Minnie Turns 152. Emily Turns 41.

Trigger Warning: Loss / Cemeteries

Yesterday afternoon, on my 41^st birthday, I meandered into the cemetery across the street. It’s a place I’ve frequented during the pandemic, drawn by some insatiable quest to replenish, to carve out quiet and solitude away from foot traffic and blaring car radios. Maybe to hide from all the bad news.

            A cemetery may sound like a rather macabre place to spend an hour of one’s birthday, but I find it’s one of the few spaces that imparts instantaneous perspective, whether it’s the open sky, the vigor from exercise, or the innumerable gravestones. It’s hard to feel as though you lack the upper hand when you’re the only living, breathing human around. And yesterday, I needed that. To look out, rather than in.

            Birthdays like New Years’ can be tethered to the expectation of celebration and merriment and yet, as I grow older, both occasions seem to deliver more wistfulness and nostalgia for the years that came before—for the moments and crossroads that cannot be revisited, let alone reshaped—than for anticipation of what lurks around the corner.

            As author Robert Dugoni writes in his best-selling novel, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, “There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.” The same may be true for us women, except we’re surely multi-tasking as we peer into the rearview.

            According to a 2019 NCHS study, the life expectancy of a female in the US was 81. COVID has slashed that by nearly 2 years. So, at 41, who’s to say whether there’s more sand above or below me. To presume flirts with arrogance, but it’s also downright foolish. Regardless, I awoke yesterday with a vexing weight in my chest. A case of the doldrums. I drank my tea before tending to the trash littering our driveway: a swell of crumbled wrappers, rotten tomatoes, blackened banana peels, and soggy paper towels that the raccoons had ransacked and then urinated on during the wee hours. As I brushed scurrying ants from my wrists, I tried not to dry-heave. Afterwards, I showered, changed, and smiled at the texts streaming in on my iPhone. I replied with hearts and blowing-kiss emojis, lest I seem ungrateful. And I was grateful. I am grateful. I was humbled by every phone call and Facebook message, but my melancholic pall only persisted. 

            By mid-afternoon, disgusted with my own moping, I buckled my ultra-cool Fanny Pack around my waist, the one I stole from my daughter’s parade bag one 4^th of July when the local librarians lobbed 1980’s belly pouches at the crowd instead of Tootsie Rolls. I tied up my sneakers, secured my earbuds, and set out in spandex for the cemetery.

            The circuit takes me around 50 minutes to complete if I power walk, a calculation that is important to bear in mind, given that the caretaker locks the imposing iron gates promptly at 17:00 hours, regardless of the souls (dead or alive) trapped inside.  

            Typically, I head south, striding past the entrance statue, two stone hands raised in prayer, and continue down a shaded road lined with Elms to section 21—the most tender part of the route, marked with a meager sign that reads, “Babyland”. Only once did I wander among those 100 or so grave markers. To do so again, would be wrenching and I’m simply not brave enough. Most of the infants and toddlers buried here died in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. The majority have the same year etched on either side of their respective dash, some with teddy bears and pastoral lambs carved onto the rockfaces.

            One weekend last winter, after an impressive Chicago blizzard, I’d trudged through the cemetery’s crudely plowed streets. Salt pellets had rendered the roads passable, although tire treads and footprints had turned the slush a dingy, ashen gray. But beyond the road, virginal snow shrouded the grass and graves for several weeks, undisturbed and beatific like a white blanket of wool. I could almost pretend those little grave markers weren’t there, tucked in under the elements—that all those children had in fact survived and grown up to be engineers and meteorologists, parents and world travelers.

            Further down the pot-holed road hangs a sign that reads, “Select Singles”, which never fails to make me cringe. It seems a strange, borderline inappropriate way to label this sectioned-off parcel as though it is facilitating some sort of afterlife dating pool. Beloved sister. Dear Aunt. Dad. I wonder about these strangers, worry they died alone, worry that all of their possessions were emptied into a dumpster after poorly-attended funerals, certain that For Sale signs were staked in their front lawns while any surviving pets were relegated to shelters. I can only hope these “select singles” aren’t shaking their heads, lamenting about their first edition Steinbeck novels that ended up in garage sales or their cash-stuffed tin cans still buried under backyard peach trees.

            From Bachelorville, I cross the bike path that bisects the cemetery and approach one of the older sections. I pass the Schroeder family plot where Robert and Martha, born in the mid-19^th century, are buried with their five children, none of whom survived past their twentieth birthday. I pass Mabel Bott’s rose-hued granite headstone and August Horn’s deteriorating grey one, buckling from the protruding roots of an ancient Oak. I pass Charles and Emma Shoup who died in 1920, one month apart, and Otto and Mary Priebe’s cylindrical headstones that resemble logs around a campfire. I smile at Bertha Blessing’s headstone, one of my personal favorites. She lived to be 86 and I’m convinced she was enchanting with a name like Bertha Blessing. A doting grandmother who smelled like honey drops and freshly baked bread.

            Most of the people in this section never made it to 50, let alone 81, having been born into the world before antibiotics or chemotherapy, a time when contracting strep throat or stepping on a nail could be your ultimate demise. While my feet shuffle forward, I conduct mental math, pondering what caused each person’s passing. It dawns on me that my walk is no different than my mother’s enigmatic obsession with newspaper obituaries. Although, I can’t recall if she admits to feeling invigorated or beholden when she discovers the deceased is older or younger than her.  

            At the crossroads, I choose left and I’m doused in afternoon sunshine. My bare skin drinks it in like lemonade. The days are getting shorter and soon I will be treading this path bundled in fleece. There are fewer trees on this side and after a long summer, the grass is brittle and yellow in patches. My gaze drifts several rows ahead where in August 2020, I encountered a shiny mylar balloon tied to a stake, blowing in the breeze. Happy 40^th was spelled out in oversized red letters. Curious, I’d crept up to the stone marker and furrowed my brow. Camilla Voss. August 2, 1980 – November 19, 2008. She’d died twelve years prior but someone was still bringing her balloons. She would’ve been 40 that year, just like me. The balloon is long gone now, but the plastic garden stake remains, sticking out of the earth like a stem without a flower.

            When I reach the perimeter, I round the southeast corner where on the other side, empty El trains wait their turn to pick up passengers bound for downtown. A few months prior, lightening split an Elm down the middle with the precision of a lumber jack, leaving behind a stump that is worthy of The Giving Tree. Beyond the stump, obscured by a thicket of bushes, vehicles whiz by along six lanes of the Eisenhower. Every so often, random bursts of country or heavy metal music emanate from stereos. I turn the volume up on my earbuds to drown out the ambient hum and kick the acorns out of my way. 

            Half-way down the road, I admire my favorite tree from afar, the sugar maple I stood beneath one warm day last fall when the wind was coaxing the scarlet leaves from their branches. I’d raised my arms and the leaves whirled around me like confetti, a kaleidoscope of reds and oranges and corals so vibrant that I felt as though I’d beckoned a sunset. In the shade of that tree, is a porcelain image of George T. Walzak, a young soldier in his WWII army uniform, who died at the age of 90 in 2010. His gravestone bears the epitaph I find etched over and over throughout the cemetery. Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shephard; I shall not want.”

            Maybe that’s my problem, I think. I do want. I want a whole lot.

            By the time I reach the western edge, I already smell the river. Dank and earthy. Like an upturned wood pile. As I veer right, the pavement is almost always damp and snippets of flowing water are visible through the chain link and under bush. The river is maybe 60 feet across and more brown than blue. Truthfully, in direct sunlight, the surface appears almost green, the shade of baby food pouches that adulterate perfectly delicious fruit with spinach. At the next clearing, I pause to listen to the frogs and wait until a serpentine stick floating downstream disappears from view.

            Once I zig-zag over the bike path, I’m ¾ of the way through my route. I stare out at the menagerie of headstones and pointy obelisks, stretching skyward, and I wonder what some of those men might have been compensating for. I think of the poor doctor who commissioned his own mausoleum just around the bend. William Molden, whose wife Lina died in childbirth, leaving him with a son who ended up dying in infancy five months later. Exquisite tragedy can be decoded in numbers. He had pedigree and money, but nothing spares a human from loss.

            Nearby, a black walnut tree has dropped a slew of fruit. The road is littered with bright green orbs so numerous it’s as though someone abandoned a pee-wee tennis lesson. But I don’t stop to admire the harvest. Instead, I am scanning for her, trying to recall where I first spotted the modest grave more than six months before while zipped into my parka, fingers tingling inside heated gloves. The slate carvings are weathered, but legible. Minnie Karner, September 25, 1869 - August 6, 1924. She’s the only one I’ve found thus far.

            Happy 152^nd birthday, Minnie. I’m sorry I didn’t bring any balloons.

            On the final stretch, I pass the open field where the Canadian geese congregate, defiling the adjacent road in excrement so I’m intentional with my steps. The geese generally ignore me or else stare on in disdain as do the occasional deer that dart amongst the gravestones, helping themselves to a Kentucky bluegrass buffet. It’s unusual if I encounter more than one or two people on my circuit. Sometimes I cross paths with a bicyclist pedaling toward the Prairie Path or a landscaper, clearing a dead tree or planting marigolds. I rarely, if ever, see anyone visiting graves and I wonder, especially with the older ones, if people still grieve for them. If a human lifespan averages 80 years, our ultimate purview is only a generation or two longer. We are mortal after all, merely passing through, borrowing the earth for a dusting of geological time. Our legacies are finite and forgettable. And while that’s sobering, it doesn’t necessarily make me sad.  

            After he died, my dad wasn’t buried in a cemetery, instead he was cremated, ashes scattered in places that constituted the fulcrums of his life. As a result, I can’t claim a formal location where I mourn him and yet, I’ve discovered I don’t need a plot of land to find or revere him. I connect with him here on this walk as much as in any quiet reflective moment. I have wondered if he is proud of me, if he finds the grandkids amusing. I’ve asked him, futilely of course, if he might grant me the privilege of hearing him speak my name one more time. Often, I catch myself trying to conjure his laugh. It’s a sound I never want to forget and at the same time I recognize, after my mother, my siblings, and I are all gone that no one will remain to evoke it.  

            As I plod along the winding driveway to the exit, I am listening to my audiobook, John Green’s Anthropocene Reviewed, and he’s talking about the concept of time and loss. He writes “I wish I wasn’t so scared all the time- scared of the virus, yes, but there is also some deeper fear: the terror of time passing, and me with it . . . I will never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment. Just as you will not speak to many of the people who loved you into your now.”

            I hear the heartbeat in such language, the pulse almost tangible. His words burrow into my skin and find refuge there. I recognize their meaning. His prose is so precise I can only equate John Green to a safe-cracker, listening to and sensing the give of the dial in a combination lock until . . . there, a click. And the metal latch breaks open.  

            I wonder about Minnie Karner‘s laugh. If it was high-pitched or rattled in her rib cage, causing her to keel over to catch her breath. I wonder if her husband made her laugh or her girlfriends or maybe the man she’d wanted to marry but couldn’t. I wonder if her own daughter ever tried to conjure it.

            Thinking about Minnie, how can I not feel anything but gratitude on a day where I am walking on this sacred ground, crunching tinderous leaves underfoot while she is below? In the final block before home, the shadow of an afternoon moon melds into focus like a Hidden Pictures puzzle. Minnie and I were born on the same day, 111 years apart. All of her moonrises are behind her. But my dash is open-ended. Less punctuation, more promise. My own wants, still unfurling.

 

*Note: Names have been altered to preserve privacy

How my Dead Father Found me a Job

While the title smacks of hyperbole, of stretching and tossing truth like pizza dough for dramatic effect, my dad really did giftwrap a new career for me. Almost three years to the day after he died. Hand on heart.

                Hyatt Hotels was my employer for seventeen years, the length of an entire childhood—milk to Miller Lite. They took me in, doe-eyed and blinking, my first real job out of college in a post-9/11 haze. What stands out in that inaugural year of professional triumph is one Tuesday eight-hour-shift when all I did was fry chicken wings for 1000+ guests. But I learned perseverance and patience from that tedious poultry encounter and somehow managed to ascend to several different properties and positions throughout my Hyatt tenure, all while avoiding Buffalo marinade.

                By May of last year though, I was sacked—one of the thousands of hospitality employees upended after our industry evaporated like coyote piss in the desert. On shaky newborn legs, I embraced my fate, surrendering to a cruel reminder—that the assumption of being in control is merely kindling for some of life’s greatest bonfires. I had forgotten the old adage: When man plans, God laughs. To me though, the cackling sounded rather gleeful. Smug, even. Many days that spring, the celestial hilarity hurt my ears.

                Undeterred, I crammed my summer with writing, mothering, laundering facemasks, and swallowing translucent vitamin-D softgels after some HuffPost article claimed they were COVID’s kryptonite. I consulted with my career coach and my best friend from college who whipped my fossilized resume into shape and made it sing with key phrases like collaborative advisor and strategic analysis until it was opera-worthy. I honed my pitch and upgraded to LinkedIn Premium. I colored my damn parachute. I composed lyrical cover letters, regretting that the digital age precluded me from dabbing them in seductive fragrances like gardenia and baby freesia, a nod to Legally Blonde. By night, I perseverated, spinning my weaknesses into strengths like a circus contortionist, and by day, I networked with the level of gusto usually reserved for scouring the planet for the perfect bone marrow donor.

                Change in itself is no bunny hill. Career shifts can feel like Kilimanjaro. I learned that worthy guides and proper gear are essential. No one should be climbing it alone. 

                The challenge with professional reinvention is akin to running backwards—such a clumsy crusade to propel oneself away from everything familiar while relying on swift over-the-shoulder glances to avoid smacking straight into a wall. I hit that wall. Several times.  

                At my lowest point, I may have even engaged in a pep talk with my sister’s Goldendoodle. Although, when he responded by licking his privates, my destiny appeared rather grim. After all, the message was clear: Slush-pile resumes succumb to slow, anonymous deaths. The only way I was going to find a new job was through someone I knew. I just didn’t realize at the time that my someone wouldn’t be alive.  

                When my father died three years ago, I couldn’t have fathomed the many ways in which he would continue to impact my life. And not just in the cliché sense of carrying on his memory, his Olympic-sized competitive spirit, his grit-toothed lessons of fortitude, or even his devotion to carbohydrates. Instead, I’m referring to moments when I’ve been aware of some elusive, spectral presence stirring the pot or manipulating the marionette strings in my favor. I picture him in a cloudburst, hovering over me like a body guard with an oversized Costco umbrella. He’s there in service, unobtrusive and quiet as a luxury car engine, providing shelter and sanctuary. Sometimes, I even forget it’s raining.  

                By November, I was still coming up short in the career department . . . gradually . . . deliberately . . . combing for my next move. And while I was adamant about being intentional—rather than humping every available job post and ending up a miserable, hungover bride after her off-strip-Vegas wedding—I was also turning restless. Before I got the axe, I hadn’t fully grasped how much of my self-identity had been tied to my career, however unhealthy that may have been. In essence, my vocation permitted me the chance to adult (the verb-form), to travel, to carve out a space—separate from my primary responsibility as a mother. It was mine alone and it represented independence. Financial, as well as emotional.   

                A week before Thanksgiving, I received an email from my alma mater, advertising a joint virtual mixer with another university. Great, another Zoom meeting, I lamented, poised to swipe it the trash. But then the first line caught my eye. Stanford and Princeton Clubs of Chicago welcome all alumni to a casual and virtual meet ‘n greet. How odd. Pre-COVID, the Stanford Club had sponsored several downtown mixers with the entire Ivy League Club, but this one was solely with Princeton.

                Anyone who has sniffled through a Hallmark commercial knows that sentimentality is a powerful trigger. I thought of my dad, how proud he had been to identify as a Tiger. At times, his devotion to Princeton seemed almost excessive, until I would remember that we are all susceptible to irrationality when it comes to who and what we love. My dad’s college years were his halcyon days. He worshipped the place, attending every reunion, donating to the wrestling club, and drilling “Old Nassau” lyrics into his children’s brains, all the while clinging to the hope that his progeny might carry on the baton as a legacy. Spoiler alert: None of us did.  

                Still, it struck me that if he were alive—if his heart hadn’t failed him, if the depression hadn’t bulldozed him—this mixer might have been something we could have endeavored to do together, both quarantined in our own homes, separated by a mere mile due to the threat of contagion. And honestly, I didn’t have anything better to do that night. My calendar was as blank as my checkbook register.

                That Thursday, I donned a Princeton sweatshirt in his honor and my Stanford baseball cap over my dry-shampooed head. I resembled a cringe-worthy, pompous, poster-child of elitist privilege. In fact, I looked like a total ass. As two dozen Zoom-fatigued participants introduced themselves one by one, I thought about how my dad would have bragged about our little father-daughter duo, admitting how heart-broken he once was to have to sign tuition checks over to Stanford, sometimes even writing Princeton on the “PAY TO” line before voiding them in a less-than-subtle attempt at humor.

                 The truth is that I had always planned to follow in my dad’s orange and black footsteps, hurrying through those pre-American Revolution stone arches, literature books in hand, Lord Byron on my mind. But just as I was all primed to go, I veered west. California beckoned me as it must have those early explorers, promising an unchartered adventure that would be all my own. All through April of my senior year, my dad tried desperately to convince me otherwise. He wrote me letters, sat me down at the kitchen table for grueling, drawn-out talks, and even appealed to my sense of duty as a daughter. We were both twisted up inside, our love stretching thin like taffy, threatening to break. And when the time came and I decided, in an uncharacteristic act of adolescent defiance, to mail my declaration card to Palo Alto, he left the room, crestfallen.

                That Thursday, when it was my turn to say hello on the Zoom, I mentioned my dad, class of ’71, and his reverence for his alma mater. I told the group that Princeton’s campus was where he had reached his athletic peak—somehow juggling three collegiate sports—and where had he earned notoriety in the form of a wall-of-fame photo at Buxton’s Ice Cream shop after consuming twenty-four scoops of butter pecan. In one sitting. The man was a legend.

                As the group divided into random breakout rooms and we settled into ice-breaking chit-chat, someone mentioned that his company was hiring, a position within my parabolic searchlight: Customer Success. When the clock started ticking down, marking the final seconds before being transported back to the main gallery, this person kindly offered to pass on my resume to an internal recruiter. In the days that followed, I honestly didn’t give it much thought beyond gratefulness.

                Until I got the follow-up phone call.

                Two months and two interviews later, I was prepping for a virtual final-round with this very company. I positioned a photo of my dad, smiling right above my webcam, as a reminder to look directly at the camera. In the picture, he’s sporting a suit and tie. His hair still has its dark pigment and his cheeks are two Maraschino cherries, rosy from his drink—a Tom Collins—or perhaps, from the confined heat. The man produced more sweat than a Bikram yogi in a rubber suit. At the apex of his smile, I can spot his false tooth. My dad hung out with me that day in my office for four hours and eleven minutes. And at the end, he held his hand out, palm-up, before folding up the umbrella. He wasn’t just smiling at me; he was beaming with pride.

                This past week, I accepted the company’s formal job offer, celebrating with a double scoop of butter pecan. We can’t all be legends, but the view from atop Kilimanjaro looks pretty darn worth the climb. 

                In reality, my father would have never been on that alumni Zoom with me. Computers terrorized him more than chunky tomatoes in marinara sauce—which should not be underestimated. Only my mom could have actually gotten him logged on. And yet, he managed to help orchestrate my path to employment from beyond the grave.

                And that generous soul on the virtual mixer who forwarded on a resume as a favor and professional courtesy to a perfect stranger . . . he earned his bachelor’s degree at Princeton. If that isn’t divinely paternal intervention, I’m not sure what qualifies.

The Gift and Grief of Turning 40 in a Pandemic . . . and Seat-Back Pockets

I miss airplanes. Even their metal-tang stench and those feculent seat-back pockets stuffed with crumbled tissues and cryptic wrappers. I mourn the long winding lines through the maze of security that made me feel like world’s most patient gerbil. And that bottle of Hint water I’d buy as an indulgence for $3.99 in Terminal One whenever I flew United through O’Hare. (The blackberry essence really does elevate the tap water they put in there.)

                Travel was both my career and my hobby. This year, the pandemic torched not only my profession, but various trips to: Vancouver, the Outer Banks, Cape Cod, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia to see Angkor Wat (that one stings).

                I know, woe is me. Cue the violins. I recognize that I dangle from a parachute of privilege. I don’t deserve a dust mote of sympathy.

                Despite all the knock-backs 2020 has doled out, my family is, for the most part, all healthy. We have not lost our home to ravaging wild fires or simultaneous hurricanes or suffered at the hands of systemic racism. We are breathing clean air. We can afford bread and milk and even cave-aged-Gruyére. My mom owns a cabin 90-minutes away in Michigan that allows us to escape our increasingly oppressive four walls. We survived the summer, thanks to an Intex inflatable pool and Steve Jobs’ enduring technologies.

                We are luckier than most, even as 2020 continues to batter against our collective storm shutters. Spikes in COVID cases. RBG’s passing. Mitch McConnell’s very existence. Dwindling Netflix content. E-learning. Kindergarten Zoom. Need I go on?

                The hard truth is that 2020 is the inevitable human hangover after decades of getting drunk on fossil fuels, deforestation, and capital greed. Here in the States, we slashed funding for public health, marginalized our working class, and overdosed on complacency. The end result is penance—for allowing our country to plummet to such a dire place that we elected an egotistical real-estate mogul with a spray tan to lead our democracy.

                This year is America’s Walk of Shame. 2020 is hindsight.

                To me, the current landscape is reminiscent of the aftermath of a party.

                We feel only depletion as we survey the apocalyptic remnants of last night’s rager: Deflated balloons, once buoyant and perky, now cower on the carpet in shrunken impotence. Abandoned cups litter the floor—those still containing backwashed punch or flat beer are drained of effervescence. Ceramic serving bowls, caked with dried bean-dip and browned guacamole, teeter off countertops. Partygoers are passed out on ratty futons and pool tables, emitting sour-breath snores. The entire house smells faintly of urine and you realize, head drooping in despondency, that someone has pissed in the corner. It was fun while it lasted, but the clean-up, the consequence of our blind arrogance, hardly seems worth it.  

                Given the party metaphor, I should disclose, however begrudgingly, that I’m about to turn forty. Later this week, in fact. So many of us have passed significant milestones this year in virtual isolation: anniversaries, graduations, weddings, funerals. I am striving to view this birthday as an honor rather than another chalky, horse pill to swallow—another proverbial nail in 2020’s coffin. I am trying not to dwell on the fact that I had planned to be sipping a boozy cocktail on a Phuket postcard-beach, sucking the life out of some poor pineapple garnish, when instead my birthday seems destined to be commemorated by lukewarm pizza.

                But I keep reminding myself . . . not everyone gets the banal “Over the Hill” Hallmark card.

                Age is a gift.

                40 is such a nice round number. So many divisors. Which really just means—it’s high up there. I’m very likely approaching the back nine. Or, at the very least, aligning my putt on the eighth green, scanning the approaching hill for the refreshment cart. Perhaps for a Hint water.

                Things are starting to fall apart. I have hip pain. From sleeping! A month ago, I bought a bladder support device for playing sports and an orthopedic pillow. On the SAME day. My Amazon ads have never recovered. Sorry if that’s TMI; I sometimes grapple with boundaries. (Still, the pelvic floor really should be granted more air time—the struggle is real.) I’m also scheduled for a surgical procedure next month to remove something that is very likely benign. All in all, my body is burping up tiny, little SOSes.

                Embracing forty feels surreal and strange because I have a distinct memory of the morning I woke up on my own mother’s fortieth. I was nine and our front yard was littered with forty pink, swine yard stakes that my uncle had ordered in attempt to one-up my mom in their perpetual porcine tug-of-war.

                “Lordy, Lordy, Jan is Forty” the sign read, stabbed into our grass in the shape of a cut-out cardboard pig.

                Lordy, Lordy, indeed, I thought, my flannel pajama pants tucked into my socks. 40 is OLD.

                I reject that notion now. 80 is old. 80 has even more divisors.

                Yesterday I was driving in the car, listening to the Jimmy Buffett song, Trip Around the Sun.

                It dawned on me that while I haven’t boarded any airplanes lately, I have been traveling. We all have. The earth is still propelling forward despite the lockdowns and stillness, amidst the groundings and closing of borders. Life exists, even persists, under such a catatonic trance. My passport may be laying inert in my desk drawer, but I’m in perpetual motion, orbiting that great big star.  

                “This year gone by ain’t been a piece of cake….

                I’m just hangin’ on while this old world keeps spinning

                And it’s good to know it’s out of my control…

               Just enjoy this ride on my trip around the sun.”

                2020 has granted me a few souvenirs. I finished writing the first draft of a historical novel. I watched my one kid learn how to ride her two-wheeler and the other master the doggy paddle. I reconnected with many friends. I lost myself in a boatload of amazing books. I walked almost every day. I even found 12-packs of Hint water on sale at Costco.

                It’s not the ride I planned for, nor am I certain of the destination. But it’s still a journey.  

                And so far at least, I haven’t left anything behind in the seat-back pocket. Except maybe some crumbled Kleenex.

My Uninvited Houseguest

The pandemic delivered a houseguest. I know, not the ideal time to add to our brood, but I don’t think I have much of a choice. The girl, woman actually—I’m still getting used to how much she has aged—who has been staying with us these past two months seems keen on extending her stay. She hasn’t confessed it out loud to me yet, but I can tell. She’s getting too comfortable, playing UNO with my kids, falling asleep on the La-Z-Boy couch, adding items to the grocery list. The other night at two a.m. I caught her watching season one of Homeland.

I am slowly acclimating to having another person around, her oddness and unnerving ability to just show up in the middle of a family meal or half-way through an episode of America’s Funniest Home Videos. Granted, she is not the most courteous interloper. She can be irritable, morose, withdrawn, and downright rude. I am endeavoring to tolerate her, to accept all of her idiosyncrasies. But sometimes she scares me, the way she looks at me in the shadows when the rest of the house is asleep. We stare at each other on either side of the coffee table like some kind of dark, perverse blinking contest. I’m convinced she derives some kind of sick pleasure out of watching me cry or hovering over me in the deep of night, causing me to shudder awake, terrified of something I can’t quite articulate.

Still, there are some afternoons of peace, those portrait-perfect, 70-degree, white-washed Saturdays that make me nostalgic for my brief stint in California, when I take the kids for a walk in the woods or a bike ride and she’s nowhere to be found.

She has visited me before, in high school and during my first semester of college, and each time after my children were born. She attended both my weddings and some family funerals and camped out for a while in the summer of 2002. That year, I thought she was never going to leave.

There are times she musters the consideration to call ahead, offering only a loose estimate of arrival like some loony old great-uncle who refuses to conform to society’s method of timekeeping. Other times, she seems to revel in just showing up on my doorstep. The bell rings and I assume it’s the Amazon delivery guy with my clarifying shampoo. She’ll barge past me without a word, without a hello, her car strapped down with baggage, parked in the driveway like some overburdened turtle.

One instance, when I was twenty-eight she surprised me so completely she made me shriek in fright. She wore the sinister delight of a child jumping out of a linen closet. That time I don’t even remember opening the door for her.

She always finds me, no matter how many times I move or cross state lines. She comes regardless, in spite of, and in addition to—seeking me out with such precision, it is as though I am unintentionally alerting her, this highly receptive mosquito, with my every breath.

On this latest visit, she arrived with a new look, a questionable wardrobe which lacks a certain finesse. Her pants are all elastic, her sweaters baggy, and sometimes I’m convinced she doesn’t even bother with a bra. Her hair could use a trim and her dark roots are starting to show, but I don’t want to offend her. Glass houses and all.

Each time she appears, a familiar stone of dread settles in my gut, the way she scrutinizes me, almost pleased with herself for disrupting my life. But after she is finally gone, truly gone and not just hiding in the pantry, things begin to find rhythm again. It may be rocky for a while, but then one day I find myself pausing while sautéing zucchini or reading a Nancy Drew to my children and realize we are all in a pretty good place.

I don’t remember the goodbyes as much as I recall each of her hellos. I can usually pinpoint when she's preparing to disappear. There are fewer staring contests, confrontations and clashes. Her eyes exude more tenderness and compassion as though she herself is mourning the inevitable departure.

Last week, after losing my job at a company I’ve been with for seventeen years, I asked her to sit down with me to better assess how long she was planning on staying. I needed to be proactive and prudent about budgeting and food costs. The additional mouth to feed was getting to be a bit of a drag.

Immediately, I felt awkward. How was it that I didn’t even know this woman’s name? After all this time, all these encounters, living under my own roof?

“Look,” I said, folding my hands on my lap. “I’m not sure what to call you, but I’ve known you almost forty years now and this is the longest you’ve ever stayed. Shouldn’t you be leaving soon?”

She smiled, that prescient grin that makes me both uneasy and reassured. How does she always manage to make me feel oblivious, as if I, alone, aren’t comprehending a glaringly obvious riddle?

“Emily,” she said, mirroring me in folding her hands. “I’m pretty sure I introduced myself years ago when you were a young girl. Call me Change. But why would I leave now when we’re just beginning to get to know each other?”

Watering our Legacies

"It's time to transfer some of the plants," my grandmother dictates from her side door, dressed in a housecoat, hair pinned back.

She’s 95 next month. I am checking on her from a distance, six feet between her top stair and the walkway where I stand, my palm shielding the sun. She, a WWII survivor, is handling this better than any of us. Her basement is stocked with canned goods, jars of green tomatoes and rhubarb jam. To her, rationing is not a rehearsal. She’s persevered through worse and now has Netflix and a microwave.

“Uproot them and plant them in your own backyard,” she says again. “They’re hardy. They’ll survive." She smiles as if conceding that I did not inherit her same green thumb.

“But, then you won’t get to enjoy them. I don’t want to raid your garden. Especially now, when there’s so little joy,” I protest, sticking to our practiced script, our dialogue dance that repeats every spring just as her perennials break through the dense April dirt.

My resistance. Her insistence.

“Take the Rose of Sharon, the jasmine bush against the garage, a few of the Black-eyed Susans, maybe a peony or two.”

“Won’t you miss them?”

She waves her hand, a dismissive swipe as though sentimentality serves no purpose, lacking in grit. I glance back at her garden, the plot of land she has cared for and cultivated for the past sixty years beside the very house my grandfather built.

But then she continues, “It would be nice if you had some of them. If I knew they would outlast me. Consider it a birthday present.”

For the first time, I do as I’m told.

Later, my children watch me as I dig holes near our back deck.

We are all putting down roots, watering our legacies.

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.