Jo Dereske

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 15

Decisions and Raccoons

The reality was that our six months in Michigan would end in three weeks. Six months, we’d pledged; we’d commit six months of our lives to ease Louise and Mike from their farm into assisted living. We’d begun this venture because we loved them, because we believed it was too soon for a nursing home. More time on their farm was a gift we’d all wanted to give them.

The people who’d made that decision seemed very far away – all those “istic” words applied: idealistic, optimistic, unrealistic. Aside from our single failed visit to Meadow Manor, we hadn’t broached the subject with Louise and Mike, hadn’t done a single thing to make it occur. We’d been acting like we were living in a fantasy world that only required us to cope, not instigate any changes.

To be fair, coping – holding their lives steady – sucked more energy than I’d dreamed possible. Maintaining any equilibrium was pure triumph.

But now, carrying through with our original goal of a care home felt unspeakably cruel, and as Louise called deceit, “a dirty rotten trick.” Despite all the difficulties and challenges and downright disasters, they trusted us.  Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske, 2014

Chapter 14

We Become Spies

The day after what we would later refer to as, “Mike’s first episode,” my brother Ray and I spent an hour on the phone discussing our options. He and I spoke at least once a day, keeping each other up to date, sharing news, opinions and bad jokes. I considered him a good friend as well as a good brother. “They don’t have to talk to each other every day,” Barbara told Kipling, teasing, “as long as they plan for it.”

Ray and Kipling went shopping at Radio Shack, where they bought an intercom and 150 feet of wire, and in the early morning light before Louise and Mike were awake the two of them strung the wire out the kitchen window of the little house, looped and threaded it up into the pine trees and along branches across the driveway into the main house. They hid the intercom on top of Louise’s refrigerator, pushed far back with a light dishtowel covering it.

Working an intercom was beyond Louise and Mike’s understanding and although this was not exactly an ethical enterprise and we didn’t feel totally comfortable with it, Ray and Barbara and Kipling and I agreed that leaving the intercom turned on was mandatory for their safety. We heard them clearly from the little house and it wasn't long before we tuned out their conversations but were alerted by angry or frantic tones of their voices or sudden unusual noises. Then, we timed our arrivals "coincidentally" to forestall worse problems.

The intercom granted us new peace of mind. We now heard their voices and movements when they awoke so we could deliver meals in a timely fashion and not leave food cooling on their table. We were able to defuse arguments and be there in an instant at the first signs of Mike’s episodes or Louise’s obsessions.

I was a light sleeper so I was awakened by their nighttime movements and was dismayed at how one or the other appeared to be up and roaming the house nearly all night long.

“Sounds like poltergeists,” Kipling said, waking up in the night and finding me in the living room wrapped in an afghan and gazing out the window at their closed and dark house, while on the intercom behind us we heard drawers opening, silverware rattling, chairs being moved, the toilet flushing.


1931 Bill came back to the farm. I don’t know what happened in Chicago but we can’t afford to live there anyway.


Every day, on my first pass around my trail I held my arms up in front of me as if I were being threatened by robbers. If I didn’t, the fine threads of spider webs clung to my face and hair, tickling like invisible feathers. The strands of web crisscrossed between trees and bushes, dewy in the morning light

Over a several day period I watched a small metamorphosis transpire that no one was able to explain. At the first curve of my trail into the woods I spied a translucent white three-inch by two-inch "medallion" about four feet off the ground on the trunk of an oak tree. It was 3/4 of an inch thick and it bubbled, actually visibly bubbled, as if it were doing a slow boil. I cautiously touched it my fingertip to it and found it pliant, pulsing as if it were alive, with a translucent purity like pearls.

In a couple of days the medallion turned hard and traded its translucence for chalkiness. After about a week, it faded to a dull leathery color covered with tiny puncture holes. When I lightly tapped it, puffs of goldy-green spores shot out, like puff ball spores. Two days later the cover had disintegrated and fallen to the ground and it was impossible to tell where it had been adhered to the tree.

An eerie stillness preceded the worst thunderstorms, as if they were trying to
sneak up undetected. No breezes, limp leaves and an oppressive breathlessness. Sounds were amplified in the quiet as the day ominously darkened.

It was eighty-four degrees and sticky with humidity and along my trail, the light was failing at one o’clock in the afternoon

I entered my prairies where I had a long view of the skies and fields across the road. Dark clouds already roiled across the southwestern sky and a single splat of a raindrop landed on my shoulder. It was enough of a warning.

I ran toward the little house, reaching the door as heavy rain pelted the earth behind me. Thunder rumbled and growled in the distance, closer with every clap. “One-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand-three” I counted after a flash of lightning. Five seconds between a flash and its accompanying peal of thunder for every mile of distance, I remembered. The yard light, operated on a photo cell, blinked on.

Kipling had gone to town and when I looked at Louise’s house, I saw her standing in the window holding the telephone receiver to her ear.

I grabbed a jacket, draped it over my head and ran to her house through the rain, which had been joined by pounding hail that bounced on the driveway like popcorn. Lightning flashed off to my left.

“Hello,” I sang out as I entered.

Louise dropped the receiver. Her voice was rough with excitement. “I was trying to call you. There’s going to be a tornado.” Neither the television nor the radio was on and I flicked on her TV. There was no telltale tornado warning sign in the corner of the screen.

Mike napped unawares on the sleeping porch and I fixed cups of green tea for Louise and me to sip in the living room while we watched the storm. The winds whipped the trees, the thunder and lightning played nonstop as the hail passed and the rain carried on, falling straight from the sky as if it were too heavy to be slanted by the wind. I turned on the table lamps and the room filled with warm luminescence.

“Your grandmother burned a slice of palm frond from Palm Sunday when the storms came,” Louise told me, “to keep the house safe.”

Fire: the farmer’s most dreaded enemy. A row of multicolored glass balls on ornate iron spikes had marched across my grandparents’ roof peak. Lightning rods.

A particularly close clap of thunder boomed and Louise blinked. The lamps stuttered and went out. “The electricity’s off,” she commented. “Do you think Johnny and the boys are all right?” She meant Ray, and I let her reference to my father pass.

“I’m sure they are. He watches the weather.”

“He was a trickster,” she said, thinking of my father again. “He bedeviled Stella because she had the best screech of any of us.” She shook her head, her eyes looking into three quarters of a century ago. “He peed in the drinking water bucket once and didn’t tell us until after we drank it.” She slipped away into her memory as the storm hammered around us.

After a half hour the sky began to lighten and the wind dropped. A few heavy drops plinked against the metal chairs outside “There will be a rainbow to the east,” Louise said. “I want to see it.”

She took my arm and we walked outside to the patio, standing at the border of her rock creation and gazing to the east. She was correct: a brilliant rainbow arched over the sky, visible from end to end, and within moments, it was joined by a second, fainter rainbow. “Get ready for a spate of good luck,” she advised me.

I’d hoped the rain would wash away the dense humidity, but the air actually felt stickier. It steamed. My clothes were damp with perspiration; In Louise’s kitchen I stuck to the varnished wooden chair.

“I’m sweaty,” I told Louise, pulling my shirt away from my skin.

“Women don’t ‘sweat,’” she corrected. “Horses sweat, men perspire, but women glow.”

“Then I’m a hundred watter.”


With the humidity came the dreaded deer flies. We’d already suffered through swarms of gnats that flew up noses, into eyes and ears and open mouths. Next were clouds of mosquitos, whining as they prospected for unprotected flesh. By some anomaly, neither Louise nor I were bitten much, and Mike didn’t notice. To the flimsy insects, Kipling was pure gourmet. They poxed his arms, legs, and face with bites. I found three old bottles of the now-banned repellent, 6-12, under Louise’s sink and Kipling doused himself in the oily stuff, growing redolent in the smells of my childhood.

Large-winged and black, deer flies didn’t buzz, they attacked in silence, dive bombing into hair, biting with mad-dog ferocity. They had a relentless fondness for shoulders and the backs of necks and arms. Their one vulnerability was their dense slowness once they landed, making them irresistible targets.

Like the mosquitos, only the females bit. Their unexpected nips stung like electric shocks. When they were particularly ferocious I carried a hand towel and slapped it against my legs and across my neck like a Penitent with a whip.

They provoked Kipling, into obsessed vengeance. The man who petted bees gleefully swatted, crushed and executed deer flies with abandon, the messier and grosser their demise the better. Their existence became a personal challenge. ”You can’t tell me there’s no way to keep them off,” he accused Ray and me as if we were guilty of not sharing some obscure Michigan secret with him.

He tried every deterrent he read about, heard rumors of, or imagined. 6-12 was useless. He buttered himself with Avon Skin so Soft he bought from a man selling it out of his trunk in the grocery store parking lot, sprayed on Deet from the sports store, rubbed mysterious concoctions smelling of camphor, lemon, tallow, dish soap, vinegar, and worse, on his exposed skin.

So armored, he’d head out to do battle wearing a grim and hopeful expression on his face. Moments later I’d spy him in the garden, slapping at his neck and arms in maniacal dance steps.

“Maybe they’re looking for the deer you keep chasing away,” I suggested, in jest. “They are called deer files.”

He considered the idea and for a few days stopped chasing the deer out of the orchard and the greening-up garden. But it made no difference. The deer flies stubbornly stalked human flesh, particularly his.

The only defense was to cover every bare bit of skin as heavily as bearable, and it wasn’t long before he surrendered to long pants and sleeves and caps, tying a bandanna around his neck that he sometimes raised over his face like a bandit. “They’ll be gone in two weeks,” Mike assured him.



1931 We are still in Michigan on the farm. The days are all the same. A very cold and snowy winter. We butchered two pigs today and who should come driving in just as all the work was finished but Tofelia and Gordon. I wonder for how long? None of us are happy about G being here but Mother says we have to be kind because he’s Tofelia’s husband. Hah.
Bill began to chew!! We went down to the woods and got into an awful fight. He said terrible things to me – and maybe I did to him, too. I can’t bear to have him chew. I won’t make up until he apologizes. A gloomy day. I’m lonesome for the city.


I feared Mike was on the verge of another episode. He walked through the garden with a kitchen pot in his hand. He meandered awkwardly through the fruit trees, trailed his hand along the fence rails, back to the garden and then through the old overgrown gardens behind the barn: blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, stopping occasionally to stroke a bush or lean down to examine a plant. He stooped over the asparagus bed and then continued to the edge of the woods, gazing blankly about him, standing stone-like for minutes.

Kipling and I stood in the window of our bedroom watching his progress. “Do you think this is the way he’ll be from now on?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, already mourning the loss of the Mike of even a few days ago. He still hadn’t fully recovered from the keys episode, remaining a bit more unworldly than before, more lost. We hadn’t accepted it yet, still hoping for a reprieve, a recovery at least to his previous state rather than a continual irrevocable decline.

Mike stepped from behind the barn and entered the old leaning chicken coop. When he emerged he no longer carried his kitchen pot. Slowly and dreamily he crossed the yard and tested the shed doors. He paused in bemusement beside the peanut butter log Kipling kept filled for the birds, made a stack of pinecones and carefully scooped it up and carried it to a spot beneath a different tree, then walked into the house.

After his wander through the garden, Mike spent the afternoon as if in a trance. He didn't answer when he was spoken to. He couldn't remember how to turn the door latch; he didn't zip his pants. I led him outside by the hand and he sat silently hunched on the rock apron on the patio, looking gray and other-worldly.

“Would you like to sit in the swing?” I asked him, pointing to the wooden swing he’d hung from a pine branch years ago, but he didn’t acknowledge me.

Finally, as I was carrying in dinner, he rose and wandered toward the barn.

"Where is he? Where did he go?" Louise fussed. "Is he sick? His supper will get cold. Go call him."

A few minutes later Mike entered the kitchen carrying two ragged sprigs of lilacs. They’d finished blooming weeks ago and the few remaining blossoms were brown, dropping from the stems with his every move. He held them out to Louise. "I found these for you, Weezy,"

She couldn’t release her worry and at dinner she asked him if he’d go to her doctor, “a nice female doctor.”

“No,” he told her.

“Would you go to me if I was a doctor?” she asked.

He thought for a few seconds, then struggled to say, “Well, I guess if you were a doctor, I sure wouldn’t know you.”

She laughed in delight and said, “You’re pretty sharp tonight, Mikey.”

Mike wiped a slice of bread across the gravy on his plate and dropped it into his glass of milk. “I’m going to lay down.”

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he answered.

A crafty expression crossed her face. “You don’t feel any better yet, do you?”

“No, I don’t feel any better yet,” he mumbled as he passed her chair to the bedroom.

Louise immediately stood and refusing my help, carried two aspirin and a glass of water to the bedroom for him.

“I love you, Mikey,” I heard her say. “You’re the best thing in my life.”

“You and me,” he replied.

Kipling was preoccupied when I related Louise and Mike's conversation as I unpacked dirty dishes from the wicker basket. "What's up?" I asked.

"We committed to help Louise and Mike for six months," he quietly said, and my stomach dropped. "In three and a half weeks we'll have been here six months."


1931 Billy and I still sore at each other. I won’t make up until he apologizes. He and Frank went to Winslow’s to help cut wood.
Heavy snow and drifting. We went to Custer and the roads were slick and slicker. I’m always fighting with Tofelia. Gordon SAYS he’s looking for work. They’re sleeping in the parlor so when we come down or go up we have to pass their bed. What a show!
We all drove to Round Lake in two cars. Twenty-three fish shanties out on the ice.


Next Tuesday, Chapter 15: Raccoons and Decisions Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske

Chapter 13

Mike's Search for Meaning

“Look!” Louise gestured upward. “It’s raining.”

We sat on the sunny patio, the sky was azure, no clouds in sight. But when I looked in the direction Louise pointed, my first thought was that we were witnessing a mysterious burst of raindrops from a cloudless sky.

Tens – no, hundreds, maybe thousands – of gossamer threads gently drifted downward and across the lawn, highlighted by the bright sunshine. So fine and sheer that if the sun hadn’t been shining, the minute glints would have been impossible to see.

“It’s a spider hatch,” I told Louise. “Baby spiders riding strands of web.”

I recalled the enchantment of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. I’d read of spider hatches but never seen one. The baby spiders were miniscule dots clinging to their threads and venturing out into the world. Gently drifting and wisping on the slightest stir of air. It was a beautiful sight.


It was almost too late to plant the garden. Kipling had postponed the rototilling , encouraging Mike to become involved: parking the red tilling machine by the garden space and asking for a lesson in its operation, seeking Mike’s approval for the garden size and layout, trying to discuss seeds and starts. But Mike had shown no interest.

He carried a lawn chair from the patio and set it in the shade by the garden, then invited Mike to relax and supervise, but Mike responded with an explosive, “Hell, no!” and stomped into the house to take up position in his chair by the living room window. He sullenly watched and wrung his hands, softly cursing while Kipling ran the red rototiller through the garden space, turning square corners and stirring up the dirt.

“Are you mad at Kipling, Uncle Mike?” I asked.

But he was too distraught to keep his thoughts straight. Instead he pointed to a tree in the front yard. “See that dog up there?” he asked, and then added, “I think they took my brother’s body to Toledo.”

I sat down and we chatted for a few minutes. An eavesdropper would have thought we were both mad.

He picked at the air. "They've got all those . . .dots."

"I know. A lot of things are dots. Computers are hard to use sometimes."

"Is Johnny all alone?"

"Not anymore."

The sound of the rototiller faded into the distance. When I looked out the window, the garden was empty, no rototiller in sight, yet I could still hear it. I left Louise and Mike curiously peering out the windows trying to see where Kipling had disappeared to, and went searching for him. Where else could he be except in the garden? I found him rototilling a twenty-feet long by five-feet wide strip next to the woods, close to where my trail meandered.

"I'm going to plant a strip of corn for the deer," he shouted to my puzzled gestures. Sweat streaked his face and darkened his shirt as the rototiller bucked it way through the weedy earth. "Maybe it'll keep them out of the garden."

"You're bargaining with the deer?" I asked.

"Why not?" the man who’d spent most of his life in the city shrugged and asked.


1930 A registered letter came for Billy and he went back to Chicago, leaving me here. It’s getting so lonesome and tiresome here. A nice hanky from Tofelia – a late Christmas gift. She’s still with Gordon – a miracle, but none of my beeswax.
I washed for Mother today. A stormy windy day.


I entered Louise’s kitchen and discovered the house in chaos. Newspapers were strewn across the floor, the coffee makings spilled and jumbled together on the table. Knickknacks had been rearranged, cushions upended. Instead of being asleep, Mike paced through the kitchen, ebullient, chattering.

“Louise says there's no heat," he told me. I checked the thermometer. It read seventy degrees.

"I wonder where the helpers across the street are," he mused, meaning us. "Where's Ray? He's usually around keeping an eye on things."

"I'm Jo Anne, Uncle Mike," I told him.

He laughed. "I know who you are, where's . . ." and he waved a hand toward our little house.

"Kipling," I supplied.

"Yeah, Chip," he said but he couldn’t wait for my answer; he picked up a pair of wire-rimmed sunglasses that had been sitting on the windowsill since our arrival. A mischievous look crossed his face. "I wonder where these came from? I think I'll tease Louise. I’ll ask her if these work better than her other glasses," and off he trotted to Louise's bed, chortling to himself.

"What are you doing?" I heard Louise crabbily ask.

Mike was suddenly chastened. "Just cleaning these," he told her.

But he was so happy and busy and chattery that Louise finally rose from bed and joined us. As I expected, she bristled when she saw me making coffee. "You don't have to do that." Then she turned accusingly to Mike. "You can't even make coffee."

For a moment he appeared uncertain, poised to crash, but retorted, "Well, once upon a time you couldn't make coffee, either."

We were accustomed to vagueness and withdrawal, his quiet confusion, but this sudden, almost manic, activity was a behavior we hadn’t seen before, traits I couldn’t recall ever witnessing in all the years I’d known Mike.

We kept an attentive eye on the situation all day, not leaving them alone for more than a few minutes. Mike remained restless and agitated. He wandered up and down the driveway, and then back inside and out again. He brushed Kipling off when he tried to talk to him. "No, no, I'm just looking," he said.

"What are you looking for?" Kipling asked.

Mike shrugged.

Kipling cooked dinner and when I delivered it I heard Louise and Mike's raised voices as I stepped through the door. Mike sat at the table; Louise stood beside him, her handkerchief to her mouth. When she saw me she reached out her hand as if in supplication.

"Tell him, Jo Anne," she pleaded, "tell him that there's no election, that he didn't go vote."

"I did too," Mike insisted, "but I didn't have it. There was hardly anybody there." His face was contorted in distress. "If that's the way they're going to treat me, I'm not going to belong."

Before I could say a word, Mike jumped up from the table. "I have to check the tank," he said, his demeanor shifting to urgency, and he rushed out the door.

Aunt Louise began weeping. "What's wrong with him? What's wrong with him?" she repeated. "There's no election."

"I'll go get him," I told her, "then we'll eat. You sit down and we'll be right back."

Mike was striding up and down the driveway, breaking into a trot every few yards.

"Are you hungry, Uncle Mike?" I asked, trotting beside him to keep up. "I brought baked chicken for supper."

The evening was soft, nearly twilight. A few mosquitoes whined around our heads and the birds were rustling in the deep branches, dozily chirping.

"Why did they do that to me?" he asked, his voice shaking. "Did you see them?"

"There's nothing to worry about," I told him, touching his arm, slowing him down. "Come inside for chicken dinner."

He finally accompanied me into the house and sat down while I served up their plates.

"Do you still think there's an election, Mike?" Louise asked.

Mike didn't answer and Louise persisted, "Tell me why you thought there was an election." I couldn't distract her from grilling him.

Mike’s mouth worked. He pushed away his plate and stood, waving his arms. "I have to find it," he cried. He rummaged through the kitchen, picking up scissors and pins, a spoon, then the clock key, asking, "Is this it?" or announcing, "Here it is," then changing his mind and searching even more frantically.

"What are you looking for? Why can't you just say it?" Louise asked as Mike rattled through the forks in the silverware drawer. Her own voice escalated into panic.

“Let me help you find it,” I struggled to keep my voice mild, stepping between Louise and Mike.

"Maybe it's in the bedroom," he said and walked jerkily toward the bedroom, muttering to himself.

Louise rocked in her chair, crying. "What's the matter with him? He's acting crazy."

The air was thick with unreality and panic. Mike’s anguish tore into our fragile kingdom. I was afraid to leave them alone, even for a minute. I phoned Kipling and he was immediately at the door. Mike barely acknowledged his presence but held up a pencil and asked him, "Is this it?" Louise was at his heels, trying to straighten him out. “Mikey, you’re not acting right.”

We needed help but who to call? Surely not an ambulance. Ray and Barbara had taken their children to Grand Rapids for the day. And for that matter, what could anyone do to help us? We were floundering, drowning. We had no clue where Mike’s behavior was leading.

"I’ll call Susan," I told Kipling in a conversational tone. "You stay here with them."

I ran back to the little house and phoned Susan. It was after five but miraculously she was still in the office. She was quick, concise and clear.

"Go along with him," she told me. "Whatever it is, don't try to straighten him out. Just go along. If he thinks he has to vote maybe he's looking for his voter's registration card. If you can't find it, give him something similar and tell him that elections are always on Tuesdays and today is Monday. Let him win and he'll calm down and probably have forgotten it by tomorrow."

I returned and briefly told Kipling what Susan had suggested. Then I led Louise into the living room and tried to soothe her while Kipling sat at the kitchen table with Mike.

"Don't let them take him away," Louise begged me. "I couldn't stand to live without him."

"We won't let anyone take him, I promise," I told her, meaning it from the bottom of my soul but terrified that I was making a vain promise, that the situation had suddenly careened out of control, that we’d crossed a critical line. In the background I could hear Kipling agreeing to whatever Mike said, and Mike's voice settling into a calmer register. They were amiably talking nonsense.

But Louise couldn't stand being an entire room away from Mike. "I know Mike better than Kipling does," she said. "I’m the one who should be talking to him."

Aside from physically restraining her, I couldn't keep her away. She marched back to the kitchen, stood over Mike, and sternly announced, "There is no election and no one took anything from you."

Soon Mike was even more distraught. "Those jokers and crooks in the post office took my keys," He stood and began searching wildly through the papers on the counter, then dropped into his chair, his hands shaking.

He focused on Louise for a moment before lowering his head into his hands and breaking into sobs. It was too horrible; I couldn’t stop my own tears.

But at that moment Louise experienced a moment of clarity and showed her true colors. She put her arms around Mike and said softly, sweetly, "I love you, Mikey. Everything's going to be all right."

He lifted his head and searched her face. "Are you going? Should I go to the meeting?"

"I'm staying here all day long," she told him, "and you don't have to go anywhere you don't want to." And then she said the exact words we used when she became confused and couldn't remember. "You're just mixed up right now. It'll come back to you."

For five minutes, I thought Louise had turned the tide, but Mike jumped up and resumed his panicked searching. I followed him and remembering his accusation that the “jokers” at the post office had stolen his keys, I jerked the set of fake car keys from the key rack beside the door, holding them up triumphantly. "Here they are!" I shouted. "I found them!"

Mike grabbed the keys from me and gripped them tightly in his hand, his body relaxing, his face clearing, cradling the keys as if they were his rarest treasure. Kipling and I talked both Louise and Mike into sitting at the table while I fixed decaf coffee for all of us. Mike said he would call the FBI about the post office people, and Kipling agreed it was a good idea, “in the morning.” Mike insisted he saw flowers on the roof outside the window. He plucked at a strawberry from a grocery advertisement in the newspaper, trying to pick it up.

Without warning, he jumped up and bolted outside. Kipling followed after him and I took Louise’s hand, restraining her. “Kipling will bring him back,” I promised.

Mike crossed the driveway and rushed inside through the front door of the little house and when Kipling stepped inside behind him, Mike thrust the precious keys into Kipling’s hands.

"Here," he told Kipling, "you take these so you can open and close . . ." and he pointed all around the farm, his words abandoning him.

Kipling gentled him back to the kitchen and we all finished our coffee and talked about nothing until life once again regained a precarious kind of equilibrium.

"Do you know who I am?" Aunt Louise asked Mike, leaning her face close to his.

"Of course I do," he said. "You're Helen."

I didn't know who Helen was but fortunately Louise didn't hear him or didn’t register the name. Next he pointed to me. "And I know her, and that's Kippy." Never did he forget Kipling.

Kipling carried in Morris for a few minutes as a diversion. We stayed until Mike's eyes began to droop and Louise’s breathing returned to normal. Mike asked me, "Are you going to the meeting?"

"No," I told him. "I'm staying home tonight. We’re all staying home with you"

Back in the little house, after they were both in bed, Kipling and I collapsed, totally exhausted, not yet ready to discuss the evening and its implications. We skipped dinner, drank two glasses of whiskey each, watched a "Fawlty Towers" episode for comic relief, and went to bed. It was nine o’clock.

The next morning when I entered the house, they were both sound asleep and I spotted Louise's robe lying on Mike's bed.

No matter how much we wanted to we couldn't "fix" what was happening. It was a horrible lesson I was learning: the giving up of control, that neither I – nor anyone – could force life to be normal according to my own idea of normalcy, that we could only stand by and somehow try to soothe the dangers and horrors of deterioration. It was unfair and hateful and my helplessness filled me with despair.

At breakfast Louise said, "That was some commotion we had here last night, wasn't it?" I was surprised she remembered, but as happened with events she did remember, she couldn't let it go. "Do you think I should mention it to Mike?" she asked.

"It’s over now," I said, trying to be diplomatic, "and I’m glad, aren’t you? Now we can forget it."

So the second Mike entered the kitchen, bleary eyed, and husky-voiced, Aunt Louise said, "Mikey, do you remember what happened last night?"

"No, I don't." She let it rest for about ninety seconds and then asked, "Mike, you don't remember what happened last night?"

"No."

"You were all mixed up."

Mike looked at her for a few seconds, his eyes squinting like a far-sighted man trying to focus without glasses and answered, "Well, that was last night."

She dropped the subject again for a few minutes, not really listening to me trying to divert her with a story of the raccoons we saw hanging off the birdfeeder like circus performers, and asked the same question. “Do you remember what happened last night?”

When Mike responded in the negative she said in a disappointed voice, "If you don't remember, then forget it."

The conversation would be repeated in various forms all day long. Mike was distant and withdrawn, moving through the day like a sleepwalker. Louise gradually forgot, only recalling that "something" had gone on the night before.

Susan called later in the day to enquire after Mike and to arrange a visit the next day, reassuring us that Mike's exhaustion was a typical consequence of an Alzheimer's episode, as was the paranoia he’d experienced the night before. “This is your first experience with a full-blown episode,” she said when I couldn’t keep the dismay from my voice. “You have every right to find it overwhelming.”

I was reluctant to leave Louise and Mike alone, believing either Kipling or I needed to be with them at all times, but Susan told us, with a hint of sternness in her Tennessee twang: “You can’t become hostages to this situation. You have to take care of yourselves or you can’t competently take care of them.”


1930 New Year’s Eve. This was a hard year for employment and eating and renting and everything else that costs a hot nickel. We all hope 1931 will be better and I hope I can go back to Chicago SOON!




Next Tuesday, Chapter 14: We become Spies Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 12

Morris the Cat Loses a Battle

Nearly every tree in the yard cupped a bird’s nest in its branches, tucked in tree crotches or amid masses of leaves, invisible but for the colorful entrance and exit of new parents. But an invader was marauding the nests. At the base of a pine tree we found a fresh robin's egg, its tiny perfect yellow yolk spilling out from the sky-blue shell into the grass. In the early evening as Kipling and I walked the trail near the orchard a swallow screeched and wheeled in the air, clearly distressed. On the next turn around the trail, we found a fresh speckled egg broken on the ground, its insides cleanly removed as if the shell had been licked clean.

I'd seen a pair of bluebirds, a growing rarity in the area, and I feared they'd beccome prey to whatever villain the birds were facing.

“Raccoons,” Mike said when we told I about the broken eggs. “Sonsabitches.” He frequently cursed, something I hadn’t heard him do when I was growing up. Susan assured us that it was common for Alzheimer patients to suddenly change behavior, to act in ways that family members found diametrically opposed to the person they’d known all their lives. “You’d be surprised what emerges from some formerly sweet old lady’s mouth,” she said, grinning.

Could Morris be the culprit, we wondered. He was wily, sleek, blindingly fast to pounce on small things in the grass. But to suck eggs? I’d never heard of an egg-sucking cat.

Kipling came upon Morris skulking low to the ground, tail twitching, intent on a fledgling Evening grosbeak three feet in front of him. Kipling scooped up the squirming, hissing cat and shut him on the back porch of the little house, giving the grosbeak time to escape, but the grosbeak, fully feathered in its exotic black, white and yellow, didn’t make its escape. It sat stupidly in the grass, easy prey to any predator, too young to fly, we realized.

We suspected that Morris – or some other animal – had frightened it from its nest before it had taken its first flight. We searched for a nest or a hovering mother, but no luck. “Something must have caught her,” Kipling said, “or she’d be swooping around overhead.”

The baby grosbeak was calm, unfrightened, not evincing any fear when Kipling picked it up and set it in a cardboard box he’d lined with grass. He let Morris out of the porch –the cat immediately set about searching for the bird – and set the cardboard box with the bird inside the porch, safe from any other bad guys.

The grosbeak was an exotic creature, with its startling plumage, thick body and large beak. Flocks of grosbeaks had visited the bird feeders over the winter but we hadn’t seen any since the snow melted, and never one so close.

Kipling carried a small plastic cup and stalked through the lawn for bugs and worms, which the grosbeak eagerly accepted, its mouth wide at Kipling’s approach, while Morris now hunkered suspiciously outside the porch door, casting broody eyes whenever he saw us.

For three days the grosbeak accepted this new turn of its life, perching on Kipling’s finger, riding his shoulder. He carried the bird to the patio to show Louise and Mike.

“Is it a parrot?” Louise, who’d always known grosbeaks, asked.

“Would you like to hold it?” Kipling asked Mike, holding his finger so the bird could jump to Mike’s.

“No no,” Mike shook his head. “Watch out for that cat,” he warned, and Louise tried to give Kipling five dollars to, “buy that bird a loaf of bread.”

On the fourth day, Kipling decided it was time for the grosbeak to join the World of Birds. He shut Morris onto the porch again and leaned Mike’s tallest wooden ladder against the barn.

“You could just release the bird from your hand,” I suggested. “That’s what rescue centers do.”

“This will be better,” he said, and carried two chairs out to the grassy area in front of the barn for Louise and Mike to sit and watch. I helped them out to the yard, hoping we weren’t about to witness a disaster: the grosbeak plummeting to the ground or a hawk swooping in and grabbing it. Louise was excited. “We’re the peanut gallery,” she said, holding her hands together, as if she were about to applaud.

With me steadying the ladder and the grosbeak on his shoulder, Kipling climbed as high as he dared. He steadied himself and freeing one hand from the ladder, transferred the bird to his finger.

The bird looked around with its bright eyes but appeared to have no interest in leaving Kipling’s finger. I couldn’t blame him: where else could he get breakfast in bed, plentiful food, and doting humans?

When Mike grew impatient and began to rise from his chair, Kipling called out to keep his attention, “Mike, watch this!” and when Mike looked up, Kipling nudged the grosbeak off his finger.

We oohed and aahed and clapped as the bird was forced to launch, flapping its wings in an unsteady swoop and falling halfway to the ground before catching on to this flight thing. It flapped with more strength and immediately disappeared into the woods beyond the orchard. For a few moments we watched and waited, expecting it to return and salute us. Job well done.

“That was pretty good,” Louise called to Kip. “Wasn’t it, Mikey?”

“Pretty good,” Mike agreed, already shuffling back to the house.


1930 Two weeks before Christmas and the sheriff caught Frank, Bill and me hunting without licenses. We had eleven rabbits with us. He was hiding by Thompson’s board fence and it was too late to run away. The sheriff told me to go home but Frank and Bill got twenty days in jail or $19.85 fine each. They took the jail. I feel so bad. A cold clear day.


At our Alzheimer’s group meeting, Milly related how she carefully arranged her mother’s refrigerator the same every day – a suggestion of Susan’s to assist her mother in finding items, but one day Milly accidentally placed leftover chicken on the shelf where the milk usually sat. Her mother couldn’t find the milk that had been placed one shelf above the chicken and was frantic, convinced she was out of milk.

“It was a major melt down,” Milly told us. “She cried all day.
”
“Try giving her what she’s confused about,” Susan suggested. “Let her put her hands on it. Sometimes touch reinforces what she’s seeing. If one sense is failing, another may be stronger.”

Evelyn’s husband had called her by his first wife’s name and she bristled with indignation and hurt, suspicious he wanted to return to his first marriage.

“Do you think she’d want him now?” Milly’s teenage daughter asked with a lift of her eyebrows.

“Probably not,” Evelyn conceded. “Half the time I don’t, either.”

But it was obvious to all of us how much Evelyn desperately longed for his former self, the same as we all wanted our loved ones to return to us.

Jack, the man whose father had Alzheimer’s and whose wife had stayed home to care for him the previous meeting, didn’t attend, but his wife Julie did. “I’d hoped if he came, he’d get a clue about what I’m going through,” she said, “but it didn’t make much of an impression. He thinks I’m exaggerating.”

“Does he spend time alone with his father?” Susan asked.

“Sometimes, but he lets a lot of things go that I don’t. He doesn’t help his father wash up or put him to bed at a reasonable hour.”

And we were off again, discussing just how important insisting that dementia patients adhere to certain standards was – or wasn’t. Susan discussed the trade-off between causing anxiety by forcing them to meet our need for control and a timetable, or relaxing our own standards so they’d feel less anxious. “Who can better handle the stress?” she asked.

After the meeting, Susan asked if Ray was working on Mike’s legal guardianship.

He was. The procedure had become complicated because before he married Louise, Mike had had another family. The details were a mystery to us and there’d been no communication in decades, but there were children and legally they had to agree to the guardianship of their father before the guardianship could move forward.

“I’ll call Ray,” Susan told me.


It wasn’t uncommon to receive two wrong numbers a day on our phone in the little house. The last holder of our phone number had been a rooming house in Scottville, seven miles away, which had then switched to an unlisted number. When we complained to the phone company, they offered to change our number for a fee, which would also mean notifying everyone of a new number. Instead, we stopped by the rooming house and requested their unlisted phone number to pass on to callers.

At first the landlord, a hefty man who greeted us at the door in green coveralls and an undershirt, refused to give it to us, “I have to take too damn many messages,” he complained. “I need a little peace around here.”

But Kipling was one of those people who, when he was denied, commiserated and agreed that yes, he’d made an outlandish request and he could certainly understand why he was being refused, yet he somehow ended up getting what he wanted. I left the office and waited beside our truck because I was not one of those kinds of people, and within five minutes Kipling exited the rooming house, the new telephone number on a slip of paper in his hand.

Wrong numbers were often accompanied by an explanation.

"Are you sure you're not the rooming house? I know Rod Beeman lives there and I need him to fix my carburetor."

"But I have to get ahold of Lucille. She's our fourth in bridge and the rest of the girls are ready to play. She's always late."

"I wanted to tell Marcia that the check's in the mail and I love her."

"But she doesn't live here," I explained.

"I'm calling from Texas."

"I'm sorry," I told him, hearing the desperation in his voice.

"How's the weather up there anyway?" he asked. Longing edged his question. I didn’t ask but I guessed he was originally from Michigan, not Texas.

Finally, I pulled out the local phone directory and found the phone number of a friend of Marcia's and he thanked me and hung up after saying quietly, “I hate being divorced.”

I provided the rooming house number to an elderly lady and a week later I heard her distinctive voice. "I think you gave me that number another time," she said when I repeated it.

Another man told me irritably. "Well, I don't know what I'm going to do now. This guy was going to buy my snowmobile."

We had an answering machine on our phone and one day when we played back the messages, a man’s voice apologized into the machine for having dialed the wrong number.

My favorite wrong number was a woman who said she was getting old and was homesick for Lithuanian food and needed a particular recipe. "You mean this isn't Ramas's?"

"No," I told her.

"Well, then who are you?"

When I said the name Dereske, she spent the next ten minutes telling me what a good cook my grandmother had been and how she herself had once danced with my Uncle Frank at a wedding. “Oh, he could whirl a girl,” she said wistfully. “I was so sorry when he was killed.” She related her journey from Lithuania with her parents when she was four years old. By the end of the conversation we were quite chummy and although she didn’t tell me her name she shared with me her mother’s recipe for kugelis, a favorite Lithuanian potato dish.


1930 Stella and I went to Ludington and brought things for Bill and Frank for Christmas in jail. The sheriff let us visit with them. The cell door wasn’t locked. But still it would make me crazy. A beautiful day. Every tree limb covered with dewy snow. I went to confession and midnight mass. I miss Bill. Merry Christmas, dear one.


A tangle of yowls, growls and high-pitched screams shocked us out of bed at two in the morning. It took a frantic minute to identify the drama of a cat fight, a brutal one. Abruptly, it ended in silence. Kipling stood at the door and called for Morris, then ventured into the darkness with a flashlight. Beyond a few disturbed peepers and the eerie hoo-hoo of an owl there was no sign of the yellow cat.

At daylight by the barn, Kipling discovered tufts of yellow and black fur in the dirt. One of the yellow tufts was attached to a fifty cent-sized piece of hide. “He’s hurt,” Kipling said, and searched the farm for hours without a trace of Morris.

As the sun set we discovered Morris lying on the mat outside our back door, one eye matted closed and his belly red with blood from a quarter-sized hole in his chest. His left rear leg was stiff and bloody, his ear was ripped half off. He made no protest while Kipling examined him, but I doubted he was able to. It was a minor miracle that he’d made it to the back door of the little house.

We phoned a veterinarian who’d practiced in the county for decades. It was after office hours but he’d answered his phone himself. When we explained our local connections and the situation, he said, “Bring him in.”

Morris lay limply in a towel-lined cardboard box between us during the five-mile drive. I kept feeling for his heartbeat, crooning nonsense to him as I would to an injured child.

The vet examined Morris and surmised that beside his obvious damage he likely had internal injuries. He gently suggested it might be kindest to put Morris down. Hearing that, Kipling gathered up Morris in his arms and carried him out of the vet’s office. “I can do better than that,” he said in parting.

For four days Morris languished on our back porch, burying himself deep inside a box of old towels, sleeping. Each morning and evening, he lay patiently while Kipling doctored his wounds in what would be a long, slow recovery. Once again, I was grateful for Aunt Louise’s faulty memory. When she asked, “Have you seen Morris today?” I’d truthfully answer, “I have; he was curled up sound asleep on a towel,” and she’d sigh in satisfaction.

After three nights of being awakened by the challenging yowls of the tom cat responsible for Morris’s injuries, Kipling considered it a declaration of war. He found an old wire trap two feet by four feet in the barn and baited it with meat scraps, then positioned it so any animal trying to enter the barn where Morris usually slept would have to walk straight into it.

The trap was successful the first night, but our captive: a big fat possum. Kipling opened the wire door and it ambled off in its clumsy gait, tail dragging behind him, seemingly undisturbed by having been trapped in a wire cage. The next morning it looked like the same contented possum in the trap. And the next morning, too.

“Either there’s a herd of identical possums around here or we have one very stupid possum,” Kipling commented as we watched it stroll toward the trees.

But the following morning, spitting and hissing filled the air before we rounded the corner of the barn, and we saw the trap wildly rocking. A growling long-haired black and white cat raced around the rectangular confines, banging head-first against the sides of the trap. Its fur was mangy, matted with knots and briars. Kipling used a pitchfork from the barn to open the trap door because each time he stepped within five feet of the cage, the cat attacked, slamming into the wire sides with its lips drawn back, well-polished teeth wickedly bared, and claws swiping. “I think he could eat through the wire,” I warned him.

The instant the trap door began to shakily rise, the cat flattened itself and pressed through the crack. It streaked away toward the deep ravine.

“I hope that taught him a lesson,” Kipling said, but he re-baited the trap with a piece of hot dog, “to reinforce the lesson.”

And there was the same cat in the trap the next morning, just as foul-tempered, just as quick to bound away.

On the fifth morning, we found the black and white cat glowering at us from the back corner of the trap. Morris, nearly healed, sat on a stump in the sunshine fifteen feet away, watching. The cat gave us a sullen meow of recognition and crouched, prepared to escape when the door was opened. He had the drill down, willing to trade a night in a trap in exchange for the tidbits Kipling used for bait.

“You’re on your own now, Morris,” Kipling told Morris, who unconcernedly sat on the stump and washed his face. “That’s the last trapping I’m doing in your name.”


1930 Christmas day. Just before we sat down to Christmas dinner, Johnny looked out the window and shouted. My Billy and Frank were walking up the road to the house through the beautiful snow! The sheriff let them out for Christmas but they have to go back tomorrow to finish their sentences. Oh, it was a good day!



Next Tuesday, Chapter 13: Mike's Search for Meaning Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

Chapter 11

True Spring

Just when we were convinced it was safe to begin digging around in the dirt and rototilling the garden space, when we thrilled to birdsong before dawn each morning, and migrated to short sleeves most afternoons, the temperature suddenly dropped into the low teens by dinner time and that night several inches of heavy wet snow fell, bowing the tree branches already thick with budding leaves, and sliding off the roofs and railings into heavy piles of mush.

Louise stayed in bed all day, vowing to sleep until true spring arrived. The birds acted dazed and sat by the feeders puffed into round balls to keep warm. I bundled up and walked to the mailbox, squinting against the gloppy flakes. To my left, in the snowy ravine, frogs frantically peeped in amphibian dismay.


1930 Stella is the best sister. We went to a dance and danced with each other. Bill sends his clothes home every week to wash.


Breaking out of the trees on my trail construction, I entered what Kipling called my "prairies," once a five-acre field where Uncle Mike had grown corn, now only partially open, thick with locust and sassafras, sedge and quack grass. So there was my trail in its many moods: the trees and the field, the shadow and the sun, slipping past water and through giant old oaks, the yin and the yang. The woods opened to a sweeping view of the sky and the corn fields across the road. I continued the trajectory of my path into the open by tapping in sticks along the twists and turns I intended to beat down into a trailway with my feet.

At last the single, complete circuit was finished. I set aside my hoe and loppers, removed my gloves, dropping them on the ground, and set off on my inaugural walk. It took me seven minutes and I was elated, so intently drinking in its sights and sounds from this new vantage point – not looking for roots that I’d stumble over or low-hanging branches but as a tourist and creator – that lights flashed in front of my eyes before I realized I was holding my breath. At the end of my first circle, Kipling stood at the edge of the orchard, holding two glasses of red wine. “To a job well done,” he said, toasting the trail.

I traded the old circle around the house for five to ten circuits on my new trail, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, changing the views. Each trip around offered new perspectives, a rich mixture of scenery and light I couldn’t imagine ever taking for granted. The trail was all I’d hoped it would be. Aunt Louise daily asked me, “What’s new on the trail?”

“I’ll take you around with me,” I offered.

“When I get my legs back,” she said.

“I saw fawn tracks in the field,” I told her one dewy morning after I’d completed three circuits and stopped to be sure they’d eaten the breakfast I’d left on the table.

"This is the time when the deer have their young," Louise said, "isn't it, Mike?"

"I don't know what time they have their young."

Her voice rose in irritation. "In the spring. You know they have their young in the spring."

"I know they have their young in the spring," Mike agreed, with a touch of impatience, "but I don't know what time."

He had spent the morning searching for the accordion he used to play with rollicking ease. I knew he’d sold it at least ten years ago but to tell him that caused more stress than his looking and not finding it. Haltingly he talked about making music at the Lithuanian Hall, and about dancing half the night.

"Mike was a good dancer," Louise said. "A good singer, too."

"Were you a good dancer?" I asked her.

She shook her head. "I wasn't, because convention wouldn't allow me to lead and I can't stand anyone pushing me around."

Somehow our talk about music and dancing grew convoluted in Louise's mind and by that afternoon she’d convinced herself there'd been a wedding the night before, "a big shindig," Kipling and I had attended and which she hadn’t been invited to. I was tempted to go along with it but I couldn't. I simply didn't have it in me to fabricate such an elaborate story.

"But didn't you have a good time?" she asked.

"I didn't go anywhere last night, Aunt Louise."

"What about the wedding? Was it fun?"

"There wasn't any wedding."

"I know there was. There was going to be dancing and lots of food. How much did you eat?"

I felt like I’d fallen into quicksand. She couldn't let it go and became more and more confused. "There was a wedding, a big party," she insisted and began crying.

"If nobody wants us to be there, then the hell with them," Uncle Mike broke in angrily.

I was a coward but I had to get out of there. I hugged her and told her I loved her and fled, hoping she'd take a nap and forget the phantom wedding and dance.


1930 Nothing happens here on the farm. Very cold. I went to the fields and brought Dad some coffee. Tiresome.


Spring finally burst on us for true. The mud dried and shot out tender, pale grass. Not a chance of a freak snowfall now, we assured ourselves. Louise and Mike stirred with the season, napping less, staying awake later and moving their lives outside. “There’s too much to see it all,” Louise said from her favorite blue metal chair on her patio. I agreed.

Their pleasure in the warming world and relative peace temporarily banished thoughts of nursing homes. Like Scarlett O’Hara, we’d think about that another day.

During a single night, as if by conjuring, trilliums opened along my trail, white petals shining beneath the trees, the heads bending toward the light. They were protected by Michigan law now, but I remembered a school field trip shepherded by nuns in black-and-white habits to a field dense with the fragile flowers. “Don’t pull them up by the roots,” they vainly warned roving students as we ecstatically filled our arms with bouquets, ripping up the roots in our exuberance. “They’ll die. Not by the roots.”

In the shade I spotted the glossy leaves of wintergreen plants, marking the spot with a stick so I could return to pick the white-fleshed, red berries, my mouth watering at the memory of the mealy, slightly medicinal-tasting fruit.

Exiting the woods onto the “prairie,” I discovered that two box turtles about eight inches long had positioned themselves on the trail, blocking it, touching nose to nose, not moving but intent on each other, oblivious to my presence. Nature had painted their shells in decorative mottling, similar but not identical, hints of red and orange among the grey-green. I ran to the house to fetch Kipling to come see. When we returned, the turtles had turned tail-to-tail, and stood as still as they had when I first discovered them. I was struck by an embarrassing shock of intrusion. “I think we’ve burst in on a private moment,” I told Kipling.

So after marveling at the intriguing signs – albeit slow – of turtle love, we left them to resume their romance.

When Louise asked me what was “new on the trail,” I described the two turtles and this reminded her and Mike of catching and cooking snapping turtles. “That meat is a chore to get out of the shell,” Louise said.

“Did you catch them in the river or on land?” I asked.

Mike laughed. “It’s easier on land.”

“But how did you catch them?” I persisted, imagining a snapping turtle’s steely jaws and mad-dog twists of the head.

He laughed again. “How do you think? You’d better know you’re a lot faster than a turtle.”

I’d been fixing them a snack and our conversation had distracted me. I stood in the open door of their refrigerator, unable to recall what I was looking for.

“I can’t remember what I wanted,” I said.

Both Louise and Mike laughed. “You’re getting to be just like us,” Mike said.

“You fit right in,” Louise added.

“Yeah, we’re just a bunch of kooks,” Mike said.

The laughter subsided and Mike said haltingly, with great effort, “Sometimes it’s not so funny when you forget.”

“It must be frustrating,” I said.

“Yes, it’s terrible,” he agreed softly, nodding and looking away.

Times like these, when Mike was aware of his slipping consciousness, were searingly painful to witness. There was little comfort and no reassurance we could provide that soothed him when he had moments, minutes, or even hours, of clarity. We forced ourselves to step back, to halt our hovering and watchfulness, and give him the space and respect we’d given him before the onset of Alzheimer’s.

We knew the clarity wouldn’t last, that the flat, dull confusion would slip back into his eyes like a curtain falling. Each moment with the old Mike was all the more precious for its increasing infrequency and fleetness of passage.


1930 Bill drove all night to get here and can only stay one day. He and Frank went rabbit hunting and shot two rabbits, then pulled stump in the new field. Got “cough syrup” for my cold.


Although it was still too early in the season to mow the lawns that stretched between the buildings and back toward the barn, the grass had turned the vigorous green of springtime, the turf dense with tender new growth. “I’d better check out the lawn mower situation,” Kipling decided.

“I know there’s a mower in the long shed,” Louise told him.

I’d read once that the first thing we humans do when we take possession of land, no matter how small, is name its properties. I’d done it to the features along my trail: the woods, the prairies, the S-curves. Louise and Mike had christened the little house, the long shed, the little woods, the old field, and many more, each site pronounced as if it were a title or written within quotation marks, like “the White House.”

Kipling returned from the long shed that was attached to the barn, perplexed. “There isn't a lawn mower; there are lawn mowers. You have to see this.”

He was right. Nine push mowers with engines, two push mowers without engines and one riding lawn mower. All regimentally lined up against the back wall of the shed and all kept dirt-free by coverings of old jackets and blankets.

We inspected the troops, noting the numerous brands and styles. Several had faded paint or rust spots but a few appeared brand new. “Maybe Uncle Mike salvaged old lawn mowers for parts,” I suggested as Kipling pulled off the ripped jacket on the last mower: a sleek yellow job with oversized wheels that brought a goofy smile to his face.

But no, after a few pulls every single lawn mower started and steadily idled. The shed reverberated with their roar, the air clouded and fumed with exhaust. All of the blades were sharpened, with shiny clean edges. No dead grass clung to the undersides.

"Why do you have so many lawn mowers?" I asked Mike at dinner that evening.

"I don't have any lawn mowers," he insisted.

"Why does Uncle Mike have so many lawn mowers?" I asked Louise after Mike left the table.

Aunt Louise shrugged and fussed with her spoon and knife. She raised her shoulders, looking embarrassed. "I just like to buy Mike tools."

That explained the four chain saws, one of them still in its case, three sanders, several electric drills and the new, packages-never-opened, router, circular saw and jig saw.


1930 Billy is here! Things became very bad in Chicago so he came home to live here for a while. I’m so glad to see him. He had a letter that his mother died in Holland – a month ago!



It rained, a warm spring rain, and Ray phoned, "This is a mushroom rain," he said. "You'd better come out tomorrow and we'll hunt mushrooms."

Morels. The Michigan truffle, the gourmet's delight. Entering the woodsy areas on the way to Ray and Barbara's we passed cars parked every half mile or so. Mushroom hunters. "They'll park a mile away just so they don't give away their favorite spot," my brother explained.

We rode with him in his truck down two-tracks to a forest of red oak that had been logged, and tromped through standing water and tangled logging debris searching for the dark brainily-faceted fungi. They were invisible until Ray triumphantly found the first one just peeking above rotted leaves in the shadow of a stump. We gathered around it, studying it for reference.

Our eyes suddenly became morel-conscious. My nose twitched at their earthy fragrance. One after another, tucked in around the bases of stumps and just surfacing under last year’s oak leaves. We raced each other for the telltale bulges of leaves normally matted flat in spring, uncovering the newest, most succulent morels. We pinched off a few fiddle head ferns and added them to our bags. Ray found an owl pellet, an oval mass of hair and tiny bones: likely a mouse. We studied coyote scat. Ray handed me a perfectly round ball the size and weight of a ping pong ball, but smooth and fragile and polished brown.

"It's an oak gall wasp ball," he told me, pointing to a miniscule hole on its glossy surface. "The wasp lays its larvae on the oak and a chemical interferes with the tree’s growth so the oak forms a gall over it to protect itself. When the larvae hatch, they feed on the cell tissue until its ready to emerge."

The ball was light as air and I carried it carefully in one hand for the shelf above my computer, saying the name aloud, like one of the old tongue twisters we loved as kids: oak gall wasp ball.

There were enough mushrooms for all of us for dinner. Louise clapped her hands in delight when she saw them. “Boil them in salt water to remove the bugs and then sauté them in butter,” she instructed me. They smelled heavenly on the stove but it was appalling how much they shrank. But still, each of our plates held a generous serving.

"These are perfect," Louise said, eating one mushroom at a time and savoring it before swallowing, her eyes closed in pleasure. “Heavenly.”

Even Mike ate them as eagerly as he ate sweets. Louise reminisced about the year she and Mike picked grocery bags full of mushrooms, so many she pickled them and canned them to eat all winter long. "Do you remember that, Mikey?"

"Yup," Mike answers.

"Just like Gary Cooper," Louise teased him. "Yup."

But only an hour later, after I’d packed up the dishes in the basket to take home to wash, when I told her I hoped to pick morels again, Louise asked, "How many did you find the first time?"

"A gallon pail full.”

"I wish there would have been enough for us to have some," she said sadly. "I love morels and I haven't had any in years."


1930 Frank killed a horse for Thompson. Bill is going to make dried beef from it. “Why waste it?” he wanted to know. They caught 8 rabbits, too.


Orchards, commercial and on family lots, went wild with blossoms. Cherries, then pears, followed by a profusion of apples. “Old” apples that would bear the small, intensely flavored but difficult-to-store fruit, blossomed along roadside ditches and abandoned farms. Their silvery bark glowed. The blossoms were fragrant and brief, perfuming the air and quickly drifting free.

Either Louise or Mike had at one time planted poppies in the orchard and now they circled several of the fruit trees: blooming brilliant reddish orange. Florid, rich and sumptuous.

Honey bees languidly buzzed the blooms, the sacs on their back legs heavy with orange pollen. Kipling had a trick of gently “petting” the bees’ backs, and each time Louise witnessed it, she laughed in amazement as if she’d never seen such a feat.

Thick spears of asparagus shot up from the asparagus bed each morning, erupting from the dirt like miniature poles. Every night for weeks we ate asparagus cooked every manner I could conceive of. And each time I set an asparagus dish on the table either Louise or Mike inquired in amazement, “This asparagus is from our garden?”

Even the air was tinted with green. Flowers I hadn’t seen since I was a child emerged: not only yellow and purple violets and trilliums, but spotted trout lilies, spring beauties, Jacks-in-the-pulpit, marsh marigolds.

In Louise’s gardens surrounding the house, which hadn’t been cleaned out in two years, hyacinth, tulips and daffodils poked through last year’s dead mass of leaves. Kipling found a leaf rake among Mike’s garden tools and carefully began to free the flowers from the detritus, finding two plates, an old TV Guide, and a pair of reading glasses that had been thrown at the blue jays.

Louise, whose flower gardens had once been her pride, watched Kipling clean them from the patio or the living room window, gazing after his easy movements of bending and rising and tugging at old weeds with sorrowful eyes.


1930 Frank, Bill and I went rabbit hunting in the night. A full moon. Beautiful. I bang pans around the brush piles or at their holes and scare them toward Frank and Bill and they catch them when they run out. Bullets are too expensive.



Next Tuesday, Chapter 12: Morris the cat loses a battle. Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 10

Movement

We arrived early for our first Alzheimer's Support group meeting, expecting twenty or thirty people, but there were only six of us sitting around a large table. “There will be more people later,” Susan Oyler said confidently. “They’ll come.” We only shared our first names with one another.

The seven of us: Kipling and me; Susan; a woman named Milly whose mother had lived with her in a confused state for six years and her teenage daughter; Roger whose father was “off his nut” and whose wife couldn’t attend that night because she was home caring for his father and their children; and Evelyn, a middle-aged woman whose husband was newly diagnosed.

Later, I would realize our group was representative of caregivers: mainly middle-aged women struggling to hold together and manage marriages and growing children, jobs, and at the same time trying to help a relative who was helplessly succumbing to dementia. Pulled in several directions with few options.

Susan told us our small group was unusual because statistics confirmed that in the United States the majority of Alzheimer’s patients were women, whether it was because women typically lived longer than men and had more “opportunity” for the disease, or whether they were physiologically more predisposed to Alzheimer’s. Our little band represented more male victims than female.

The meeting was quickly dominated by Evelyn. Earlier in my life I would have resented her monopolization but our hearts warmed to this woman who was struggling alone and desperate for support. She was far more "raw" than the rest of us. Her husband's diagnosis was less than a week old and she was determined to "talk him out of it." She was frightened and angered by his bizarre behavior.

“He emptied out all the kitchen cupboards last night,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “And got mad when I put everything back. He wanders away and doesn’t tell me where he’s going. This morning I couldn’t convince him that it was Tuesday.”

"Let him win," Susan advised her. "If he says the sky is green, agree that green's a nice color and he'll calm down. He's losing so much and he's frightened; he's trying to win at anything, so he can feel that he's all right, that he's not losing his mind. He knows there's something wrong but he can't figure out what."

In quick bursts, we compared stories, eagerly turning and pulling words from each other. What’s worked for you? How do you handle wandering? Does your uncle ever hit? I can’t make her stop calling me by her sister’s name. Why is he suddenly afraid of dogs? He’s always loved dogs.

At last, people who knew exactly what we were experiencing, all members of a soul-draining club that had no rules or logic, bound by the desire to care for people we loved.

"Whatever your emotion, the Alzheimer's patient reflects it back to you," Susan explained. "If you're agitated, they become agitated. If you're calm, they'll grow calm."

The meeting was scheduled to last from seven until eight-thirty but we remained in our chairs until after ten, exploring, examining, probing for solutions, still talking as we walked to our cars in the parking lot. A frigid clear night hung above us, stars like crystals.

"Every case is different. There are certain behaviors we normally see as Alzheimer’s progresses, but it's impossible to predict when they'll occur. Some people never experience these behaviors. Some experience them all in a few months and slip away quickly. Others can live for years, slowly fading away."

"There is no cure."

And Susan looked at me when she said, “You can no longer give them memories, only moments.”


1930 Got eggs from home and a big veal roast and wild duck. Mother is too good. I am grateful. Beautiful weather. I walk a lot and try not to think about our troubles. Watched children play in the park today. They’re nicer than us adults when they’re nice, and worse when they’re mean. But at least they put it behind them fast.


The snow had melted in the shade of the woods and puddles had soaked into the ground: it was time! I couldn’t wait a day longer before I began my trail. I invited Mike to help me plan its route.

“A trail?” he repeated. “God oh God.” But he gamely joined me, dressed in a barn coat and work boots. We walked together behind the barn, me chattering about my brilliant idea to make the longest route possible and him repeating my most stressed words. “Through the berries,” “above the creek,” “A shovel.”

He seemed at ease, tugging on a fence post here, picking up a stick there, and companionably nodding as I rambled.

“I want to weave through these trees,” I said, stepping into a stand of oak.

Mike took one uncertain step after me and froze. He gazed around him at the close tree trunks, his mouth silently working, and then turned his head to look back toward the barn.

“What do you think of making a path around that big beech tree?” I asked, pointing toward a silvery-barked giant.

He shook his head. An expression of panic mottled his face. He awkwardly twisted his body and without saying a word, stumbled back toward the barn, away from the now foreign forest.

Mike beelined toward the house and I lengthened my stride to keep pace with him, trying to speak calmly about the clear day, the new grass, anything that held no emotion or agitation. I opened the door for him and followed him inside where Louise said, “I thought you went fishing,” and Mike responded, “He wasn’t home,” before I returned to the oaks.

I meandered, marking twists and turns with stakes Kipling had cut from slats for me and I carried in a burlap bag slung over my shoulder. My route would pass beneath the tallest trees and snug up to the creek bank for as long as possible. The trees were still skeletons of themselves, the underbrush leafless. In spots I knew the earth remained frozen a few inches below the surface.

But I couldn't wait any longer. I found an axe, shovel, hoe and a pair of knife-sharp loppers in Mike’s shed, donned my oldest jeans and a faded barn jacket of Louise’s and headed for the woods, feeling like a pioneer setting out on a long slog.

Every morning after preparing Louise and Mike’s coffee, I hacked at bushes and roots, and wrestled with brambles, returning inside only to eat and help with Louise and Mike. I wore through a pair of gloves and then another pair. My soft winter muscles ached to distraction. After dinner I soaked in a hot bath and stuck new bandages on my blisters.

I accepted Kipling’s aid only to move the largest fallen tree branches. This signified more than a trail. Once far enough into the woods that I was out of sight and sound of the house I felt an exhilarating sense of freedom and solitude. I needed this trail.

Although the woods were silent, when breezes blew just right, the eerie sounds of sighing and moaning floated to me from the direction of the house. The melting snow had uncovered rows of glass bottles along the south foundation of the antique shop, where Louise had lined them, taking advantage of the sunny exposure so the old glass would turn colors: purples, blues, a few pink, according to old glass formulae. When the wind blew across the open bottle tops they keened and whispered like mad organ music.

The color changes increased their value in Louise's shop. Other glassware decorated a nearby stump for the same reason: crystal sugar bowls, vases, drinking glasses, goblets, more bottles.

When I stopped to have tea with Louise, I told her how much I enjoyed hearing the wind across the bottles’ mouths. “I used to do that,” she said and sunk into a black funk for the remainder of the day.


1930 Mother sent a chicken for my birthday dinner. Billy gave me purse and gloves. I wish he wouldn’t have.


The slant of the sun’s course through the sky lengthened. The air fairly shimmered in anticipation of warmer days.

As I hacked my trail into the side of the steep bank above the creek, the sun through the bare trees grew so warm I peeled off my jacket and hung it on a branch, working in shirt sleeves. Beneath me, the amber water of Weldon Creek rushed and babbled its winding path. Brilliant yellow-green skunk cabbage thrust upward in the swampy verge like tropical apparitions. I chopped at the root-bound earth with a sharpened hoe from Mike's greenhouse, a hoe he'd honed so many times, it was only half its original size and oddly the handle was only half its original length, as if he’d broken it but believed it was too good – or perhaps too familiar – to throw away.

Around me, the forest floor was opening to life: budding birdsfoot violets, fiddleheads of bracken ferns, yellow-green moss. It was too early for trilliums and daffodils, two flowers that heralded the honest arrival of spring.

My trail was impacting the wildlife, perhaps interfering with accustomed paths, yet offering them new avenues, too. A weasel, still partially in its sleek winter white, undulated silently through the woods and stopped at a tree, climbing a foot up the trunk. Its head snaked around on its pencil-thin body and it regarded me for a moment before it leapt down and disappeared like a specter. “An ermine,” Mike said as sure and clear as anything when I told him. “You don’t see those much anymore.”

The mammal book explained that one of the few differences between a weasel and an ermine was the length of its tail and the size of the black tip at the end. In the winter they both turned white and were both trapped as ermine.

In Mike awakened the same autonomic response to spring as in the trees and animals. When I arrived early in the morning to make coffee, trying not to awaken them, he was frequently already up, scrutinizing the day through the windows, dressed in his farming clothes and searching for his leather boots. He wandered around the farm, often without a coat, once with only one shoe, opening and closing the barn doors, minutely examining the shed wall, picking up a hammer and dropping it, carrying a rake outside, then putting it back, carefully tying a piece of twine around and around the outside water pump handle in a mysterious but definite pattern.

Kipling shadowed him, worried he might slip on the muddy earth or wander off, although he tried to stay invisible to Mike. I longed to be inside Uncle Mike’s head for a few minutes – only a few minutes. Was his physical landscape the same as mine? What about his sense of color and his hearing? I wondered if he experienced a narrowing simplicity that held its own measure of security. The world had grown much smaller for him, but did that make it safer?

He performed skeletal versions of his old spring tasks: haphazardly pruning raspberry canes, raking random squares of earth. He’d always propagated his own garden plants, growing them from seed he’d saved from his best produce, refining and nurturing his vegetables to create truly spectacular specimens, a natural botanist. He was the only source for a yellow acid-free tomato that was too dangerously low in acid to can but was a great “slicer.”

He’d stored these seeds in various-sized jars in a cool dark corner of the barn, clearly labeled, for the following year. The seeds hadn’t been touched in at least two years. Kipling was encouraged to see Mike opening the jars and sniffing the contents, then rearranging the jars.

What Kipling missed seeing was Mike emptying all the containers of seeds into a single bucket and before Kipling could intercept him, Mike carried the pail to the bank and tossed the seeds as if tossing a bucket of water, over the bank and into the ditch. They blew on the breeze or sifted into the grass. Scattered. All gone.

One afternoon Mike dragged weathered boards from the barn: two by fours, eight-foot planks, pieces of plywood, and stacked them neatly by the big barn door. After hours of diligent work, the boards were propped every four or five feet, all around the barn as if to keep it from collapsing.

“Why did you put the boards against the barn?” I asked him at dinner.

He studiously looked away from the window where the boards were plainly visible. “I didn’t put any boards against the barn,” he said, and shook his head at my crazy ideas. “God oh God.”


1930 We have hit the end of the rope and it hurts. I’m going to go home and Bill will stay with John to try to find a job. We can’t afford to pay rent anymore. I WANT to go home.


The temperature rose to a balmy fifty-seven degrees and for the first time since we’d arrived Louise emerged from the house on her own. Still in her nightgown and robe, bundled inside a jacket, she unsteadily walked the length of her patio and back and then repeated it, then again, each time a little more sure of her balance, a little more upright, her head turning as she absorbed the day. Morris curved around and through her legs, dropping in front of her and rolling onto his back. I held my breath, but she managed – or he did – to avoid an entanglement.

"I'm going to drive my car today," she announced when she saw me, waving one hand toward the garage. Keys hung on a nail in her kitchen, but they were only for her peace of mind. We’d exchanged the actual keys for keys that we’d found in a drawer and which fit nothing.

"I'll take you anywhere you'd like to go," I assured her.

Her face darkened, her chin rose. "I'm going to drive myself."

"All right," I agreed calmly, wondering if I really was learning anything. "You tell me when you're ready and I'll get your car out for you."

"Maybe later,” she said. “Could you set a lawn chair on the patio? Bring two. No, six. For all of us.”

After I cleaned off the dust and spiderwebs I set up six metal lawn chairs from the garage, positioning them exactly where she directed me to, her own angled so she could rest her feet on the stone collar around the tree, she asked, “Do you think I belong in a nursing home?”

I sat in the patio chair beside her, the metal cold through my pants. Louise wore less and seemed impervious. Wasn’t this the moment to reinforce the idea of assisted living? It was my opportunity to broach the subject while she was clear and calm, to begin introducing it often enough that she would hopefully remember and accept.

But the day was beautiful, Louise was content, we were sharing a calm, intimate moment. I opened my mouth and what came out was, “They’d probably throw you out. You’re not sick enough. In fact, I think you’re stronger all the time.”

Aunt Louise frowned and finally answered, “Maybe, but I’m not getting any better looking.”

A few moments later, she asked, “Do you think Mike could live here by himself?”

“It would be very difficult for him,” I told her, recalling Susan’s more “gentle” approach instead of saying what I knew was true: no, he definitely couldn’t.

“I don’t think he could, either. On days when I feel good, like now, I wish I could go on living forever, but on days when I’m depressed, I wish the Lord would take me. I’ve lived longer than my father or mother lived, longer than anyone in my family.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, remembering all those short-lived people.

“Well, I wish they were here so they could congratulate me.”


1930 At home. Helped Mother clean. Wet, sloppy snow. No letter from Bill waiting for me.


As I pulled out a roll of paper towel in Aunt Louise’s pantry, noticing how we’d finally begun to make a dent in her stores, the corner of a large box wrapped in old fashioned brown parcel paper and tied with string came to light. A yellowed label was addressed to Lithuania. The return address was my grandfather's who'd been dead for thirty years. I took it home and opened it.

Inside were dresses, with Lithuanian language pamphlets hidden in the pockets, shoes, a purse, candy and two cakes of lavender soap. I was too curious not to ask Aunt Louise about it. So I rewrapped it in its brown paper, retied the string, and returned with it to the house. When she spied it in my arms, she grimaced. Its memory was still fresh – and painful.

“After your grandmother died, your grandfather wanted to send her things to her sister in Lithuania.” Louise shook her head. “But the post office wouldn’t mail it to Lithuania, not in those times.. I couldn’t stand to disappoint him so I let him believe I mailed it. Then I felt too guilty to throw the package away.”

She studied the package for a moment, frowned, and touched, almost caressed it with her arthritic hand. “Could you put it back? I’d feel better.”

I tucked it back into its place in the pantry between the paper towels and two cases of canned tomatoes.


1930 We all went to church including myself. What else is there to do? Early to bed and early out! I mailed a roasted rabbit to Billy. He’s working but doesn’t want me in Chicago. Why? Too troublesome and no place to live anyway. I get a letter from him every day. I’m so blue and lonesome. It’s cold here. Snow.


Next Tuesday, Chapter 11: Tricks of Springtime  Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 9

Susan

Susan Oyler was a petite, pale-eyed blonde with fragile skin. She looked twenty. “So what have we got here?” were the first words out of her mouth when I opened the door onto the front steps of the little house. She’d left her jacket in her car and instead of lugging a briefcase, only carried a baby blue purse.

Within moments I was pouring out our problems: Louise’s depression, her unreasonable anger, Mike’s incontinence, their mutual befuddlement and the way they escalated each other’s confusion, our own frustration and inability to ease their lives as effectively as we’d hoped and wanted to.

I didn’t need to explain the fine details; she comprehended exactly what we were talking about. Her answers were clear and pointed – and practical, the brand of practical that made me shake my head and ask, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Maybe your aunt doesn’t want you to fix her problems; maybe she just wants you to hear them.”

“What does it hurt if your uncle sleeps in his clothes once in a while?”

“Let her win in an argument, even if she’s wrong. She’s only trying to hold onto some semblance of herself. She needs to be right."

“They’ll mirror you. If you’re upset, they’ll become upset.”

“Don’t ask him if he wants a bath. That’s too complicated a procedure for him to understand anymore. Draw it and tell him it’s ready. Talk him through the steps.”

Susan recommended a book titled, The 36-hour Day, which I would mail order from Grand Rapids and which was destined to become well-thumbed and dog-eared, always close at hand.

“What about the legal guardianship issue?” I asked.

“That’s immaterial as far as my helping you,” she said tersely and I recalled my phone exchange with her receptionist, “but your brother should consider it for your uncle’s protection.”

While Louise had assigned Ray durable power of attorney, nothing legal had ever been done for Mike. Susan explained that in Mike’s current state, no one was responsible for his health care. If he were struck by an emergency illness, his treatment would be taken out of our hands. Legally, he shouldn’t even see the doctor without a legal guardianship, and since we were nieces and nephews, not children, it was important to have the legal right to continue providing care for Mike.

“I’ll go meet them now,” Susan said, and when I rose to accompany her, she held up her hand. “I’ll go alone.” She didn’t take her purse, not even pencil and paper.

I watched her jump across a puddle in the driveway as easily as a child and unhesitatingly open their door without knocking. I dreaded the reception she was about to receive. I couldn’t fathom Louise’s response to this direct, erudite young woman. Susan was unlike any other person they’d met in the social services system.

Five minutes later Susan returned. “She threw me out,” she said cheerfully, smiling and looking satisfied, “but I think she and I will get along fine.”

At dinner than night, Louise remembered Susan and asked, “Who was that nosy nurse who was here today? She’s too young to be a nurse.”

“Too young,” Mike agreed.

As Alzheimer’s had advanced, he’d developed a trick of communication and could converse with an unobservant person by simply repeating the most stressed or last two words of whatever he heard.

“Hello, Mike. That was a pretty good snow last night.”

“Pretty good snow.”

“The plows still haven’t got to our road. The whole north end is drifted shut.”

“Drifted shut.”

“That’s right. I’ve seen it worse though. I just came back from town.”

“From town.”

“Yeah, not much going on there. Not until the plows get out.”

And so on. To a casual listener, the conversation made perfect sense, and I was reminded of Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardener in the film, "Being There."

“Too many nurses,” Louise went on, leaning back from her half-eaten lasagna. “Too many pills. Just too many. I never dreamed my life would come to this.” Tears were building in her eyes.

Instead of rushing in with my usual cheery platitudes of why her life was still worthwhile, how much she was loved and what she could still accomplish – which she invariably saw as condescension – I tried a Susan Oyler tactic. “It must be discouraging.”

“It is. You just don’t know how discouraging.”

“I don’t,” I agreed. “You did a lot of exciting things in your life.”

“That was when I was full of piss and vinegar,” she answered with a distant smile.

I could barely refrain from smiling myself. Her threatened descent had been stopped in its tracks.


1930 Bill still feeling punk. Emma went with me to look at rooms on the south side. Al and Sylvia came for dinner. I made cream pie and French fried potatoes. Al is driving for somebody on the south side. He said Bill should apply. Easy money.
A puzzle started today in the Herald with a prize of $$. I’m going to try my hand at it.


Change was neither miraculous nor instantaneous. Life on Weldon Creek didn’t suddenly become the idyll I’d once naively expected it would be. We made erratic progress, sometimes by inches, occasionally by millimeters, and too often slipping backwards and losing precious ground.

Susan Oyler had other clients; she was occupied creating her new program, finding her local bearings, but whenever I called, she gave the impression she’d been sitting beside the phone waiting for it to ring just so she could discuss Louise and Mike. She dispensed confidence and praise and assured us that yes, we were definitely moving forward; life for Louise and Mike was improving, and that by helping them remain at home, we truly were giving them a gift; it didn’t matter whether they recognized it or not. On some level they knew.

It would be months before I consciously understood that what Susan suggested I give to Louise and Mike was exactly what she was giving me: assurance that we were valuable, encouragement when we made mistakes, recognition that yes, this was damn hard. Not sympathy, but this acknowledgement of our struggle strengthened us and gave me glimmers of the grace I longed for.

The arrival of spring helped. That anticipated lengthening of the days, the shift of winds from north to southwest. So what if the melting snow created fields of mud and slush that clung to the soles of our shoes? Floors couldn’t be kept clean. If we neglected slipping out of our shoes we trailed muck from room to room. The little runoff creek raced through the ravine in brown torrents we could hear from inside the house. Trucks passing on the highway threw up great fanned sprays of silvery water which hung in the air for a few seconds like mist. A steamy fog hung over the fields. We felt ourselves opening to the light and the slowly rising temperatures. Optimism seeped into the air and I fantasized baring my arms to the sun.

As the snow had melted, Louise’s patio emerged. The year my grandfather died, Louise went into a depression, a black withdrawal. Back then, her depressions were simply a fact of life. "Louise has the blues again," we'd hear Dad say – and we were filled with anticipation and conjecture as to just how she'd pull herself out of it this time. Would she spend weeks immersing herself in decoupaging every box and can she could find? Make exquisite braided rugs? She might take a paintbrush loaded with fanciful colors to the outbuildings, or start some ornate garden.

Once she reroofed the garage. Another year she dug a new section of basement beneath the house: breaking through the stone wall like an escaping convict and carrying out one pail of dirt at a time until she’d excavated an eight by ten basement room that undermined the house’s foundation. Whatever her project, it was a guarantee she’d fight her blues through physical action.

So after my grandfather's death, to drag herself from a depression so deep she could barely speak, she built the patio. She and Mike scoured the countryside for rocks, not any rocks, but the "right" rocks, rocks that looked like faces or animals or were especially smooth, that were the proper size and color, that had "potential."

A farmer, seeing them foraging for rocks beside the road, offered them a head-high pile of stones he'd culled from his fields over decades. Louise declined. "That would have made it too easy," she explained.

She built the patio herself, refusing anyone's help, including Mike's. It was a solitary effort, bordering on the heroic – or pathological. The patio, still in beautiful shape after twenty years, was curved, approximately fifty feet by twenty feet. Rocks lay perfectly flat, mortared with concrete, and inlaid between the rocks, a child's delight: silver dollars, antique door knobs, glass insulators, antique coins, marbles, seashells, crystals, even a credit card under glass, a silver spoon, jewelry, the porcelain arm of a doll.

She added stone walkways through the garden, a foot high collar around the thickest pine, another circled the well pit and windmill. Mike strung a wire of lights through the trees and attached to the roof so she could work after dark, sometimes until dawn. And when she’d finished the patio and the tree rings and paths, as if she couldn’t stop, she built a beautiful stone fireplace chimney on the west side of their house– although that side of the house didn’t have a fireplace.

She banished her depression by wearing it down, toiling on her patio single-mindedly from dawn until she was too exhausted to go on. The patio was more the center of her life than the house, and now she watched its emergence from winter with keen anticipation.


1930 A beautiful day. We went to Chicago Music Festival at Soldier Field with 150,000 other people. It was wonderful and made me forget our worries for a while. Bill is doing odd jobs. I worry but there’s nothing available. I pick up what I can but it’s not enough. Mother sent a package.
Yesterday Sylvia and I went to a spiritualist reading. She said I’d soon have a sister in the spirit world. Huh?


Hearing me screech out a curse when I scalded my hand draining a pot of pasta, Kipling asked, “Would it be easier if we shared the work?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he said. “How about if we trade off? If I cook and take over dinner every other evening, and we trade lunches, too.”

“You can’t cook,” I said unthinkingly. He made chili and liked to barbecue, and I recalled a grayish tuna, cheese, and rice dish he’d concocted during his bachelor days and christened, “Tuna surprise.”

He shrugged. “I may not be a chef, but I can read a recipe.”

I was taken aback. Spring and summer were coming when he’d be doing yard work and maintenance, and our responsibilities would be more equitable. It was true, though, that my chosen tasks had begun to feel like martyrdom: cooking, cleaning, dealing with unreasonableness while Kipling never interrupted their lives with meals, baths or a vacuum cleaner. When they saw me, it was with suspicion that I was plotting some devious interference. Kipling was always welcome as the man who fixed things or who arrived to spread good cheer.

In an instant, I glimpsed liberation, time to myself, not having to begin another meal as soon as one was finished. I was touched by his generosity even while I worried about him struggling with cooking, or whether Louise and Mike would accept him.
But freedom!

“All right,” I agreed in a mix of eagerness and trepidation. “Let’s try it.”

Kipling attacked cooking in his usual meticulous and determined manner. He dug through Louise’s boxes of cookbooks, studying nutritional values of various foods, frowning over herb charts. I found him examining measuring cups and spoons, testing the heft of wooden spoons and spatulas, mulling over the pros and cons of ironware, and tasting contents of spice jars.

“Allspice isn’t a mix of all the spices,” I heard him say to himself.

The first time he took a bite of an omelet I’d made and commented, “I wonder how dill weed would taste in this,” I was startled.

“Whole cranberries in this sauce would taste better, I bet,” he said, reading a recipe. “Chicken is easier for them to digest than beef.” “I think we’d better plant fresh herbs.” “Have you ever worked with phyllo leaves?” “Let’s not buy any more pre-grated Parmesan cheese.”

We experimented and revised our schedules until we had a working plan that suited us both. When he cooked and took over their meals, I washed dishes. And when I cooked, he washed dishes. Whoever served the evening meal also served Meals on Wheels or fixed lunch the next day. I continued to prepare coffee in the morning because I liked to tidy up their house and leave the notes and have a general idea of how Louise and Mike had spent the night.

Kipling’s first meal was one of his own favorites: Beef Stroganoff. He’d ignored my suggestion that he start with something simpler, say meat loaf. He was both astounded and pleased when his beef stroganoff actually looked like the cookbook illustration. “It’s delicious,” I assured him, and it was.

At first he admitted to Louise that he’d cooked the Beef Stroganoff.

“You cooked this?” Aunt Louise asked him. “All of it?” She raised her hands to the heavens. “What a man.”

She cleaned her plate and asked for seconds. In the thrill of his first success, Kipling said, “I think I could like this.”

But her refrain soon became, “I tried to teach Mike to cook. He always said he’d learn when the time came. Well, the time has come and gone.”

And it grew worse. “Did you hear that, Mikey? Kipling cooked this meal. Why can’t you learn to cook? You don’t do anything anymore,” which caused Uncle Mike to grow petulant and stomp out of the kitchen to sulk in his chair by the living room window.

“You know,” Louise said when Mike was gone, “The most hurtful things I’ve ever said in my life I’ve said to Mike and he’s the one I’ve always wanted to hurt the least.”

“Why do you think that’s happened?” I asked.

She shrugged. “There’s just something cruel in me, and I hate it.”

After a few days, Kipling began telling them I’d cooked and he’d simply brought the meal over. That they could accept. “It keeps the peace,” he told me. I didn’t feel it was fair but he was right.

I followed his Serbian pork with hand-stuffed tortellini and he countered with dilled pork chops in a sour cream sauce. I baked my chicken and he deboned his and sautéed it in olive oil and garlic, with fresh herbs.

Mike’s pants grew tighter; Louise’s cheeks were rosier. They rarely left any food on their plates. “You’re a gourmet cook,” she praised me.

“Not every night,” I told her.

Louise had been fond of Kipling but now that she saw him more often, she’d come to delight in his measured, cynical humor and to anticipate his arrival. “Kipling’s a nice fellow,” she told me.

“I know it,” I agreed. “I’m glad he’s my husband.”

For some reason that set her on edge and she bristled. “He’s very nice,” she repeated. “In fact, I think he’s nicer than you are.”


1930 Tofelia went back to G. She’s crazy. They moved to South Haven.


How had I missed it? Louise saw them before I did. As if overnight, crocuses erupted in clumps and drifts across the sunnier sides of Louise’s lawns. Purple, yellow, white. Popping up in the dead grass of lawn and in gardens, even while snow still clung in the shade of trees and beneath shrubbery.

A corresponding optimism arose in us at this first promise of warmer weather and regrowth. “Pick the stamens for flavoring,” Louise told me. “They’re nice in rice.”

“Nice in rice,” Mike echoed, relishing the words. His mind often played with phrases and nonsense words, rhyming them or repeating sounds that pleased him. In the car, if he recognized a word in a sign he often turned it into a ditty: “fish. Fish, wish, swish.” “Store More.” “Tire Fire.” Susan said that was common, “a desire to create logic of sorts, even though it made no sense to the listener.”

I thought Louse’s mind was wandering about adding crocus stamens to rice until I read about saffron.

Her delight in the crocuses lasted for days. Each time she saw me she’d ask with new excitement, “Have you seen the crocuses?” Every fresh sighting of the tiny bursts of color gave her something to marvel over and for her, as for all of us, signaled the long awaited change of seasons.


1930 Bill thinks I’m a damn dumbbell and won’t know any better, but I do. He went to a meeting. I don’t want him hanging around those people.
We play cards almost every night with Al and Sylvia. Al owes me so much money he gave me a painting - I love it but it won’t pay our bills.



Next Tuesday, Chapter 10: Trailing into Spring Read More