Up the Hill Alone

They were two pewter candlesticks, a pewter bowl and a pewter vase—all with strongly and somewhat crudely rustic Norwegian designs. Oh, and a Russell Wright bowl which I had given her to match the Russell Wright vase, which she already had. So—six objects, and I was sobbing over them. That was all that was left of her.

It wasn’t, of course. It just felt that way, those six objects that had been taken out of my mother’s house a month ago and sent to New York. A renter has been found for the house in the woods where my mother had lived and where she had died, and so John and Jeanne had gone out and taken even more of the personal possessions out the house. And that meant that when I came into their apartment four days ago—I was greeted by the Norwegian chest that had been in the place she had designed for it all those years ago. (Note—I just added it up, and it’s over thirty years….)

It looked beautiful, it looked wrong. And I decided, it would be best to go around the apartment while I was along—examine every nook and cranny, and find everything from my mother’s house that was now living in my brother’s house.

Winnie the Pooh—the edition from 1946—was on the tea table. The blue and white ginger bowl was in the hall. There were some post Art Deco-ish vases of which my mother had been fond. And there was a whole raft of small pieces that we had to go through.

“The trouble was the coffee ladies,” I told John. “Every time a member of her coffee klatch went off somewhere, they had to bring something home, and then Franny had to put them somewhere and keep them there forever because who could offend the coffee ladies?”

She was like that….

So John and I went through the box, and soon made a game of it.

Marc (holding reproduction Egyptian cat): Barbara Shaw in the souks of Cairo!

John (moving his head sideways like an Egyptian, imitates native): 50 piasters.

Marc (imitating Barbara): 50! 25, and not a piaster less!

Life teaches you how to get through some moments—and no, no tears were shed over the chulerías that Franny had had forced on her all those years. But what to do about the stuff she had used, had liked, had admired? Such as the Russell Wright stuff, or the Norwegian pewter?

“The last thing we need is more stuff,” I said to Jeanne. “Who else do you know who has eight or ten china sets between them? Oh, and three sets of silver?”

But it also seemed like I had to have them—and what, beyond memories, do I have of my mother? And that’s when the thought hit—this is all that’s left of a woman who had laughed and loved and told stories and wept on the passing of her man. I had held her ashes in my hand and thrust them into the earth—and that I did dry-eyed.

I looked down at the six items on the floor and thought of her hands holding them, lifting them to her eyes. I saw the roadside flowers we had gathered that would go into the Wright vase that would end up on the Norwegian wood-burning stove. I thought of the time I had played cello at Herb Fritz’s barn in Spring Green. Fritz, a friend of my parents and a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, had long died; his widow, Eloise, was soldiering on. And on the grand piano was a beautiful plain blue vase, with sunflowers stuck into it.

“Our own van Gogh, as Herb used to say” said Eloise.

It was the last time I had played for my mother.

“How much stuff is still in the house?” I asked Jeanne.

Who may have taken it as criticism—“there was just no way we could get it all out in one weekend,” she said.

“It’s not that, I just want to know how much more of this I have to go through…”

The answer?

Some more.

There’s a house in the middle of the Wisconsin woods that, one day, will be another man’s or woman’s pride and problem—not John’s, who is waking up at 3AM to worry about it. There will be a long, graveled driveway wending through green woods in summer, gold in fall, and grey and black in winter—and that driveway, once so welcoming, once leading to arms yearning to hold me? That driveway will tell me ‘no, not today.’

‘She came and she went about her business, but she’s gone. And you should go, too. Go away—back to your life, back to the living. Let her molder here, if she wills, or slip through her woods on the back of the cold winter winds, of sit on the rocks you both sat on, when you were wailing. When she could wail. And now?’

‘She could be rough, that mother of yours. Remember how she told John, who was wailing for a lost child, that he had to suck it up, stop crying, get on with his life? And why? For Jeanne. So he squared his shoulders and did it. Now, let’s see you’

And I do it, of course. I square my shoulder and lift my chin and turn around and begin the trudge up the hill…

…alone.

The Dead Finger Strikes Again

I have just spent three minutes and forty-nine seconds sobbing as hard as I did three years ago, when my mother had asked for—and I had given her—death.

How do I know the precise time? Because I looked down at the YouTube clip that I chose, or that had been chosen, as the vessel for my grief. The oboe had just finished its solo in the second movement of the New World Symphony.

Is it hokey, this music? I’m never sure, but it hits me, every time. And I needed to be hit, because I had just gotten the news: the Acres might be sold.

If you know the story, feel free to skip the next paragraphs. My father and mother, whom I called Jack and Franny, bought twenty acres of forest in Southwest Wisconsin, and decided in the 1960’s to erect—with their own hands—a small wooden house.

“I needed a place to live and die, so Jack built me a house,” was my mother’s matter-of-fact comment on that decision.

Well, Jack was certainly the Master Builder, with a reverential nod to another Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. That applied in the States; when Jack and Franny sailed their 27-foot Norwegian fishing boat through Europe, the captain then became Jack the Skipper.

But every story, especially in this family, has many sides. I was conscripted during the winter to sand floorboards from lumber scavenged from a decommissioned Air Force base. That summer we poured the foundation and put in the floor. During the following winter, I sanded the boards for the ceiling.

What emerged was a lovely house that absolutely everybody loved to come visit but no one in their right mind would want to buy. People, it seems, like house with bedrooms, if you can imagine such a thing. They define pulling out a bed from an uncomfortable sofa—which is what Jack did—or sleeping in a bunk in front of the picture window—which is what Franny did—as camping.

It was completely idiosyncratic, as unconventional as they were. The spice rack lived up at the ceiling, unless pulled down by a rope and a pulley. There were only two closets; the bathroom was small and became miniscule when Franny added the apartment.

My parents had a genius for friendships—the house saw many wonderful dinners, parties. Jack would be standing in the kitchen, aquavit in hand, beaming out at whomever it was who had come. He was about to start the Chinese cooking; all the ingredients were at hand, neatly chopped or sliced or measured out in little containers. It was an hour of preparation, five minutes of cooking, and a leisurely 40 minutes of the best Chinese food I expect to have in my life.

For forty years my mother lived in the house, and she chose to die there as well. Right—so we did that, emptied out the house after she died, closed the door and went away.

I have, in fact, made a small profession of saying good-bye to the place. I did it first three days after she died, that gorgeous May of 2010. I did it a year later, when we were going to put the house on the market, and needed to “showcase” it for the realtor.

Well, we either did a lousy job of it, or the above peculiarities of the house were off-putting—nobody wanted to buy it. So when the Morning Glories—those wonderful women who had cared for my mother in her last year—decided, with the Zanas, to hold a party at the house, I decided to go up to Wisconsin, and say goodbye, yet again.

It was not an easy trip; the weather was cold and rainy, the house seemed sad and unkempt, there were many ghosts.

Perhaps literally.

Bess and Tibor came out, bringing us food, wine, and excellent company. The talk turned metaphysical, and Bess related how she always associated her mother with deer. She was talking with her sister at the time, and then she rose, went to the window, peered and saw…

…not a single deer.

No, she saw fourteen.

“Yes, but have you tried that in Manhatt…”

That’s when the smoke detector went off.

Nobody was smoking; nobody was cooking. I took the damn thing—still shrieking—outside, where there was a strong wind.

Wouldn’t stop….

I was almost fearful, taking the battery out, that it would still keep going.

It didn’t, of course. Two days later, we had the party; I played the saddest and yet most regenerative music I knew. We bid our hosts good night, and began doing the wrap-up.

“Interesting night,” said Eric. “Wonder what Franny would have thought of it?”

The porch light went out.

“You ever put that battery in the smoke detector?” I asked Eric.

“Nah, and we’re not gonna.”

Seemed sensible.

And so the house has sat empty, or rather full of the memories, the love, the occasional spats, the tears and the kisses and mostly—how I miss it—the laughter of those forty years of life and death and grief and joy. And now someone—perhaps—has been chosen to live in it, and fill it up with their own life.

I know grief, as Franny did. You let it out, you wail, you feel better until you need to do it again. Repeat. And repeat. And repeat.

“But where will they live when they come back,” I sobbed.

Felt real as I sobbed it.

Right, get to work. Sat down in my chair, put on my earphones, clicked the arrow to start the Dvorak, howled for 3:49 minutes. Then I started the post:

I have just spent three minutes and forty-nine seconds sobbing as hard as I did three years ago, when my mother had asked for—and I had given her— death.

Then the computer went dead. No cursor. I could see everything, but there was no cursor, and the computer wouldn’t respond to keyboard commands or typing.

I did the only thing I could do—a forced shut down. As I did that, my iPad, which was charging through the computer, flicked on. I noted the time.

11:23

My mother was born on 11 /23 /1920.