and waited for our miracle to arrive via one-day shipping.  

Meanwhile, the excrement accumulated. Puny pellets resembling grains of black rice tainted everything. Countertops, bedspreads, bathroom towels, the lip of the toaster. I felt terrible. This was my grandmother, reduced to living in filth, declining from her own distress. My mom begged Baba to stay at her house, to get some fresh air, just for an hour or two, to get her hair done, but she stubbornly refused. It was as if Baba had sealed her fate with that mouse and only one of them would emerge alive.

In early December, we introduced a “humane” trap into the home and baited it with tuna and hard-boiled egg. Baba claimed to have reached the point of compromise, having explained to the mouse over breakfast that she would allow it to be captured alive and released in the forest preserve. As long as it would leave imminently, she would grant a reprieve.
         I began to question her sanity and then my own. The night prior I had woken up at four in the morning in a sweaty Ambien-induced fog, having just dreamt that the mouse was, in fact, my grandfather reincarnated, coming back to visit his home and lovely wife.
        But even Baba’s negotiations proved futile. At times, I was tempted to check the doors and archways for signs of Charlotte’s infamous spider webs. Surely, they had to be somewhere, spelling out “Some Mouse” or “Radiant Rodent” or “Terrific Templeton”. After all, this mouse was no ordinary creature. Her male counterparts had been eradicated on night #1 and yet, somehow, she had managed to survive in the suburbs amid a minefield of deathtraps.

          Ultimately, we brought in the d-CON. The poison was long overdue.
        “You know this will mean this mouse is going to die in your house somewhere, burrowed in some linen closet or in the hollow of one of Grandpa’s old sneakers?” I tested Baba to ensure we had her consent.

“I don’t care about the carcass. I gave her a chance. If she’s going to be here, I’d rather have her dead than alive.” She peered up at me, her chin wobbling. “I didn’t even get to make my Christmas cookies this year.”

She spoke with such muted sorrow, so little left to claim. She didn’t drive or go anywhere unless we were taking her to the doctor or dragging her on an afternoon adventure in the wheelchair. Those Christmas cookies were her tradition, her connection to her Czech homeland. She had made them every year since she was a 21-year-old war bride. 73 straight years of whipping butter, flour and sugar into submission. They made her feel useful and worthy and alive. And this year, a rodent weighing less than an ounce had stolen that away.

“Okay, we’ll put out the poison. And Baba,” I extended my hand over her own, “that mouse will die. And once she’s dead, we’ll sterilize the kitchen and make the cookies for the New Year. I promise.”

For days, the mouse ingested pellet after pellet of poison. My husband and I kept refilling it every afternoon when we came to check and saw more had been consumed.

“How is it not dead yet? This seems obscene,” I’d beseech him.

There was a small part of me that felt bad for the mouse, for the suffering that would befall her, but all I had to do was look at my Baba, wilted as a neglected houseplant, to know I would do anything to spare her more grief.

The last time the mouse visited during breakfast was three days ago. I don’t know if Baba spoke or shook her cane or even bid her farewell. I do know she swept the poop into the bin and then sprayed the counter with bleach. She reported that the turds were tinged an unnatural shade of green.

And so, six weeks into this ordeal, ‘tis the night before Christmas.

I am straining to believe in miracles, that all through her house, not a creature is stirring, especially the mouse.

A Gentle Giant

(A poem to my Dad on what would have been his 70th birthday, 9.11.19)

As youngsters,
dwarfed by your broad shoulder,
your forearm - sturdy as a maple trunk,
we swung from your limbs like monkeys,
draped off your neck like threads of tinsel,
our feet rarely grazing the ground.

We capered over you,
our personal jungle gym
because you were rooted,
solid,
staunch as a statue,
albeit one that laughed.

My own kids never knew you like that.
But, if I really try,
if I coil inward
toward the quiet tempo of my pulse,
surrender to the drumbeat in my chest,
you begin to emerge,
unfolding before me,
a warm, breathing relic from my childhood.
The awakening of a gentle giant.

The apparition is fleeting,
but just long enough so that
I may once again feel the wind on my face,
the grass nipping my ankles,
your arm as my abiding anchor.

The Bedtime Stalling Tactic I've Made Peace With

My four-year-old is using my dad’s death as a bedtime stalling tactic. It trumps ‘I’m hungry’, ‘I’m thirsty’, ‘I’m not tired’, ‘My nightlight burnt out’, ‘My pj tag is chaffing my skin’—Every. Single. Time. She’s no dummy. As soon as “I miss Grandpa” tumbles from her pouted lips, she knows I’m as smearable as butter. I’m not going to just shoo her back into her dark bedroom with a stern look and a pat on the bum.  Those three magic words are met with a sympathetic nod, a hug, a rubbing of noses, a kiss on the forehead.  Missing her dead grandfather earns her a few extra minutes of mom lingering in her room at night, smoothing the bedsheet over her limbs and scratching the crook of her elbow. Asking WHY he had to die typically reaps two bonus lullabies. They’re practically dessert.

I know she’s manipulating me, but I’m putty in my grief, stretching to her whims and words in my mindful attempt to make death something she can always ask me about, to nurture the few memories she may still have of him, to keep him vibrant in her rapidly expanding mind.

She was newly three when he died. I have perhaps two memories from when I was three, from a trip we took as a family to the Czech Republic. Both of them are flimsy and unreliable. I’m not even convinced that they are free-standing or if they instead grew out of the sepia photographs from that trip like a potato that sprouts roots.

I know my dad is slipping through time for her. It’s been a year and a half, a third of her entire life. His presence is being replaced by compound words and playground etiquette and capital and lowercase and the names of her preschool classmates. He’s irrelevant to her until the sun sets and the bedroom curtains close.

Even when my dad was here, near the end, he mostly existed in the periphery, a prop that accompanied my mom on her babysitting visits, quiet, sullen, like a raincoat you might hang up at the door.  Sure, he played restaurant with my daughter, sitting on the couch while she piled plastic food on his lap, making sure he sampled each of his dishes. Sure, he nodded off as she built castles out of Magna-Tiles on the rug around his feet and then smiled bleary-eyed when she’d shake him awake. But, he wasn’t animated, teaching her how to grip a bat in the backyard or carrying her on his back like a balding pony. He didn’t have the energy to be alive with her, to spark those moments that create memory in a toddler’s brain. By that time, he wasn’t capable of investing in his own legacy.

A few weeks ago, she began using him not only at bedtime, but when cranky or in the midst of being scolded in attempt to soften my resolve. She’ll sob and retreat, only to find me later, tears streaming down smooth cheeks, claiming to be missing him. She knows that Grandpa’s absence is an acceptable reason to cry, as opposed to being denied cookie dough Pop-tarts for dinner. She knows that I will indulge her with sympathy, her own personal get-out-of-jail-free card. In his heyday, I realize my dad may have even been proud of her for this. It’s genius.

But, her ploys were growing tiresome and overused, causing me to wonder if her constant insistence on missing him was conditioning my own mourning, dulling the significance of his loss like the boy who cried wolf. I stopped humoring melancholic Grandpa claims after she’d lose at a game of Uno or smack her sister in reproach.

“Really?’ I’d ask in a level voice, attempting to disguise my cynicism. “What is it that you miss about him, specifically?”

Typically, that would shut it down.

Until yesterday afternoon in a store, after denying her request to buy LOL charm cotton-candy scented bath fizz for $12.99 that was chocked full of parabens and chemicals and just about epitomized everything that was wrong with America, she began to cry harder as we exited through the automatic doors.

With tears splashing her pink unicorn sandals, she gulped repeatedly and peered up at me with wet eyes. “Mommy, I miss Grandpa, but mostly I’m afraid of forgetting him. What if I really do forget Grandpa?”

I stopped cold, her hand still in mine as her little body swung back to face me. It was my turn to swallow, my tears now hitting the blacktop outside the entrance to Bed, Bath, and Beyond because I didn’t know how to form the words. I didn’t know how to tell her the truth: “Sweetie, you probably will. In fact, you probably already have.”

But, I didn’t say that. Instead, I blubbered, “You won’t, honey. Don’t worry. We’ll talk about him tonight. I’ll scratch your back and we’ll remember him together.”

It’s five minutes. Two extra songs. A stall tactic for sure, but I realize it won’t last.

A man’s legacy, just might.  

I Stayed

Before we were married, I promised my then-future husband that I would stand by him in sickness, health and hair loss.

“You can count on me,” I told him earnestly while feeding each other bites of Chunky Monkey ice cream from a shared spoon in bed. (We were once adorable). “Except for two scenarios,” I qualified. “If at any point our kids get lice or our house becomes infested with bed bugs, all bets are off. I might leave the state. I cannot guarantee you that I’ll stay.” I stared at him without apology.

“Oh, come on,” he waved me off, half-chuckling.

I gripped his arm for emphasis, halting the dairy consumption. “No, really. I’m not kidding.”

You see, it’s not the bugs themselves, as long as they hunker down in their natural habitats, buzzing over daffodils and dog shit with the same uncivilized partiality. I allow them to roam free in my backyard, dodging chirpy robins and nocturnal bats. I’m even tolerant of the basement invaders, given the fact that when it comes to being underground, chances are that they were there first. To those silverfish and prehistoric centipedes, I say, if the dark corners of my storage unit are your utopia, then have at it. We’ll never be Besties and if I catch you venturing out, you’ll be subject to the “scream and squash”, but I’m not going to abandon suburbia over it.

What I can’t handle with any rational human composure are bugs in my living space, confined, cornered or contained within my toddler-hand-print-smeared walls. When they cross the threshold into my domain and venture upstairs, adhere themselves to my mattress or to my limp hair follicles, then I get crazed.

The night I found several translucent blood-sucking pediculosis capitis crawling along my three-year old’s scalp during bath time, my husband was at work. Conveniently. The same place he was the night our fire alarm started chirping at two a.m. AND the morning I broke my foot in the entryway AND the afternoon a trio of hornets took up residence in our upstairs bathroom. I don’t blame him for the timing. At least not entirely, but emergencies due tend to befall our household during his absences.

For a brief moment after I discovered the lice, I froze in my kneeled position on the floor, staring at the critters as shampoo suds dripped off my wrist, contemplating if I could abandon my two girls in four-inches of lukewarm bath water and sprint out the door until I reached Indiana. They’d eventually towel off on their own and put their pjs on, right? My six-year-old would figure it out. She knew the drill—how to set the toothbrush timer, sing “My Favorite Things” and turn on the twenty-seven nightlights that make our house shine like a beacon in the night.

But, then I beheld their naked little bodies, pink and puckered from a warm soak. My preschooler announced with glee that she had written the number “3” with a bath crayon on the side of the tub—blissful ignorance oozed from her toothy smile, naïve to the gruesome ectoparasites sucking the blood out of her head at that very moment. My emergency maternal instinct kicked in and I dialed Hair Butterflies. 

The name of the only lice-removal hair-salon in our town borders on offensive for how blatantly it attempts to evoke serenity.  No parent is calling at nine p.m. to eradicate monarchs from their offspring. Nevertheless, they offer a 24-hour answering service.

The store owner peppered me with questions, predominately about price. “Did I understand that the after-hours rate in the salon was three times the standard amount?”

“Yes, fine,” I spit out. Did he understand I was fully prepared to drain my checking account in order to eradicate the invader? This was as hostage situation and I was fully prepared to pay ransom.

An hour later, my daughters and I were doused in peppermint oil, combed out strand by strand, and probed for nits. My six-year-old and I were deemed clear, although I would spend the next seventy-two hours clawing at my scalp with the dedication only a hyena devotes to a carcass. My leprous three-year-old sat, happy as a rat at the county fair, with her iPad and a lollipop, oblivious to why her head was covered in a goop and tied down in a shower-cap. When we returned home, I sanitized the bedsheets in scalding water, vacuumed the carpets, and banished an army of stuffed animals and dolls to the freezer. Three days later, I would discover there is nothing creepier than a pair of frost-bitten plastic eyes peeking out through a Ziploc bag behind the Home Run Inn Pizza.

That incident alone should have proven my devotion. I assumed I had paid my dues, until one morning this spring I woke up scratching and discovered bites tracking down my right leg. My breath sputtered out in gasps. I resorted to birthing-class Lamaze. Could it be? NO. Not a chance. I had just returned from Europe, but I was careful. Neurotic even. Pulling back every hotel mattress pad, scouring luggage racks, and quarantining my suitcase in the downstairs laundry room to unpack. I tore apart the bed, the mattress, the box springs. I carried in extra lamps and had my girls stand on chairs with flashlights. Nothing. Not one blood smear, molted exoskeleton, or scrap of bug-sized fecal matter.

I texted my husband at work, convinced that I must have gotten the bites abroad, relieved that our house was still a safe haven, until he began to respond—unaware those reassuring little dots were foreshadowing impending doom.  

I hate to tell you this…I was going to wait until I got home, but I have them too.

I tried to unsee the words as they blurred and clouded my phone’s display, but there was no denying what this meant. The invaders were in our abode.

The kids and I ran a slew of errands to escape the contamination. When my husband came home, we attacked the master bedroom, vacuuming nightstands and ceiling fans and closet corners, bushy with dust bunnies. Sweating and spent, we sat on the striped mattress pad without a single insect in sight until my husband shot up and exclaimed, “It must be the couch!”

After a half-hour of probing through the thick folds of a twenty-year-old microfiber dinosaur, we assessed our haul: two mismatched kid socks, a filthy penny, six popcorn kernels, half of a rock-hard granola bar, a purple beaded necklace, and several plastic Shopkins, likely suffering from dust-induced asthma.

“We need to call in the dogs,” I declared. “I read about these specially trained canines that can sniff out bed bugs.”

“That’s ridiculous,” my husband countered. “How many hundreds of dollars do they want for that racket?”

“$350 and it’s worth every penny. I refuse to be that family. The outcasts, the pariahs, branded with a scarlet ‘A’. Our friends will never want to visit. Our children will be ostracized. Not to mention, I have no idea how I’m going to sleep tonight, all exposed like that goat in Jurassic Park—the one with the rope draped around its neck in the T Rex enclosure, bleating for the predator come out and rip into my succulent calf.”

My husband furrowed his brow. “Are we talking about you or the goat?”

“We’re one and the same!” I bellowed. “I warned you about this before we were married.”

“I thought you were being hyperbolic.” 

And then I exhibited one of my finer moments of adulthood and shouted back, “Do you even know me at all?!”

In the end, we got the dogs and an exterminator because again, ransom payments. Neither found any evidence of bed bugs, but the pest control inspector discovered three spider egg sacs adhered to the underbelly of our ancient couch. After vomiting in my mouth, I merrily wrote the check and exiled the sofa. Within a day, the adulterated couch was tossed and to my husband’s effusive delight, we spent Masters Tournament weekend shopping for replacement furniture.  

All in all, our marriage has withstood and prevailed. We have a new sofa that doesn’t eat people and I didn’t leave. I stayed. I haven’t fed him ice cream since before we said “I do”, but I didn’t move to Indiana. And to me, that’s pretty damn romantic.

Auld Lang Syne

This anxiousness is new. December 31st. The waiting as the hours tick onward, obliviously, obediently, without remorse, into another year. Another January. A year is closing behind us. A year in which my dad existed. For twenty-two days, but still. He breathed. He napped. He spoke. He gummed down low-sodium pulled pork sandwiches delivered on hospital trays.

Ushering in 2019 feels like another loss. My dad’s left us already, but tonight at midnight, we—my family and I—will leave him. We’ll all awake tomorrow morning, the pillowcase damp with drool, the mattress warm, the sheet rucked, the silver sun beneath the shade—and we’ll toast frozen waffles and swirl our coffee with milk. But, a door will have closed in the night, one that he cannot follow us through. Not really. Not in the flesh. And I can’t help but feel like I’m somehow betraying him.  

It’s an odd journey, this calendar of grief, marking time, fighting the distance that you both need and resent, in order to move forward. I was dreading this day more than the holidays, more than the anniversary of his passing just on the horizon. Perhaps it’s the finality of it. I know he isn’t coming back. I’ve known that for a while now. I think I even knew that when he was still alive, but so diminished from disease that he turned to shadow. But, tonight. Tonight is a punctuation mark.

There’s something about reaching the end of the calendar year, sealing all our baggage inside a tidy box and sending it off in the explosion of fireworks, buzz of noisemakers, and showers of confetti. We guzzle Prosecco and recite a 230-year old Scottish poem and drink to times long past, to old friends. We count down from ten and magically our load is lightened. We seduce the coming year with promises of being a better wife, a more patient mother, a more doting daughter. We vow and fantasize and throw out the stale Christmas cookies. We stop cursing for a day and buy yoga pants. We put down our smart phones and read a book. We splurge on flowers in the winter. We light a $38 candle. Because why not? 

We get our tabula rasa. A clear conscience. A new start. Except.
Except for the years when January 1st seems more like an end.

Dad, oh how I wish you could come with us...

Even if just for auld lang syne.
Even if only for twenty-two days. 

Princeton

Dear Dad,

It’s been almost seven months and I rarely think about you sick anymore. Mostly when you come to me now, you are tan, energized, sinew and muscle, your face reflecting one of a myriad of expressions from my youth: Your burst of elation behind a softball fence after Amy or I strike out the clean-up hitter. Your pursed-lip pause, preparing your delivery before you relay a joke. Your singular focus while scooping buttered lima beans up to your mouth or scraping the extra tomato sauce off a pizza. Your engrossed scrutiny of the Bear’s offensive line in the Red zone with that brief flicker of your eyelids as you straighten your glasses above the nose.  

I can conjure up your sounds and smells with wine-glass clarity. Other memories materialize surreptitiously like a bur, adhering to my clothing, attaching to me without my even being aware. Like the morning in the cemetery when you taught me to drive in the portly red cargo van or the afternoon we peered out at the Grand Canyon, dizzy from its magnitude. Each recollection finds me like a lovely accident, a trigger from a time elapsed; a brief hiatus permitting me to wade in wistfulness for a while, leaving me homesick for you to return to us.

I hear the pad of your worn running shoes on the pavement next to me as we jog. Your breath spewing out in forceful gusts, your body consuming, disposing, recycling air. I hear you calling me ‘Emmy’ from the bottom of the stairs at home. You were only person who ever called me that.  I miss it….the sugar-dusted endearment, the soft familiarity of your greeting. I hear the jangle of your laugh as it rumbles out of you with abandon, striking a high note and then dissolving into a cough, like it caught even you off guard. Then the smile, still lingering on your face: an offering of respect to whatever earned your amusement. I haven’t heard that sound in such a long time. You stopped laughing years before you left.  It’s stubborn to access, to really pin it down, but I resurrected it on my walk the other day and it stopped me cold. Reliving your laugh made me sob.

I smell you too. Not the soured medicine scent that sat with you in sickness. That blows past me like some stranger tipping a cigarette out a passing car. What lingers are the smells of my childhood. The warm, stuffy foulness of the single bathroom we all shared down in Marco after you exited clutching the newspaper and whipped on the exhaust. (It was always ill-advised to follow you if reading material was involved.)  I can still smell the bar soap on your skin after a shower, even though you’d be sweating through your shirt five minutes later. I smell ham frying, crackling and sizzling on the kitchen skillet with the Villager’s white lunch paper slapped on the counter, the expiration date several days past. I smell charcoal from the barbeque. Chlorine from the pool. Pert Plus shampoo. Wood dust from the hardware store. The fragrance of old flannel while hugging your neck.

You weren’t fancy. I could pick your tatty toothbrush and greased comb out of a lineup with ease. We all could. You didn’t need much for yourself, but you longed to give us everything. And you did. You found mom. Right there, that was everything. You couldn’t have chosen a better mother for us. You couldn’t have gifted us a better life.

You injected us with confidence. You were relentless when it came to practicing sports, but you made sure we reached our plateau. For one brief snippet of time in our little corner of River Forest, I could actually say I was the best at something. You infected us with hunger, the drive to excel. I know with every fiber of my being that had you not gotten sick, Bridget would already be catching with her glove. You would have been blown away by the athletic prowess of your grandsons, pacing proudly on the sidelines of Brady’s soccer games, perched on the bleachers at Jack’s wrestling meets. And 3-year-old Grace, well, you’d chuckle when she’d argue with you over how to grip the t-ball bat. You’d be endlessly amused at her bossiness.

As we tour your University campus, misty with rain, I picture you here, darting under archways, turning corners, hustling to wrestling practice, running laps in the football stadium: A shadow in constant motion at an age younger than me now. Your original self in this place. Before Mom. Before all of us. Before air-conditioned student centers and WiFi. But, I attended your reunions, chubby-cheeked in tiger apparel and then later, lean and awkward in bright orange shorts. The last one I came to, I was pregnant with your granddaughter. Over the years, I detected the pride in your voice. I know you were happy here. Happy enough to pretend to tear up my Stanford tuition checks. I suspect you found your stride: You left home. You made friends. You exceled. You grew into yourself.

I am humbled to walk over this old colonial ground. Many feet have tread here. I wonder if any of our footprints lined up, yours and mine. If I have, at any point today, managed to step, even partially in your big shoes. I have peace that you trust our judgment to leave a bit of you behind in this dirt, a home that once absorbed your salt and your sweat. We leave you in dust to settle where you might, to mingle with the sanctity of this place, its storied history. We leave you to soak into the earth, to grow with the bark of some tree, a blade of grass, a seed of a dandelion. Just as you once grew into a man here.

As we move on and forward as a family, toward September 11^th, your 69^th birthday that will never come, toward holidays without you flanking the dining room table, the firsts will all be tender, skin grafts over a burn. The subsequent years are destined to be less raw. In my grief, I am meanwhile savoring the moments that visit me, sometimes as ephemeral and fleeting as a hummingbird in a garden. Graceful moments that both assault and comfort me at the most random, arbitrary occasions: Embracing the jarring reaction a can of Coke provokes in line at the Jewel, the tears that are triggered by an orange shirt passing up and away by escalator, the heartache of an empty clay baseball diamond at sunset.

I have encountered you on walks, while driving in the car, in my tumbling thoughts before sleep, as I chop vegetables, and while staring out of airplane windows, wondering where you are. Where you went. Distantly aware you are somehow in all these places, everywhere at once, coiled and ready to remind me the next time I smell burnt ham that you are far, but not so far.

Love you, Dad.