Jo Dereske

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 8

Betrayal or Common Sense?

I learned that an old friend of Louise and Mike’s was living in care facility near Ludington, 15 miles away. Meadow Manor had a sterling reputation, reportedly light and attractively furnished, with a high staff-to-resident ratio. Without telling Kipling or discussing it with Ray and Barbara, I called the director of Meadow Manor.

“They’re not ready yet,” I told her, “but I’d like to bring them in to visit a friend. Maybe someday . . .” I trailed off, feeling the traitor, unable to look out the window toward Louise and Mike’s house as I spoke.

She understood immediately. “Why don’t you drop by alone to view our facility?” she suggested. “I’ll give you the grand tour.” And then she startled me by inviting me that very afternoon.

“So soon?” I exclaimed, and she laughed.

But I went, in a stew of apprehension and guilt. I was only looking, I told myself. Meadow Manor was light and cheerful. Instrumental music played quietly enough to be unobtrusive. Yes, some “guests” slumped in wheelchairs, a few stared in confusion, others appeared content: laughing and lively.

The director proudly showed me the dining room where a chair exercise class was being conducted to rocking 1950s music, the library and lounge, the kitchen facilities. She assured me that married couples could share a room and they were prepared to handle Alzheimer’s patients who weren’t dangerous or too disruptive.

Around us the cheery voices of staff called patients, “Hon,” or “Sweetheart,” raising their voices to be heard. I had a mental flash of the expression on Louise’s face if she were called “Honey.”

The director showed me to the room of Bernice, the long-time friend of Louise’s who sat in a recliner watching a game show. A necklace of amber – the Lithuanian woman’s favorite gem – circled her neck. One wall of her room was dense with photos from her long life.

“Bring Louise and Mike to visit,” Bernice invited when I explained my connections.

“Does she still braid rugs?”

“Not so much anymore.”

The next day, when Louise and Mike were dressed, I said, “Don’t forget, we’re visiting your friend Bernice today. Kipling’s warming up the car,” sweeping them along into coats, finding gloves, keeping up a light chatter that deterred them from asking too many questions or refusing to go. I kept my eyes averted from Louise’s, certain she’d glimpse my betrayal in them.

I had no plans to trick them or convince them to check into a room, only to introduce them to the care facility. If they could see that Meadows Manor wasn’t a prison or a warehouse, that people – their friends – were actually comfortable there, even content, the idea might lose some of its horror. That was why we were in Michigan, after all, wasnt’ it? To help ease them into assisted living.

“Where are we going again?” Louise asked several times during the drive while Mike hummed to himself as he watched the still unawakened land out the window.

We turned into the circular drive of Meadows Manor and Louise stiffened. “Why are we here?”

“To visit your friend Beatrice.”

“I’m not going in there.”

“She’s expecting you.”

“You’re not making me go in there. This is a trick. You’re committing us.”

“No, no, Aunt Louise, I promise, this is a visit. I told Bernice you were coming.”

“Well, you can tell her otherwise. I’m not stepping out of this car. Take me home.”

Mike began rocking in his seat, wringing his hands as Louise continued to balk, her voice growing low and cold. “Take. Me. Home. Now.”

And so Kipling turned the car around and we drove home. Louise refused to speak to either Kipling or me except to demand that he stop the car so she could change from the front seat and ride in the back with Mike. They were coldly silent the rest of the trip home.

But in front of the garage, as I took Louise’s arm and helped her rise from the back seat, she smiled, squeezed my hand, and said, “Thank you for that nice ride. Let’s do it again another day.”


1930 We played cards at Al and Sylvia’s. Nobody had any money to bet with so we wrote I.O.U.s. I won.
Bill tried to sell but no luck. I swallowed my pride and asked Mrs. B. if I could work for her. Did washing and some baking and she gave me $4. Didn’t see Dr. B. Very cold.


Mike was deeply modest. But he’d begun wetting himself. I’d read in one of the Alzheimer’s books that this was a critical point for many caregivers, when care became too burdensome and professional homes were required.

My sister-in-law Barbara tried to introduce disposable briefs but as she explained their use, Mike stared off as if she were invisible. She left a package in what Louise called his dressing room, off the bathroom. I found them in the garage. I returned them to his dressing room; he tucked the package under an afghan on the breezeway. I tried lining his clean underwear with them and found them wadded and unused under the sink. When he wet himself he would suddenly glance down at his pants and exclaim in genuine amazement, “Now where did that come from?”

I tried to enlist Louise’s help, showing her the disposable briefs and explaining that Mike needed to wear them. “He doesn’t need those,” she said indignantly. “They’ll embarrass him. He’s fine.”

We were stumped. We couldn’t physically wrestle him into disposable briefs. And if by some miracle we could, he was aware enough to remove them, anyway. It seemed hopeless, a condition we were loath to accept but might have to.

A few days later, over a cup of tea, Louise confessed that she had laid out Mike’s clothes for him every morning of their married life. “I loved to baby him,” she said.

“And did he baby you?” I asked.

A faraway look crossed her face. “Sometimes.”

That gave us an idea. I laid out fresh clothes for Mike in his dressing room: pants, shirt, socks, and a pair of disposable briefs. The old habits were resurrected and the next day he dressed in the clothes I’d left for him, including the briefs. Triumph, I thought.

But only occasionally was he fooled enough to don the briefs. More often I found them crumpled and dropped on the floor. It would remain a continuing problem.


1930 Stayed home ‘cause we’re flat broke.


Walking my circle thirty-five and forty times a day around the little house had become boring, and now I had a fantasy: a trail through the woods along the edge of the property lines and above the banks of Weldon Creek past the stump where I’d sat in misery the week before. In sections the brush and blackberries and velcro plants were as dense as Sleeping Beauty's forest. But the hardwood trees towered high into the sky: oak, beech, maple, cherry, hickory; forming a canopy reminiscent of a Wanda Gag illustration.

Temporarily forgetting my thoughts of leaving and fired by spring fever, I envisioned a broad trail, wide enough for two to walk side by side, curving around the property, maybe a quarter mile around, maybe a half mile. I could see it clearly in my mind. It would be beautiful, perfect.

I shared my vision with Kipling as we drove home from buying groceries, taking side roads where we vigilantly scouted for signs of spring: swelling willow buds, maybe a hint of real green. Weren’t those birds scratching for bugs? And oh my gosh, pussy willows were fat to bursting.

"Sounds like a lot of work," Kipling commented.

"I want to build it," I told him, “I need a project to take my mind off some of this.” No need to explain what “this” referred to. I wanted to do it alone; it had to be my project, my trail, grubbed out with my own two hands. I could hardly wait for warmer weather and the woods to dry out.

“What’s that?” Kipling asked, slowing the truck and pointing to a billow of smoke rising from a stand of trees. Snow still dotted he ground, especially in the northern shadows of the tree trunks.

“It’s a sugar bush. It’s the end of the season but see the pails hanging on those maple trees? They tap the trees for sap and then boil it down in that shed. Maple syrup.”

He stopped the truck to take a closer look, and we rolled down the windows. The air was mouth-wateringly redolent with the fragrance of maple.


1930 Billy found a dirty job that will last two weeks at 55 cents an hour. I went downtown to return a dress. They only gave me $7 back when I paid $18.50 for it. Robbery.
Al and Sylvia came to play cards and stayed until 2:30 in the morning. Nobody’s buying art so Al’s putting away his paints and looking for a job.


As soon as I entered the kitchen I sensed an unspoken camaraderie between Louise and Mike. They stole glances at each other and smiled. Mike teased Louise, calling her "Weezie," until she giggled.

"Do you love me, Mikey?" Louise asked.

"I sure do," Mike answered.

"And I sure do love you," she told him with such fervency that I stepped out of the kitchen and straightened the living room, feeling the rude eavesdropper, "and don't you forget it."

"Don't you forget it either," he replied.

Their mood lasted through the entire meal. I tried to imprint it, telling myself to remember this, remember the warmth when he touched her arm, remember her glowing face when he smiled at her. This was the marriage and the love that mattered, this connection between them that was so deep it endured despite mental confusion and crumbling memory.

I dropped a spoon and Mike teased, "Butterfingers," he said and laughed that he'd got it right.

Then I carried the empty milk carton to the trash and tripped on the edge of the stool.

"Buttertoes," Mike said and his face shone with pride at his own cleverness.

Louise laughed with him. She leaned across the table and squeezed his hand. “You’re the funniest man I’ve ever known.”


1930 It has been a bad month. We now owe Big Mike $60. I don’t know how we’ll repay him. Billy and I both have terrible colds but Bill went to the south side to look for rooms. It’s too expensive to stay here.
Mother sent a package with cheese and eggs. Thank you! I‘m too poor to even go home. I sold my green dishes for not a lot.


Barbara phoned from work. She’d just learned of a new program sponsored by the Mental Health Department to help the elderly and their caregivers deal with the challenges of aging, including dementia and depression.

When I phoned the Mental Health Department, I was transferred to Susan Oyler, newly arrived from Tennessee and just building her program. “We’re reaching out to county families who want to keep their senior relatives living at home for as long as possible,” she said, sounding warm, enthusiastic, and young. “We’ll help both the caregivers and the elderly cope with the problems of dementia, maybe give the families some relief. I’m starting an Alzheimer’s support group in two weeks so people can share the experiences.”

“This is exactly what we’re looking for,” I told her, explaining our situation. As I spoke, through the window I could see Kipling digging a narrow trench across the driveway to direct the melted snow into the ditch. It was still the gloomy portion of spring. Too soon for that spicy optimistic fragrance of plants about to burst from the ground. It was second nature to sniff the air for their presence whenever we stepped outside.

“Great. I’ll transfer you back to the receptionist to set up an appointment for an assessment.”

I was flush with gratitude and optimism and burgeoning confidence when the reception came back online.

“Are you their legal guardians?” the receptionist asked.

“No,” I explained. “We’re their niece and nephew.”

“I’m sorry, but you’re not eligible for this program unless you’re the legal guardians of your aunt and uncle.”

“But we’re the caregivers.”

“We only have funding for those with a legal relationship.”

“Not a familial relationship?”

“Legal,” she said with single-word emphasis.

“But –”

“I’m sorry.”

“You must be planning on a very small program, then,” I snapped and banged down the receiver, bitterly disappointed.

In that rural area of Michigan, I doubted that many people bothered filing for legal guardianship of their elderly relatives. It was a formality that most would believe unnecessary. Grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles were tended as they needed to be, which was usually sufficient for all concerned, leaving most people so grateful that “something was being done,” they didn’t interfere. I knew people who’d simply enfolded distant relatives into their homes, even neighbors.

Louise herself had rented – “for pennies,” everyone said – the little house for a year to Mrs. Mayer, an elderly widow with no close relatives. As Mrs. Mayer failed, Louise had assumed more responsibility, checking on her and bringing meals, and in the end even paying for her funeral.

Five minutes later the phone rang. I almost didn’t answer it, still fuming. “Hello?” It was Susan Oyler.

“If you’re still interested,” she said, her Tennessee accent twanging. “Let’s schedule an appointment right now for me to come meet your aunt and uncle.”

“But we’re not their legal guardians,” I reminded her.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “Those guidelines are an issue our staff needs to deal with, completely aside from getting you the help you want.”

We set up an appointment for the following Tuesday and I began pinning hopes on a woman I had yet to meet.


1930 T.Jones knocked at our door at midnight to tell Bill to come to work on the new Mer. Mart bldg. It won’t last long but Bill is tickled. I have a bad toothache but no money for the dentist. Billl went to work with a high fever but doesn’t dare miss the chance.


Next Tuesday, Chapter 9: Susan Oyler Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

c Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 7

Time

Just after dawn, I entered Louise’s house to make coffee and set out breakfast before she and Mike rose from bed. But Louise was already sitting at the table in the gloomy light, staring down at her hands. I turned on a light and guardedly sat down.

“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked.

“John and June are so thoughtless.” Crumpled tissues covered her placemat. Her eyes were wet as if she’d been crying.

She was talking about my father and mother. My father, her baby brother, had been dead for eleven years. My mother, had moved to California to assist her ill parents, and across the country my mother and Louise maintained a gentler, closer relationship than they’d managed when they lived three miles apart. “I’ll fix the coffee,” I said, hoping to distract her. “Would you like a piece of toast?”

“I thought they’d take us out for breakfast,” she continued in a querulous voice. “Anyone else would have, but I ended up making them breakfast.”

She was so outraged my curiosity got the best of me. “What happened?”

She was only too eager to share. It might have taken place yesterday. “Mike and I asked them to stand up for us. We were married right here in this house. I hoped they’d take us out for a celebratory breakfast. But no, they never offered. I was a new bride and I had to work, cooking everyone a big breakfast while they all sat around and celebrated. No one even offered to help. Thoughtless.” And her hands rose to her rigid mouth.

I knew this story and even though I was only four years old at the time, the memory was vivid.  Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

Chapter 6

Walking in Circles

No matter where I lived or what was happening in my life I’d always carved out time to walk. Placing one step in front of the other soothed my mind, focused my attention, and also, I'd convinced myself, gave me a free pass to grab a maple bar or piece of apple pie at no dietary cost.

But the road past the farm was too busy, the snow too deep, for a satisfying walk. Only the driveway was cleared, and it was too icy. I longed to walk in the woods but that meant a sweaty struggle through crusted snow, one heavy foot forward at a time.

I told Kipling how much I missed walking and the next day when I drove in after a trip to the grocery store, I found him shoveling a circle around the little house through a foot of old snow. “It’s not exactly a scenic route,” he told me, “but you might be able to get up a little speed.”

It took him most of the day to shovel and smooth out a two-foot wide path. “Once I get the crusty snow out of here, I can use the snowblower to keep it open,” he said.

I paced off the track and one circle was 280 feet long. Therefore, nineteen circles equaled one mile. Every day I walked thirty-five to forty circles, learning the minute slopes of the earth, the angle of the curves, the view from every inch.

“That’s where I used to ride my bicycle,” Louise told me sadly, remembering.

I’d forgotten. One summer, when I was a teenager, Louise had decided to lose weight, enrolling in what she called her “Fatso Club.” Mike found and repaired a heavy old single-speed bicycle for her. She painted it bright blue and rode it around the little house with her usual determined dedication, circling and circling for hours until she had scarred a narrow crater the width of a bicycle tire in the grass. Her track remained for years. And now, without knowing, Kipling had shoveled out almost the same circle that Louise had pioneered.

The birds grew accustomed to my circling presence and didn’t even flap away from the feeders as I passed beneath them. Morris sometimes sprawled across the trail, waiting for me to scoop him up and perch him on my shoulder for a few rounds. “Some people carry weights,” Kipling observed. “Some people carry cats.”

Otherwise, I grew trancelike, mechanically counting the laps on my fingers: left hand for fives, right for ones. Louise or Mike waved from the window, often every circuit, as if they’d forgotten they’d already encouraged my passage, round and round.

In the post office, the clerk looked at the return address on a package I was mailing my daughter, then at me, and said, “Oh yes, you’re the lady who walks in circles.”


1929 Got up early and did a big washing – dog tired. Now that Mrs.B. thinks I might quit she makes me work twice as hard – hah.
Went to the Tower with Bill and saw Greta Garbo in “White Orchids.” Then he stayed in my room till 5:30. Mrs. B. doesn’t know. Bill really wants to get married. Later on. Maybe?! No time to rest because Mrs. B is having a big dinner at 7 tonight.


What we hoped was the final blizzard of the year raged off Lake Michigan and onto land. “Lake effect snow,” the weatherman called it, with a “wind chill of minus forty degrees.” Windows rattled in fierce gusts that shrieked between the pine boughs and around corners. Drifts blocked the path and my trail filled in and disappeared as the landscape turned monochromatic. There wasn’t a bird in sight and the bird feeders swung back and forth, spilling seed. Kipling worried about Morris and found him in the barn curled beneath old hay, in a state akin to hibernation, uninterested in emerging or eating.

There was no traffic on the road: somewhere snowdrifts had blocked it closed. Visibility, when you could keep your eyes open, had decreased to only a few feet.

It was a good day to hunker down and wait for the weather to change. Kipling and I bundled into our heaviest winter clothes and crossed the driveway to Louise’s, bracing ourselves against the stinging blasts of wind. We planned to make hot chocolate to share with them, “If they haven’t already gone back to bed,” I warned him.

Louise and Mike sat at the table watching us enter, dressed, not just clothed for the day, but dressed for a winter day outside. Boots, coats, woolen caps and scarves. Even mittens. Gathering their heavy clothes and wrestling into them, between Louise’s arthritis and both their confusion, had to have been a monumental task. How long had they sat swaddled there in the warm house, waiting for us when we’d had no plan to join them?

“Oh good,” Louise said, rising, pulling a purple stocking cap over her ears. “We’ve been waiting for you. Let’s go.”

“Where?” I asked warily, afraid to hear what they believed had happened.

“Outside,” Louise said sharply, as if I were simple. “This is perfect.”

Uncertain but game, Kipling and I helped them outside, he on one side of Mike and me on the opposite side of Louise, the two of them clutching each other. The wind nearly whipped the door from our hands. Both were unsteady in the fierce gusts and uneven ground. Snow blasted against us and Louise’s voice was barely audible when she said, “Stop.”

So there we stood, faces to the wind, snow pelting our bodies. I turned toward Aunt Louise and tried to see through squinted eyes what it was she wanted. But she had closed her eyes and lifted her bare face to the weather, letting the wind and snow pummel her. She was holding Mike’s arm and they were both smiling.

Later in the day as we discussed the storm that was beginning to blow itself out. Mike said dreamily, mainly to himself, “It snowed and blowed, snew and blew.”

But for some reason, that reminded Louise of the cruelty of her bath, now days ago, and she refused to speak to me except to demand tissue after tissue, certain that being forced into the bathtub had given her a deathly cold. Each time I passed her a fresh tissue, she wiped her nose once and threw it on the floor.


1929 I had the most terrible dream last night – that I died. I was DEAD. It was so horrible and I haven’t been able to get over it all day. Such a sensation – to die. Black and empty and cold. I’m sorry we have to do it. Billy called and I told him about it. He laughed. It’s not funny, I tell you.


The sky had sluggishly begun to lighten the following morning as I walked across the driveway to make coffee. A school bus passed and I made out figures of children in the lighted and steamed windows. The wind rose and fell, stirring up clouds of snow like sand storms across the white fields. My heart stuttered at the desolate loneliness of the scene.

I stepped into their house as Louise emerged from the bathroom. Seeing me before she was prepared for my presence now only angered her – what was I doing “sneaking around?”

I slipped behind the door out of her sight and watched while she returned to the sleeping porch.

There she pulled a blanket from her own bed, tottered to Mike’s bed and spread it across his shoulders and back. He slept on, unaware, and she leaned down and kissed his head before she climbed back under her own covers.


1929 I’ve quit my job and moved to Harper Avenue with Bill. He said, “Let’s just get married,” but my mind isn’t clear yet and I don’t think I’m ready to get married. It feels so final but I can’t tell Mother I’m living with Bill. He told me not to worry about finding me a new job. But I’m restless. I cook and clean and then what? Went downtown with Sylvia.

Food Fights

I tried to pull back from Louise and Mike, reminding myself we were meant to be reliable and steady for them, but I failed miserably. I found myself riding Louise’s roller coaster, up when she was up and careening wildly out of control when she did.

In their eyes, we weren’t guests; our presence wasn’t essential. Seeing us constantly and not quite understanding why was a different kettle of fish than being her goddaughter/niece and dropping by for occasional coffee and cozy chats.

I brought them a meal of pork chops with orange sauce. Louise picked at her chop, then shoved it scornfully to the other side of her plate. “I don’t like lemon with my meat,” she announced. “Mikey, do you like lemon with your meat?”

“No!” Mike emphatically answered, sopping up more orange sauce with his bread.

“You cook too fancy,” Louise accused me.

“Do I cook better than Meals on Wheels?” I was foolish enough to ask since she’d frequently complained about her lunches.

“Sometimes,” she said huffily. “Not usually. I like my food plain. We’re just plain people. You don’t eat like this all the time, do you?”

“Yes,” I told her, not exactly true, but feeling my irritation rise. “We usually do.”

“Then you must be a lot fancier than we are. Fancy, fancy, fancy.”

This from the woman who was a former gourmet cook, who’d prepared sublime dishes without recipes, whose cakes and breads were unattainable standards. She’d only had to taste a dish once to be able to dissect it and recreate it with more flair than the original. My meals were pallid in comparison to her exotic fare. Exasperation got the best of me. “Maybe we are fancier,” I told her. “We live a different kind of life than you do.”

Now of course I’d escalated the exchange. I was embarrassed by my childish nyah-nyah-nyah-ing and ordered myself to stop it, to grow up – I didn’t possess enough moxie to one-up Louise, even during her most impaired days.

And indeed, she gazed at me imperiously, dismissively. “We don’t need two hot meals a day from you. We can have sandwiches. I don’t want you to fix meals for us.”

“It’s no problem, Aunt Louise. I only bring over whatever we’re eating. I don’t fix anything extra for you; sometimes I just make too much.” That was the line I’d often pulled out when our assistance struck her as suspicious.

“It’s too much. We’ll eat sandwiches.”

“But . . .”

“I want sandwiches.”

I gave in. “Whatever you want, Aunt Louise.”

When I returned to the little house, Kipling listened to my complaints and commented, “It’s a long winter. We’re all tired of the weather. I haven’t seen the ground in two months.”

This was his first winter in Michigan and I refrained from telling him he couldn’t count on consistently seeing the ground for another two months, either. Instead, I donned my mittens and scarf and walked my circle twenty times in the dark.

The next morning Louise turned up her nose at her usual bran muffins. “I’m tired of bran muffins. Don’t bring me any more. I don’t want them.”

“Would you like me to take them home with me?” I asked, but she bridled and said, “Just leave them here.”

Uncle Mike refused to take his pill. I’d left it on his placemat beside his coffee cup as usual. “I already took it,” he claimed.

“Here it is,” I told him brightly, tapping his pill with my finger.

“That’s to remind me to take it tomorrow,” he said and clamped his mouth shut.

I let the subject rest and escaped to the bathroom to set out a towel for Louise’s bath. When I sat down again, Mike had moved his pill to the middle of the placemat where I usually sat.

“Are you going to walk your circles?” Aunt Louise asked me.

“Yes.” At last, the subject was shifting to the world outside.

“At least someone around here can still walk.”

That evening, with her complaints about dinners being too fancy in mind, I prepared a meal of hamburgers. As I carried in the basket, she sniffed the air and asked, “What’s for supper?”

“How do you feel about hamburgers tonight?”

She looked at me in disbelief. “You’re joking.”

But still, she tucked into her hamburger, requesting mayonnaise, olives and honey mustard, outright rejecting catsup and plain mustard. “Is it snowing out?” she asked as she began the second half of her hamburger.

“No, it’s clear.”

“You and Kipling are lucky you haven’t had to move any snow yet.”

“We’ve shoveled snow at least ten times now,” I told her.

“There hasn’t been enough snow this winter to shovel,” she challenged.

I opened my mouth to protest and then for once, let her misstatement pass. Mike sat quietly without looking up, accustomed, I suspected, to disappearing inside himself when she used that crisp-edged voice.

She grew angry when I ran water to wash the dishes. “You don’t need to use hot water and soap. You’re just too fancy and too clean. Do you make Kipling be that clean?”

I ungritted my teeth and struggled to speak in a conversational tone, “You know, Kipling’s much fussier when he washes the dishes than I am.”

Louise loved Kipling. He was that nice man, a charming guest, unlike her pushy niece. She immediately defended him. “There’s nothing wrong with being clean. You can’t be too clean.”

Then she shoved away her cup and ordered imperiously, “I need to practice my handwriting. Give me a pencil and paper.”

Her right hand had weakened since a stroke a few years earlier but she still used it, gripping utensils between her thumb and palm. As I washed and dried the dishes, Louise sat at the table and struggled over the lined notepaper I’d pulled from a drawer, occasionally sighing or expelling her intently held breath in a rush, but happily not making any more comments or complaints. I couldn’t wait to finish cleaning up the kitchen and get out of there. Think small and quiet, I told myself.

“Enough of that,” she finally said. “I’m going to sit in the living room.” I was glad to see her go.

After she’d left, I glanced at the paper she’d been concentrating on so vehemently.

I love you, Jo Anne, it read, and I’m happy that you are here.


1929 Bill bought me a train ticket home. Maybe my restlessness made him crazy. Oh well, ho hum to that. I left Chicago at 7:30 and Frank met me at Ludington. Mother and Dad good. Frank and I rode Dad’s new horse. Fields are beautiful green still and the wildflowers are out along the roads. Mother’s worried about Tofelia. I’m not. That sister can take care of herself.


The next day was Sunday and when Louise saw the day written on her note, she held it up. “It’s Sunday. I’d like to attend mass.”

I hadn’t been in eleven years, since my father’s funeral. “Of course I’ll take you and Uncle Mike,” I told her, excited to hear her initiate an outing.

“I want to see those clouds that Indian painted behind the altar. Beautiful, just beautiful. People came from all over to see them.”

Uh oh. The clouds she was talking about were beautiful. They’d been the parish’s pride: clouds painted the blue of Lake Michigan, billowing from floor to ceiling framing the altar, drawing the eyes upward.

I’d recently read an article about the painter, written long after his death. His work, said the author, was considered to be “one of the finest representations of North American Indian primitive art.”

But that small wooden church that held the beautiful clouds had burned almost forty years ago and been replaced by a modern brick and glass building with streamlined fixtures and pews, single-colored pebbly glass windows instead of stained glass.

There was no point in explaining this to Louise. “I’ll change clothes and be right back to help you get ready,” I told her, hoping she’d forget the old church during our drive.

When I returned to help her dress, wearing one of two skirts I’d brought with me, she still sat at the kitchen table and for a moment her expression was totally blank as if were trying to conjure up my identity. “Do you feel like wearing a dress or pants?” I asked. “I love that blue dress on you.”

She shook her head and waved a tissue. “I have the sniffles. You go and put in a good word for me.”

She couldn’t be convinced otherwise and took up her station by the window, surveying the little house and the driveway, so I convinced Kipling, who’d never been inside a Catholic church, to go, too, and we waved as we drove away. Louise smiled and cheerily waved us on our way as if she were sending us off to do good deeds.

“We don’t have to go,” Kipling said as we neared the church. “We can watch the Lake, or have a cup of coffee.”

“Just my luck she’d remember and ask for a report,” I told him.

The congregation had dwindled. The babushkaed Lithuanian women who’d approached the communion rail on their knees and stayed after Mass devoutly telling their rosary beads in low murmurs, the bent and capped old men, were gone. So were the nuns, and the school had closed. But others, whom I hadn’t seen in ten and twenty years, greeted me by name, as if I’d only missed mass last Sunday.

It was so simple to fall back into that ritual: standing, kneeling, the incense, the Offertory. The reader, now bald and tremulous, had been the reader as far back as I could remember. The organist’s mother was once the organist. During the sermon, I felt that if I turned around my father would be impatiently shifting in the last pew, waiting for communion to be finished so he could slip out the door.

After mass, a woman who looked vaguely familiar touched my arm and said, “I knew you were one of the Dereskes because you all have that…” and she made a motion with thumb and index finger across her cheekbones and eyes.

When I told Louise that she’d been asked after at mass, her face filled with surprise and hurt. “I would have liked to have gone to mass.”

“But I asked you,” I blurted.

“I don’t remember that,” she said indignantly. “Was I asleep?”


1929 Frank took me to a dance at Bonnie Belmont at Long Lake. My, the “water” was flowing outside and inside. Nobody hides it. The fellows seem to be so cheap and drunk. I’m used to city ways now. The mailman brought me two letters from Bill.
I went to mass with everyone. Mother kept patting my arm like I might sneak out.


That night, hoping to salvage the day, and the past few days, I made a festive Sunday dinner, including roast chicken and an apple pie. With pomp, Kipling and I carried it over to eat with Louise and Mike. The snow was dirty and crusted, appearing defeated, and we hoped we were witnessing the end of winter. “The days are getting longer,” I told them. “We’re heading toward spring. That’s worth celebrating.”

But Louise was still feeling injured over my not inviting her to mass. “My hands won’t work,” she complained as we arranged the food on the table. “I can’t cook. I can’t even break an egg.”

“It’s not hard to break an egg,” Kipling told her as he cut the chicken. “You just drop it.”

Louise broke into paroxysms of giggles and her depression instantly lifted. She began complimenting Kipling for the dinner. He explained that I’d cooked it. She ignored his words and praised him for the perfectly seasoned chicken, the tender scalloped potatoes. Kipling shrugged and after a few more disclaimers that I'd cooked their dinner, not him – which she ignored – he played along with her.

I might have turned invisible as she went into rapture over “his” pie crust. It was silly but I couldn’t stop myself from fuming. It was obvious from Kipling’s expression that I was doing a poor job of concealing my irritation.

“That was a perfect meal, the best I’ve ever had. Thank you, Kipling. Thank you. As a reward you don’t have to do a lick of cleaning up.”

Which of course left only me. Kipling began to protest and stood to begin clearing the table, but she gripped his arm. “No, no. You’ve worked too hard already.” He looked at me in appeal but I was busily banging plates and running water for dishes.

As we left the house, she thanked Kipling again and again for that wonderful meal. “You’re a good kid. I’m glad you’re here.” She didn’t say a word to me and turned her head away when I tried to give her a customary goodnight kiss.

It was back out into the night to walk in circles until finally the absurdity of it hit me and I fell into laughter over the scene of me drudging over dishes while my aged aunt flirted with my husband. At least she’d momentarily forgotten the past sorrowful days. I heard a door open and looked up to see Kipling framed in the doorway of the little house, Morris rubbing against his legs. He raised his hand in an apologetic salute.

1929 Got a special delivery from Billy and will leave for Chicago in the morning to surprise him. I’m lonesome here. The mailman said he wished I’d get more mail so he’d see me more often.


Next Tuesday, Chapter 7: We consider admitting defeat Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 5

Yellow Stickies

“Do you like to talk when you first get up?” Louise asked me after seeing me in her kitchen every morning when she rose, coffee ready to pour, some tidbit of conversation I thought might cheer her. She was bleary-eyed, wrapped in a blue robe that had obviously been a long-time favorite.

“No,” I admitted. “That’s why I get up before Kipling. I have to sit alone and drink coffee until I’m ready to face the world.”

“Me, too,” she said and then after a perfect pause, “There’s nothing worse than being greeted by a grinning face first thing in the morning.” She gazed at me for a long moment before lifting her coffee cup.

There was no mistaking her comment was aimed at me. But, but . . . Shouldn’t I be there to greet them in the morning? What if something happened during the night? What if they were confused by my not being there?

After sulking that I wasn’t the ray of sunshine I believed I was, the next morning I began a new regimen. I let myself into their house while they were still asleep, making the coffee and pouring it into the insulated carafe they were accustomed to seeing on the table, muffins or cereal beside it. My return to their house wouldn’t be until I’d seen movement through their windows, although I often skulked on the little house’s glassed-in porch like a spy, as anxious as a mother.

Ray and Barbara had left “yellow stickies” for Mike while Louise was in the hospital and I reinstated the practice, every morning adhering yellow Post-its to Louse and Mike’s placemats. Each note was topped by the day of the week, the date and year, plus a few words if anything unusual was happening. “Patsy is coming for a bath today.” “Doctor’s appointment at 10:00.”

“Isn’t today Sunday?” Louise asked several times a day. For some reason, Sunday had developed into a touchstone. When I’d told her no, it’s Monday or Thursday, etc., she’d proclaim forlornly, “I’m all mixed up then.” But one day a week when she asked, “Isn’t today Sunday?” we could say with great relief, “You’re right, it’s Sunday,” and she’d smile and say smugly, “Well, at least I know what day it is.”

With the advent of the notes, I explained over and over, trying to sound fresh, as if it were the first time I’d said it, “If you ever wonder what day it is, Aunt Louise, just look at your note. I’ll always write the day of the week at the top.”

It would be weeks and hundreds of questions later before she began to look at the note on her own, but gradually it became a habit to reach for her note when she was confused, at least most of the time.

“Today’s news,” she called the yellow stickies, and frequently not trusting that she and Mike had identical news, she’d take his and stick it next to her own on her placemat.


1929 Bill said he loves me and wants to marry me and that he’s going to buy me a diamond ring! I think I’m beginning to understand what real love is. But I want a sign(?) that this is really “it.”
Mrs. B. said I owe her for cleaning the blanket Bill and I took to the park last night to lay on. It’s not even dirty. A beautiful moon tonight, silver and shimmery.


The differences between Louise and Mike’s dementia became more distinct. Mike’s world was fading, as if a gauzy curtain was descending over it. Occasionally that curtain would rise, permitting him to see and comment with perfect clarity. Other times it was as if his gauze curtain had been layered over by velvet drapery, closing him inside, away from us.

Louise saw the world too clearly. Each experience was icily distinct, fleeting past, deeply experienced, and poof! Gone. What she could hang onto, though, gripped her by the throat until she burned up with obsession over it: where were her car keys? Did the neighbors ever find their dog? I didn’t eat lunch; I know I didn’t eat lunch.

For me, her forgetting was preferable to watching her agitated bewilderment as she was consumed by her fixations.

She lived in a continually renewing world. She could reread the same newspaper every day and find the news fresh. One day she picked up a paper tucked into the magazine rack.

“It says here: ‘Major snowstorm struck area fifty years ago today.’ Do you remember that, Mike?”

“No,” answered Mike.

“Of course not. You weren’t born yet. Or were you? How old are you?”

“Well, how old are you?” Uncle Mike asked, shifting uncomfortably on the couch.

“You tell me how old you are, then I’ll know how old I am.”

“I’m not going to tell you how old I am,” Uncle Mike answered indignantly.

“Then I’m not going to tell you how old I am, either,” she said, and angrily shook the newspaper before disappearing behind it.


1929 Bill gave me a diamond ring! I’m engaged!! He wants to get married right away but I want to wait. What for? I don’t know. He showed me pictures of his family in Holland. They look like royalty: furs, feather hats, medals. I celebrated my engagement by buying a beautiful green dress for fifteen dollars. Wow. I want so many things I can’t afford.
I felt so happy and tough that I called Vince and told him to meet me at Rialto. I want my money back. $100. Not chicken scratch.
I met V. and I looked like a million bucks. Boy, wasn’t he sorry! But I don’t care. I despise him. He said he can’t pay me back my $100. Hah! Jimmy saved Vince from a thrashing – by me! “You want the cops to come?” Jimmy asked me. But what else do you do to a thief?

The Lake

On a brilliant winter morning I pulled my eyes away from my computer screen and raised them to the sky. Puffy white clouds banded lumpily along the horizon and momentarily forgetting where I was, I thought with pleasure, “The mountains are out,” and immediately suffered a stab of longing for the Northwest. I switched back to reality and glanced at the main house. Louise sat gazing out of the living room window, frowning. She’d been resistant to everything I’d offered that morning: coffee, breakfast, a trip to town, help with a bath, finally asking me, “Don’t you have work to do somewhere else?” I dreaded talking to her again, but I crossed the driveway, steeling myself to hear what was upsetting her this time.

“Do you think the Lake is frozen?” she asked as soon as I walked in the door. She meant Lake Michigan and I knew it was.

“Let’s go see,” I suggested and she beelined for the closet to pull out her coat and boots, calling out “Mikey! Hurry up or you’ll be left behind.”

In the flurry and excitement of a sudden holiday, the four or us headed due west toward the lakeshore in Ludington. The roads were bare, the fields sparkling in the sunshine, tree shadows flung cobalt across the snow.

The park was closed, crisscrossed by snow fences but the City plowed the parking lot at the boat launch, snowbanks thoughtfully pushed aside not to block the view. It was a winter without ferry service and the harbor had been allowed to freeze, the ice breaker gone elsewhere.

High winds and sub-freezing temperatures had upended gargantuan blocks of ice, reshaping the harbor into a broken landscape of icebergs and craters. In the sunlight, the underbellies flashed blue. Farther out, sudden sprays of water exploded between the shattered ice. It was a treacherous place. At the end of the ice-sheeted breakwall, the white lighthouse brooded over the harbor entrance, its rotating light dark.

The Lake, which was always in motion, throbbing with waves and sound, was now hidden beneath its frozen crust, absolutely silent.

“It’s eerie,” Louise said, marveling at the humped and broken white.

“It’s Lake Michigan,” Mike corrected, “not Erie.”

We sat in the car for a half hour, intermittently starting the car for warmth, just watching.

Louise sighed. “I’ll never forget this,” she said, her voice warm with content.


1929 Dog tired. Out with Bill until two AM. He gave me $20 for a new dress. I bought a hat and a dress (with a feather!) for $27.50. He feels bad about Vince taking my money and says I’ll never have to worry about giving HIM money.
Other men keep calling even though I’m engaged. I’m true blue to Billy.


The cold weather brought a small wild creature into the attic of the little house.
We heard it scurrying, racing from one end of the ceiling to the other, up and down the walls, startling us when it scampered over our heads or chewed in the walls beside the bed in the middle of the night.

“It has to go,” Kipling said.

He decided not to set one of the wooden spring traps we stored on the back porch and baited for mice that invaded the house. “It might not really be a mouse,” he explained.

I couldn’t think of anything else but a mouse that might scurry through the walls.

At the hardware store Kipling inquired about a small live trap. “A live trap?” the clerk asked. “What for?”

“We might have a mouse in our attic.”

The clerk raised his eyebrows. “You want a live trap for a mouse?”
Kipling nodded. “It could be some other animal. Smallish.”

“I’ll show you what I have,” the clerk said and stepped to the back of the store, returning with a bag of the same spring mousetraps that we had at home.

Next, Kipling tried to out-think the small creature. He pulled a ladder out of the barn and propped it against the house so he could reach the attic vent where he spent an hour in the cold rigging up a trap of sorts from wire and wood that would allow the animal to exit but not return. He filled a jar lid with sunflower seeds.

That night, the attic was silent. “See?” Kipling said. “No reason to kill it.”

I was doubtful and sure enough on the following night the creature returned, sounding as if it had enlisted friends. Scampering and chewing and rustling kept us awake most of the night. I burrowed under my pillow; it was like trying to sleep with one mosquito buzzing and divebombing your head.

Finally Kipling admitted defeat and reluctantly brought in Mike’s step ladder. He slid back the attic door in the ceiling and set a spring trap baited with peanut butter. Within an hour we heard the definitive snap. Kipling climbed back up to open the attic door.

“Look at this,” he sadly said, holding out the trap.

It held a tiny gray mouse with a soft white underbelly and cannily knuckled feet, like hands. We’d caught plain brown mice beneath the kitchen sink, but nothing like the silvery mouse from the attic.

“Upstairs, downstairs,” Kipling commented, and indeed the little upstairs mouse seemed a higher class mouse than our scruffy kitchen mice.

Such a tiny animal had made all that racket, yet after the demise of the wee gray creature, our walls and attic were appropriately silent.


1929 A letter from J. Osborne. Said he loves me and wants to marry me! Huh? I haven’t even been out with him for two months.
I worry Billy cares too much for me. We went to a movie at United Artists. What should I do? I feel blue when I’m not with him.


An aide came once a week and assisted Louise with personal care and also reported her vital signs and condition back to the nurse. I’d originally planned to provide personal care to Louise but she was offended by the idea. “Absolutely not. You’re my niece.”

The aide’s name was Patsy. She was solidly into her fifties, curly-haired, with a laugh deepened from smoking. When Louise told Patsy, “It’s too cold for a bath,” Patsy agreed, saying, “Winter sure is hanging on,” yet somehow coaxed her into the tub without another murmur of protest.

Louise welcomed Patsy’s visits. I left the house or stayed away when Patsy arrived, giving the two women privacy – and a break for myself. But suddenly there was another of the unexplained shifts.

Patsy pulled into the driveway on Monday afternoon. Only a couple of minutes later she drove away. When I investigated I found both Louise and Mike sitting quietly in the living room. “She never came in here,” Louise said innocently when I asked about Patsy.

Patsy rescheduled her visit for the next day but Mike refused to let her in. “Louise is sleeping,” he said and closed and locked the door in her face before I could intervene. And when Patsy gamely returned on Friday Louise flat out refused a bath.

Barbara and I had a talk with Louise and Mike. Explaining anything could be a futile exercise but we were determined to keep it simple and firm.

“Oh, we’d never not let Patsy in,” Aunt Louise assured us, tsk-tsking as if shocked we’d ever suspected her of being so recalcitrant.

Patsy phoned the evening before the next visit. “The nurse needs to be sure Louise wants me,” she said. I could hear a faint or else in her voice.

“She does,” I assured her. “We’ve talked to her. She understands and she knows she needs a bath.”

That was true. For the past several days Louise had been complaining five and ten times a day how desperately she needed a bath. It had grown into a low-level but pervasive obsession. When I tried to help her she refused. “I’ll wait for that woman,” she said.

Louise had just risen from bed when Patsy arrived. “It’s too cold,” she complained when she spotted Patsy removing her jacket in the kitchen, and began to shake in exaggerated shivers.

“I’ll turn up the heat,” I offered and turned the thermostat to 82 degrees. No matter. Louise pounded the table with her hands as if her shivering was uncontrollable.

“You’re part of Social Services, correct?” she asked Patsy in a clearly put-on shaky voice.

“Yes I am.”

“Just as I thought: the SS.” She shook so much she couldn’t pick up her coffee cup. When Patsy and I looked away, she stopped, and when we turned back to her she trembled worse.

“Should we do it?” Patsy asked me too softly for Louise to hear.

I’d thought this through. If Louise didn’t have a bath, she’d be yearning for one and angry she didn’t get it. “Yes,” I said.

From the bathroom I heard Patsy murmuring and Aunt Louise sobbing. “This is the cruelest thing that’s ever happened to me,” she cried. “I’ll refuse another bath for ten years.”

Mike sat in the living room, rocking back and forth in agitation. “If they hurt Weezie. . . ” he said, making fists.

As if he’d heard the fuss, Kipling arrived. Taking in the situation, he asked Mike, “Can you show me how to start that pump in the garage?”

Mike couldn’t resist a plea for assistance. There was no pump in the garage, but that didn’t matter, because Mike would forget the details of the request and be content in Kipling’s company. I watched the two men amble off companionably toward the garage, leaving the bath-time chaos behind.

When Louise finally emerged from the bathroom, clean and smelling of Keri-Lotion, her face was pink and beaming. She stood taller, preened a little. Patsy entered the kitchen behind her, disheveled and exhausted and looking in need of a long hot soak herself.


1929 I warned Mrs. B. that I might be getting married soon and would be quitting. “After all I’ve done for you?” she said. Bill was over for a while and I showed my temper in the worse form, he still says he loves me. Sometimes I can’t help it, or, I CAN help it, I just DON’T.


By mid-February a foot-high stack of seed catalogs had arrived in Louise and Mike’s mailbox. Kipling’s eyes gleamed as if a treasure chest had been delivered into his hands. He intended to engage Mike in planning a garden. We all hoped that gardening still remained as Mike’s true passion, but Kipling longed to try his own hand at gardening, too. “It would be fun to eat food I’ve grown myself,” he said dreamily and I knew he was gazing into a summer vision of himself and Mike presiding over a garden of legend – raising vegetables identical to those pictured in the seed catalogs: “Corn higher than your head! Tomatoes the size of baseballs.”

Kipling gathered the catalogs and sat down at the table with Mike. “Which vegetables do you grow in your garden?” he asked, opening a catalog in front of Mike to a colorful illustration of glossy tomatoes.

“Well, I don’t know,” Mike said, gazing blankly at the succulent fruit.

“Do you want to grow tomatoes, Uncle Mike?” I leaned over and put in, and Mike began clasping his hands in agitation, unable to answer my question.

Kipling cast me a considering look that made me blanch, and Louise jumped to Mike’s defense. “He’ll grow whatever he wants, won’t you, Mikey? You can’t tell him what to grow.”

“What can you do?” Mike said, shrugging, withdrawing.

Kipling let the subject drop for the time being, and I swore to myself I’d stay out of all future garden discussions. He left a stack of seed catalogs beside Mike’s chair, hoping Mike would pick one up, and brought the others home to the little house.

Kipling pored over the catalogs, circling exotic vegetables, folding over page corners, making notes. He drew diagrams based on gardening books and the track of the sun across the garden space, studying, redrawing, and reading more.

“Green beans, for sure,” I heard him mutter, then peer out at the dirty snow.

Words

I’d kept a diary since I was twelve, early on discovering the pleasure and relief of spewing forth my young woes. But the diaries also transformed my past into a weight, a burden that was usually meaningless – often foolish – when viewed from the present.

So every few years I destroyed all of them in a mix of horror and relief. All my words – gone. Seeing a garbage bag stuffed with shredded paper or curling pages on a bonfire was a wickedly delicious release. Well, that’s over. I’d begin a new diary in a lighthearted mood until a few years later when I’d repeat the cycle.

As the days on the farm passed and the tensions increased, my diary took up more time and more space. I might sit down and write three, four, five entries a day, chronicling my frustrations, the tragedies and small triumphs. I began carrying a small spiral notebook with yellow paper to jot down thoughts or ideas and record conversations. I found a spiral Audubon calendar divided into weeks. In each day’s space, I recorded in minuscule writing medical details, who stopped by, appointments, menus of meals I’d prepared, general health and weather. I abbreviated and truncated to fit more into the rectangular spaces. Louise became AL, Mike UM, each day summarized as “bad “or “good” and all its variations.

I was mad to make sense of what we were experiencing, to get it down on paper – and out of my head.

“Am I being as obsessive as Aunt Louise?” I asked Kipling one day as I squinted over the Audubon calendar.

“Well, you are her niece.”


1929 Do I love Bill? He called me and I wondered if he loved me too much and then he didn’t call me for two days and why? I called him but he was out. It won’t happen again, like V.


Next Tuesday, Chapter 6: Tiptoeing through Food Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 4

The Little House

Mike had built the little house forty years ago for my grandparents. There were no plans or drawings; it had evolved from images in his head, “even while he was building it,” Louise boasted. “He’s very ingenious.”

The bedroom windows – kitty-corner from each other to catch the breezes in summer – faced the orchard, the rising sun, the forest beyond and the path of the moon. Across from the bedroom was a room too small to be a bedroom, with good northern light: my grandmother’s sewing room.

In the center of the house, Mike portioned out the living room, with a wall of windows that faced the ravine, and off the front a small glassed-in porch warmed by ambient house heat. The kitchen was behind the living room, with another porch off it. Mike had installed clear oak flooring he salvaged from a defunct train depot, skillfully fitting pieces together until there were no cracks or gaps. He sanded the boards smooth and sliver-free. After all that work, a friend had said, shaking his head: “he covered it all with that god-awful linoleum to protect it.”

We were well-settled in the little house, furnishing it mainly from Louise’s antique shop. I encouraged Kipling to take the sewing room as his office, and I set up my computer in the small glassed-in front porch, where I could keep an eye on Louise and Mike’s house while I worked. The completed re-edit of my book was due to my editor New York in three weeks and I was behind in my self-imposed schedule, frankly bewildered by how long it was taking me.


1929 Mae and Phil got married at City Hall and we had a big party at Rialto afterward. I drank – oh my, did I! – but I feel better than in a long time. Crazy music. I danced until I was sick and danced some more. Ed brought me home but that’s all. I’m true to myself now. I hate men.
Slept too late and Mrs. B. banged on my door with a shoe!  Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 3

Groceries

After my first trip to the grocery store, I carried a brown paper sack of food to Louise and Mike’s.

Louise stood by the sink with her hands over her mouth, watching me store milk in her refrigerator and arrange bananas and apples in a glass bowl on the table.

Louise holding her hands to her mouth was a bad sign.

“How did you know what to buy?” she asked.

“I just picked up a few things I thought you needed.”

“How much did it cost?”

“It’s all right,” I told her. She had granted my brother Ray Power of Attorney a year earlier and he managed her bills, but trying to explain the situation now only confused her.

“No. I want to pay,” she said and removed a five dollar bill from the drawer where she kept a little cash. “I’d rather pay than be obligated to you.”

“. . . rather pay,” Mike mimicked perfectly in a soft voice.

I refused and she thrust the money toward me, her face flushed. I reluctantly took the bill, replacing it in the drawer when she wasn’t looking.

“I’ll write a list for you when I want groceries,” she said. “You don’t have to buy our food. We can buy it ourselves.”

Mike nodded. “ . . . ourselves.”

“I only –” I began, and stopped when I glimpsed the expression on her face.
From then on we smuggled groceries inside early in the morning or while they napped. Kipling and I behaved like backward robbers, signaling to each other an all-clear that it was safe to deliver the goods.

As long as food was visible they didn’t question where it came from, or noticed that they never ran out. Their kitchen had become like the fairy tale purse that magically refilled itself.

The glass cookie jar in the center of the kitchen table became our barometer. As long as it was full, life was serene, but once it reached the halfway point, Louise slipped into a low-grade panic. “Mike needs more cookies,” she’d fuss. “Go to the store and buy Mike’s cookies.”

He easily went through a package of vanilla sandwich cookies a day. I decided to ration them – all those cookies couldn’t be good for him, right?

But the first time the cookie jar approached empty, I stepped into the kitchen and saw a torn-open package of cookies. I peered closer – where had those come from? – and discovered they were two years out of date.

I surrendered and reinstated the continuously full cookie jar. He ate well otherwise; he was physically vigorous. When I changed the sheets I discovered vanilla sandwich cookies beneath his pillow, he tucked cookies into his pajama and jeans pockets.

I set about cleaning the house, looking for more out-of-date cookies and discovered that Louise herself had attempted to create that same fairy tale purse.


1929 Out with Vince. Saw “The Circus,” but I paid for everything. Also gave him $3.60. He says he’ll make up for it. I wonder? He is out of work, but I have faith. He keeps me wondering BUT TIME SHALL TELL. Hope I’m not sorry in the end.


Stashed in the basement and the breezeway and in the pantry I found fifty-eight, four-roll packages of toilet paper. An unopened case of Smith Brothers cough drops was stacked on top of a box filled with twenty-four packets of lime Jello. A five-drawer dresser full of candy – only candy – hardened and melded together. Plastic grocery bags bulging with stale cookies hung on coat hooks. A cabinet on the breezeway was lined with cake mixes, all outdated, all attacked by insects. Cans of food – with labels I didn’t recognize or missing altogether – rusted in the basement. Mice had torn into packages of rice in the pantry, worms spun cocoons in the dried potato mixes. In a desk I found eleven packages of chocolate chips and beneath those, five chewed-open packages of dates.

The Depression was vivid in Louise’s memory. “We lived in Chicago and for a while we survived on eggs,” she told me. “Every few weeks your grandmother sent us a wooden crate with six dozen eggs and that’s what we ate. There wasn’t any work so there wasn’t any money.”

She’d even saved the wooden crate that conveyed eggs between Michigan and Chicago. It hung in the garage, my grandfather’s address still visible on the yellowed shipping label.

My mother, who was a child during the Depression and recalled her father pretending to leave for work every morning after he lost his job so her mother wouldn’t worry, had saved, too. She’d scraped margarine off the margarine wrappers, and the refrigerator was always filled with dibs and dabs of leftover food in a myriad of plastic containers. Leftovers grew fuzz and had to be thrown out, bread staled, unopened packages outlasted their “use by” dates.

For both of them, the act of saving had become more important than the using.

One set of cabinets in Louise’s kitchen held only used bits of plastic wrap and old plastic containers. The old outhouse was literally piled from floor to ceiling with neatly folded brown paper sacks, their open ends all facing outward. Empty and washed glass jars that had once held spaghetti sauce, applesauce, orange juice, pickles, mustard and aspirin filled cardboard boxes and shelves in the garage.

Little pats of butter and plastic squeeze packages of mustard from Meals on Wheels were piled willy nilly in the refrigerator until I discreetly removed them. Rubber bands. Clips and twists off bread wrappers. Old envelopes. Even when her hair was washed and set, Aunt Louise resisted having the curls combed out. “I’ll save them until I go out,” she argued.

A cardboard box in the closet had a carefully written message in red crayon on the lid: Mike’s underwear too worn to mend.

When I offered to clean out the pantry, she insisted, “Leave it. We may find a use for it later.”

Afraid they’d eat spoiled food by mistake I began removing a boxes and bags every morning after I made coffee, piling them in garbage bags on our back porch for a future trip to the landfill. I could barely see my progress.


1929 I am a fool and an ass and I feel terrible. Frank told me Vince is married. Yes!! He’s married!!!
We fought and he turned into a brute, almost choked me to death, I never cried so in my life. I hate him. I hate hate hate him. After the money and everything. I cried all night. I hate him.

The Farm

During the early 1900s, a notorious Lithuanian real estate dealer whose name was still synonymous with “shyster,” heavily advertised Mason County property in Chicago and Pennsylvania where thousands of newly-arrived Lithuanians had clustered. A dream-come-true, he lured: Cheap land, land ripe for raising oversized crops and big healthy families.

Hundreds of Lithuanians bought into his promise and packed up for rural Michigan. They formed settlements where Lithuanian was the first language, kept Lithuanian customs, supported a Lithuanian Catholic church and two satellite parishes. Barns sprang up before houses. They held pot lucks where kugelis and suris and bacon buns – and alcohol – reigned. They founded a school taught by the Sisters of St. Casimir, Lithuanian nuns from Chicago, and scrimped and sacrificed to enroll their children. Multi-syllabic surnames ending in ‘as’ and ‘is’ and ‘e’ abounded.

Much of the farmland was sand, and much of it worthless.

Farms that produced crops were often abandoned by the next generation who went searching for more secure income. The older generation died off, many without fulfilling their dreams, and the farms were sold to downstaters for deer-hunting property. Barns disintegrated, fences fell, hardwoods returned to the fields, wild animals reclaimed their forages.

Louise and Mike’s farm occupied a bluff fourteen miles inland from Lake Michigan. The farm stood as an island, bound on the north by the two-lane road, on the west by a deep ravine, and to the south and east by trees and the larger creek: Weldon Creek. Roadless National Forest stretched behind their land for miles. It hadn’t been a working farm in over twenty years. But it could be; until recently it had been that well-tended.

Hardwood trees –oaks and maples, beeches, ash, a few birches, many over a hundred feet tall and referred to as “overgrown,” by my brother Ray who knew timber –formed a skyline visible from a half mile away, a shady dense woods that hovered just beyond the barnyard’s barbed wire fence.

Louise and her first husband bought the farm in the 1940s. “Oh, I hated it here at first,” she’d said many times. “I had a good job with Time-Life in Chicago but Bill had never lived on a farm and he thought farming would be fun. The realtor showed him that creek and he went crazy. I’m embarrassed by how I harassed him the first two years. I wanted to go back to Chicago but of course we couldn’t.”

“Why not?” I asked.

She waved her hand and didn’t answer.

But Bill died suddenly of a heart attack and two years later Louise married Mike. The farm, now Louise and Mike’s, flourished in its small way. For several years they raised a dairy herd, then corn. Until the previous year, they’d sold their fresh produce from a driveway stand, restored antiques and kept a small antique shop on the farm


1929 Vince keeps calling but I won’t to talk to him. What a disappointment he is. I told him, “The only way I’ll see you if you have my money in your hand.”
Mae and I went to Rialto. A fattie with a Lincoln invited me to his room. Ha! Laugh! I hate men now.
Don’t feel so good. Big storm here tonight. They still scare me. The Bs are going to have a party. A lot of work. Good! I won’t have time to think.
Letter from Tofelia. Crazy with love. Gordon is perfect, Gordon treats her like a queen. Gordon, Gordon, Gordon. Gordon is a god. I think Gordon is a scalawag and not a nice scalawag, either. She’s too young to SEE him as a person. Younger than me and married. And me? I am double-crossed by a skunk. Why couldn’t I see Vince for what HE was? I thought I was smarter than I guess I am. Dumbbell.
Letter from Mother, news and asking about Vince– I blabbed his name from the rooftops when I was home. I’m not telling her he was a rat.


We shaped the routine of our days to Louise and Mike. I made their coffee, then fixed a light breakfast, sitting with them while they ate. Meals on Wheels brought lunch on weekdays, and I prepared dinner, with several visits in between from both Kipling and me. I willingly took on the major responsibility: I couldn’t banish the guilty suspicion I’d bullied Kipling into coming to Michigan.

Because Louise had recently been hospitalized, a program followed her at home for a few months. A nurse visited once a week to record her vitals and an aide was available for help with personal care.

Social services were stretched too thin for the number of people who they knew needed their assistance. “There are more we don’t know about,” Roberta, the nurse told me. “People who are infirm and just surviving any way they can.” She shook her head. “Some we don’t discover until it’s too late.”

There were no social services e available for Mike except Meals on Wheels. Without family to assist him, he’d be on his own until someone reported he’d descended into a dangerous state, then he would have been removed from his home and sent to a nursing facility.

Medicare, Home Health Care, Senior Services, Meals on Wheels, Social Security. I’d never dealt with any of it. Louise was suspicious of any sort of assistance, and it was my brother Ray who soothed the way for her acceptance. Fifty years separated Ray and Louise, but they might have been contemporaries.

Louise was quick to end conversations that didn’t interest her but she and Ray sat companionably for hours, their topics ranging across the world and back again. She sometimes called Ray “Johnny,” our father’s name, or asked me, “Is my brother coming over today?” meaning Ray.

“If I could have half her wisdom,” Ray said, “even in her state now.”


1929 Mae and I walked to where they’re building the Exposition and looked around. It’s enormous! I can’t wait. Pavilions from every country in the world. Mae and Phil are getting married. EVERYBODY is getting married..
A letter from Vince full of lies, he really loved me and was bored of his wife, and if only I’d . . .blah blah blah. I ripped it up and flushed it down Mrs. B’s toilet and it PLUGGED the drain. Had to mop up the floor. Mrs. B made me bleach the floor as if the water was dirty. It wasn’t – just dirty with Vince’s lies.


I had fled the village where I grew up three miles from Louise and Mike the minute I was able: off to college, then to the Northwest, determined to abandon my grubby self for the sophistication of the wider world, resolved to never return except to visit family, absolutely one hundred percent positive that my hometown held nothing for me, that I’d never become a writer if I was doomed to such provincialism. I wanted more. From the age of twelve I was on fire to escape.

But a curious thing happened. I abandoned my hometown physically, yet again and again I found myself haunting that rural area in my writing. What was wrong with me? Here I was, finally living in the world I’d fantasized, and now I was stealing mental trips back to the rural landscape I’d fought to escape.

I conjured the oak forests and rivers, Lake Michigan and its façade of tourism, the mania for deer hunting. I puzzled over what seemed a casual acceptance of suicide and the stiff-necked secrets of isolated families.

I ferreted out the characters of my memory: Clem, the damaged man who walked the roads day and night; the family I’d witnessed cooking acorn soup. I spent one wakeful night wrestling to recall the names of the three deaf brothers who lived all their adult lives in a one-room house near us. I dug deep, to the point that I would eventually write a mystery series about a woman who reluctantly returned to her rural Michigan town after tragedy.

While I considered our assistance to Louise and Mike an earth-shattering return to my homeland, most people weren’t aware I’d ever left. My family’s features were stamped on my face.

“How’s your mother doing?” the mail carrier asked, not, “You came back.”

“Sorry to hear about your dad,” an old neighbor said of my father who’d died suddenly eleven years earlier.

“I saw your cousin the other day.”

It was as if I’d just returned to the dance after a breath of fresh air. Of course I’d be back. What else made sense?


1929 I have a terrible cold. Everything is bleak and gloomy and miserable and awful and terrible ugly.

On a snowy afternoon, Ray drove into the driveway in that easy way of people who’d grown up with snow. After a near disastrous spin-out I regained my winter driving skills, although never to the confident nonchalance of my teenage years, which was just as well. Kipling took to snow-driving with ease. “Just forget you have a brake and gas pedal and you’ll be fine.” He simply shifted to another mental gear and serenely took to the roads.

Ray had brought his son, three-year old Lukas, to visit Louise on his way to pick up six-year old Jon from school. When Mike looked out the window and saw Ray lifting Lukas from the car’s back seat, he jumped up from the sofa and faded from the living room onto the sleeping porch where I glimpsed him sitting on the edge of his bed, very still, his hands quiescent on his knees. He won’t leave the sleeping porch until after Ray and Lukas leave.

Eighty-two or not, Louise visibly brightened when a man was present, no matter whether he was eighty or three. Her eyes flashed. Dimples deepened.

“Lukey, Lukey,” she teased, giving him the look as he emerged from his snowsuit. “How’s my little boyfriend?”

Chubby, fair and good-natured, Lukas smiled at the same time he gravely regarded her.

After Ray and Lukas left, I brought a dinner of pork chops in a wicker basket I’d found in the garage and would use for that purpose all during our stay. I sat at the table with them, a cup of coffee on my placemat. Louise still glowed from Ray and Lukas’s visit.

“That little boy rules the roost with a baby fist,” she said. “He’ll be a heartbreaker. You wait and see. The other one, too.”

“Jonukas?” I supplied.

She nodded, but I could see she was confused by his name. She'd also sometimes called her little brother, my father, Jonukas.

“Did you want children?” I stupidly asked. She was silent and I hoped she hadn’t heard me.

But she had. “I did,” she said, “but I couldn’t –” and stopped, looking off toward the darkening day, deflating.

Mike banged down his fork and glared at me, suspicious I’d said something to hurt Louise. We three sat in uncomfortable silence, neither of them eating, three clocks ticking into the room. It had been a day when Mike unexpectedly rewound the two mantel clocks and the wall clock. They all chimed at different times.

Unsure how to rectify the discomfort I’d caused, I blathered an anecdote I’d heard about snowshoe rabbits returning to Michigan, the proof being that one had been spotted lying beside the road, hit by a car.

Mike grunted and went back to eating his pork chop. Louise was not deterred. “I’m too old for anything,” she bemoaned, “and I’m getting older.”

“We’re all getting older,” Mike said in support, “all of us at the same time.”

“But I’m the oldest one here. I’m the oldest one for five miles around.”

“Hah,” Mike snorted. “A lot more than five miles around.”

Now she was angry but he’d accomplished what I couldn’t: deflecting her sudden melancholy into a hot retort. “You don’t know everything. What day is it?” she challenged smugly.

“It’s Tuesday,” Mike answered without hesitation. He was right; it was Tuesday.

“No, it’s not,” Louise said just as certainly.

Now Mike grew uncertain. He frowned, crossed and uncrossed his legs. “It’s Tuesday or Wednesday,” he said. “I think so, anyway.”

“It can’t be,” Louise insisted.

“I know it is.”

“You’re getting mad at me, Mikey,” Louise accused.

“How do you know?” he challenged her.

“Because I know you, that’s how I know.”

“Oh.”

‘Now do you know how I know?”

Mike turned his spoon wrong end around and poked it into his mashed potatoes. His eyes glazed. “I don’t know.”

As I carried the basket back to the little house over the worn and salted path, a chickadee’s song suddenly burst from the snow-covered spiaria bushes next to the house, clearly out of place in the dark and cold winter evening. I paused, listening, thinking its song was as topsy turvy as the conversation in the house I’d just left.


1929 Terrible. I’ve been horrible sick for days. Dr. B. helped. Weak as a rag. Can’t eat yet. Mrs. B. said she’s not going to “wait on me” anymore. I wish Mother was here. Vince has NOT returned my money. Awful blue and low.
Mae got rid of three for me. Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 2

How She Came to Be

Louise was my father's sister. From a Lithuanian family of five children, she was the oldest – and cruelly the only one still living, having witnessed each sibling’s arrival and departure from the world.

That autumn, she had celebrated her eighty-second birthday in the psychiatric unit of the local hospital, where she was being housed for three weeks after confiding to her doctor that she intended to lure Mike, who'd recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, into the car with her and drive smack head-on into an oncoming semi-truck. The doctor, taking her at her word, ordered an intensive psychiatric examination and admitted her to the mental ward of the local hospital that very day.

"This isn't the clinical depression of the aged," the psychiatrist had explained. "It's the same depression a younger person experiences who sees her life careening out of control."

My brother Ray and his wife Barbara lived the closest and had taken to watching out for Louise and Mike as they grew older. They kept a daily eye on Mike while Louise was in the psychiatric unit, witnessing for themselves the extent of his deterioration that Louise had managed to hide from everyone.

The day after Ray and Barbara brought Louise home to her farm and to Mike in her certifiably newly recovered state of mind, she fell to the floor in what the doctor termed a “brain seizure” that sent her back to the hospital, and this time the doctor was adamant: she was too ill to return home, they'd reserved a room in the local nursing home for her to spend her final days. There was little time left and the family should prepare for her death.

"Let us take her home," my brother Ray pleaded with the doctors while Louise lay semi-comatose in her hospital bed. "It's what she wants."

"She's too weak. She requires twenty-four hour care. She doesn't have much time."

"If she's going to die, let her die at home," Ray insisted, "where she's comfortable."

She had no children, only nieces and nephews who both adored her and were terrified of her wicked tongue and her sharp sense of the world. Little got past her and we were rarely clever enough to evade her wit. Perhaps because she had no children, she was expectant that our conversation would be worth her attention. “Cute” didn’t hold water with her.

"If we can just keep her home until she lets go," Ray said. None of us thought it would be long. She was weak, confused, barely able to sit up, declining by the hour. We came to help and to say our goodbyes: me from Washington, my sister Mary from New Mexico, my brother Tom from downstate. Ray and Barbara, who lived ten miles away, took turns spending the nights.

Her ending would be peaceful, we swore. No hospitals, no anonymous surroundings, no heroic measures. Among those who loved her, amidst the mementos of her long life. With dignity.

And with Mike. Always hovering nearby, following her with his eyes, frequently vague and disoriented, other times completely lucid. I’d known him forever as a quiet, retiring man, and believing we were witnessing his basic nature, we’d missed what was happening to him, his slippage into dementia.

But Louise didn't die. “What’s for dinner?” she questioned Ray one afternoon. She shakily made her way to the living room by herself and began to recognize each of us. “What happened?” she repeatedly asked.

"I'm a tough old bird," she proudly proclaimed when she momentarily comprehended how ill she'd been.

Her memory didn’t keep pace with her returning strength. She was unable to fix the simplest meals. The days of the week confused her. Neither of them could be relied on to lock the doors at night. Louise was unable to help Mike or now even recognize his failing mind, which in a way was a blessing. His deterioration had formerly obsessed her, a source of agitation and grief, and the cause of her stay in the mental ward.

“He smells sometimes,” she’d whispered over the telephone to me before his diagnosis, her voice edged in dismay. “He was always such a clean man.”

“I don’t think he loves me.”

“He put the groceries in the garage.”

"I'm better, aren't I?" Louise asked us. "I'll be able to drive tomorrow, won't I?" and in the next breath she might exclaim, in complete surprise, "You mean I was in the hospital? I don't remember that."

In our eagerness to bring her home we'd made no plans for the eventuality that she might recover but not recover enough to live alone again.

In our innocence we'd assured them they'd be together on the farm they loved, that their lives would continue as before, that there would be no changes – ever.

1929 Vince didn’t call for three days. He’d been sick with an awful cold. I felt blue and lonesome and went to see “Dream of Love” with Al. My God, such a night! Men can’t be trusted. Remember that!

Day One

I spotted a light in Louise and Mike’s kitchen; one of them was awake. We’d unpacked the truck in the dark, hauling cartons and bags through the snow until midnight. The little house was crammed, boxes spilling into the kitchen, several with flaps undone and partly empty, more untouched, waiting for daylight.

While Kipling peacefully slept, I’d been awake most of the night, my mind a swirling morass of planning and uncertainty. I pulled on my coat and new boots and cautiously crossed the driveway, my arms out for balance against the ice beneath last night’s snow. Where we lived now, in Washington State, below-freezing temperatures were uncommon, and snow even rarer. I’d forgotten what true winter involved.

Breathing felt like ice being shoved up my nose. Pine trees Louise had planted forty-five years ago had now grown to fifty and sixty feet, protecting the path between the two houses, always murmuring and whispering among their heights. At their feet, dried pinecones, blown free in last night’s wind, pocked the snow.

I stumbled into a knee-high drift that knifed in front of Louise’s door, scattering powdery snow into the air, crystalline in the yard light. Kipling had already asked me where the snow shovels were. I didn’t know.

On this day, Louise and Mike’s old habits had resurfaced and one of them had locked the door. I’d forgotten to take the key the night before and I was locked out. I knocked. No movement. I couldn’t see anyone through the window. My panic rose. What if . . . I removed my gloves and rapped harder on the wooden door.

We’ll break a window, I thought as I pounded on the door. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten to take a key. What could be more basic? A stupid key. Finally, as I was about to return to the little house to wake Kipling, I heard slow movement inside.

Mike pulled open the door and gazed at me blankly, his hair neatly combed but wearing a pair of too-short women’s red polyester pants and a shirt with buttons askew. I knew Uncle Mike too well to be able to discern whether he was handsome or not. He was six feet tall and slender, still heavily muscled. Louise was two years older than Mike. “A man needs an older woman,” she liked to say. “They know more.”

He'd always been reticent, willingly living in Louise’s shadow. Theirs was a marriage where her name was mentioned first, or even without his. “I’m going to visit Louise.” “Let’s have Louise over for dinner.”

She’d fiercely protected him, and no one tumbled to how she’d covered for his failing mind – probably for years – diverting our attention when he forgot our names, claiming he was napping or busy when we visited, until he’d become lost one day on a routine trip to the hardware store and her carefully constructed subterfuge crumbled.

“Hi, Uncle Mike,” I told him. “I came to have a cup of coffee with you.”

He waved his hand vaguely toward the world. “They made it empty.”

“I’ll make some,” I said brightly, realizing how “chirpy” I sounded, how nervous. He followed me to the kitchen and sat at his usual place at the kitchen table, silently watching me put on the kettle, his hands repeatedly smoothing his orange plastic placemat, left hand holding it in place, right hand sweeping from corner to corner. Over and over.

Our presence was no surprise to Mike. During the past month, someone had appeared every day to make coffee, fix meals, and keep them company. He was no longer certain which nephew or niece was which, but he accepted our intrusion as friendly.

The tea kettle whistled and Mike laughed. “Train’s coming in,” he said, then went back to smoothing his placemat.

I poured him a cup of coffee and set it on the placemat. He turned it between his hands and frowned at the movement of dark liquid before he sipped it.

“It’s cold out,” I said. “Your thermometer reads eighteen degrees.”

He nodded. “Pretty cold. Might snow this year.”

Beyond the kitchen stood the rarely used dining room and beyond that the glassed-in room – once a porch and now called the sleeping porch – where Louise and Mike slept. They’d traded their original bedroom off the dining room for the sleeping porch years earlier, moving closer to the trees and light. “I have to see what’s going on outside,” Louise had said. “I might miss something.”

Louise stepped into the kitchen, in nightgown and robe. Mike gallantly rose from his chair. “Good morning, chickadee.”

“You mean, old crow, don’t you?” she mumbled as she shuffled past him.

Once a quick-moving woman, now she steadied herself with one hand on the back of a chair. Her hair was thick and luxurious, a silver that younger women paid to mimic. At eighty-two, Aunt Louise remained an arresting woman, her cheekbones high and her eyes wide-set.

She spotted me pouring coffee, accepting my presence without question but protesting. “You don’t have to make our coffee. We can do it.”

I already knew they couldn’t, that once when they’d awakened before my brother Ray arrived, he’d walked into water spilled across the kitchen floor. Who knew whether it spilled before or after it boiled? Like the co-conspirators they’d been their entire married life, they’d denied they’d spilled any water at all.

“Just for today,” I assured her. Her hand rose to her mouth, a sure sign that my presence was unsettling.

“Where are you staying again?” she asked.

“In the little house.”

“There’s no heat over there.”

“Ray fixed the furnace,” I reminded her, not knowing that this particular conversation would be repeated nearly every day in the months to come.


1929 Poor Vince is broke and looking for a job. I’m so lonesome and restless. I want him to love me so badly.
Mae and Sylvia and I went to Briar’s. I got rid of half a dozen.
Mrs. B. makes it unpleasant for me. Gee! But I hate my work.
I’m homesick and I’ve made a decision. I’m going to be a Catholic again – for Mother’s sake. It means more to her than it does to me.

How We Came to Be

“This is multi-infarct dementia,” Louise’s doctor had told Ray after her last appointment. “Now, you virtually have two people with dementia living together.”

We brothers and sisters consulted by phone. We all agreed: a nursing home was out of the question. We couldn’t bear the thought – not yet. But what to do? Barbara was a visiting nurse, but none of us had personal experience with dementia.

Our solution was impractical, crazy, ill-advised. “You’re out of your mind,” friends said. “You’re just postponing the inevitable.”

That was exactly our goal: to postpone the inevitable. Kipling and I had some flexibility. Our children were grown. After a week of intense consideration while he made his decision, Kipling obtained a six-month leave of absence from his job. I knew he’d agreed to come to Michigan because I wanted it so desperately.

I was a writer and besides finishing up a new book, I had a contract to write three more. I was convinced I could work anywhere. We planned to remain in Michigan through the summer, to give Louise and Mike final months on their beloved farm, and during that time, we’d gradually accustom them to the idea of an assisted-living home. I not so secretly anticipated that the stability of our presence would slow or even stall the ravages of their disease.

“Just make the decision to put them in a care home and do it,” one acquaintance advised. “It’ll be easier on them in the long run.”

Another, older, friend said wistfully, “I wish I would have done that for my mother. If you do this, you’ll always be grateful.” I appreciated her encouragement but I was foggy about her meaning. Why would we be grateful?

Kipling and I arrived in Michigan laden with the essentials, including my computer, favorite books, videos and bags of Northwest coffee from friends who believed we were retreating to the ends of the earth.

We were also armed with excuses to offer Louise to explain our presence: I was homesick for Michigan; I needed the peace and quiet to write; she was doing us a favor by letting us stay in the little house; if there was any neighborly thing we could do to help them out, we’d love to. She accepted our decision with little comment, unusual for her.


1929 Vince didn’t show for our date. I was left standing in front of Paulie’s all mad and lonely. Chicago felt too big and I missed home. I told Mrs. B.I was sick and went home on the train to Michigan. I hope it shakes up Vince when he can’t get ahold of me.
Dumb, but I cried when I saw Dad and Johnny waiting at the depot. Johnny’s sure big for a kid. Tofelia is Tofelia. Ha! Mother cooked a big dinner of chicken and kugelis and cabbage.
The weekend went too fast. Dad has Johnny working like a man. Frank came by to help in the cellar. Mother sent a basket home with me.
Met an old daddy on the train who asked me out. Guess not! Two letters from Vince when I got home and Mrs. B complained he’d called too many times over the weekend. Ha!

Mail

Later in the morning of that first day, as we unpacked in the little house, the temperature outside rose to 21 degrees. Bright sun cast blue shadows across the snow. The little house grew snug and familiar as we spread our possessions in familiar configurations. Kipling had found snow shovels and we’d gleefully shoveled the path between the two houses, pausing to toss a few snowballs and congratulate ourselves on our tidy job. What fun, we thought.

My late-night fears abated. Kipling and I would spend the winter popping in and out of Louise’s house, eating cozy meals with them, providing good cheer and security, tactfully easing them toward assisted living until they believed they’d made the choice. I’d complete my book in record time and leisurely begin the new contract, perhaps even complete it. Kipling would have the freedom to try his own hand at writing, as he’d always wanted to. It would be idyllic, I just knew it.

As I untangled my computer cords on the glassed-in porch, movement caught my eye. Mike, without a coat and in his slippers, ambled down the driveway toward the mailbox. The winds had scoured the snow off the drive but it was humpy with ice, treacherous even in boots. When he returned I followed him inside and set his coat and boots on a kitchen chair.

“If you go out again,” I told him, “here are your boots and coat.”

“Well,” he said, grinning, “boots and coat.”

Louise glanced up from the newspaper. It was still open to the first page, just as it had been two hours ago. “Mike knows how to put on his boots, don’t you, Mikey?”

“I certainly do.”

An hour later I spotted him circling our pickup truck before he headed toward the mailbox, again without a coat and in his slippers. I intercepted him and walked back to the house with him.

“Take my arm,” he said, crooking his elbow, “so you don’t slip.”

Inside, I moved the chair closer to the door, nearly blocking it so his boots and coat would be in his path. “Wear these if you go outside,” I told him, patting his coat.

I sounded like a cheerleader. I was clueless how to talk to him in my new role. Was I the visiting niece offering a suggestion? The new director of his life? And why should he, the man who’d taken over his family’s farm at age nine when his father died, who’d been independent and capable his entire life, listen to me?

“I’m not going outside,” he said, casting me an indignant look and pretending to shiver. “Too cold.”

But barely a half hour later, he was on his way to the mailbox again, his step unsteady, still in shirtsleeves and slippers. The mail wouldn’t be delivered until late in the afternoon. Each hopeless trip was new to him, an old habit he repeated, totally unaware of the time of day or of his fruitless earlier trips. Had our presence upset his usual routine or perhaps these multiple trips were his usual routine?

I returned to their house and pulled a heavy sweater off the door hooks and held it open for him to slip his arms into. “Here, Uncle Mike,” I said in my chirpy voice. “It’s a little cold in here. Why don’t you put this on?”

“No, I’m not cold,” he said and returned to the kitchen.

“It’s cold?” Louise asked. “Then, Mikey, go down and start a fire.”

“You have automatic heat now,” I reminded her, pointing to the thermostat. “You don’t need to make a fire.”

“When did we get that?”

“Ray installed it last summer, remember?”

“It’s news to me.”

But several minutes later Mike emerged into the frigid air. Wafting behind him and around him were thin shreds of gray smoke.

I screamed. Terrified, Kipling and I dashed to their house. Mike ignored us and continued coatless and bootless toward the mailbox.

Inside, the air was dusky with smoke drifting up from the basement. Louise stood unsteadily in the kitchen, waving a towel. While Kipling ran to the basement I grabbed Aunt Louise’s shoes and coat to take her outside.

“Poor Mikey,” she said, coughing. “Sometimes he forgets how to make a fire.”

“Why don’t you come to our house?” I urged her, holding open her coat.

“Your house?” she asked. “Don’t you live in Washington?”

“We’re staying in the little house now,” I explained.

“Oh, I don’t want to go there. There’s no heat. Just open the door and this smoke will dissipate.”

Dissipate?

Kipling returned from the basement, hacking. Mike had attempted to build a fire in the wood furnace and left the furnace door open and the damper closed. We turned up the thermostat and opened the doors and windows, the three of us waving towels to move the smoke outside into the freezing day
.
“Well,” Uncle Mike said when he returned empty-handed from the mailbox and spied us waving the towels. “Birds in the house.”

So now we had our first glimpse into the future: life without a central core of logic, or memory, where reason didn’t always hold an honored place. And unless we acted: dangerous.

We had the door to the wood furnace welded shut. Every time I found matches or lighters in their house I quietly removed them. While Louise and Mike slept, Kipling moved the firewood from the woodbox beside the fireplace to the barn, but Mike followed his tracks in the snow and carried the logs back to the house, one by one.

At least, we consoled ourselves, he wore his coat and boots.

Before we left Washington, I’d borrowed books from the library and read about dementia, both Alzheimer’s and those diseases frequently categorized with Alzheimer’s: multi-infarct dementia, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and Picks Disease. Many of the dementia-causing illnesses were impossible to diagnose until an autopsy after death.

Everything I read illustrated how little was known about these baffling diseases. There was no predictable progression, the experts told me, no single set of symptoms, and worst of all, no cure. “Each case is unique,” every book and article stressed.

Nothing more than guessing.

To read about dementia and to witness its effects were two diametric experiences. These were people we loved. How could we interrupt their collapsing universe and restore a semblance of normalcy and security to the aunt and uncle I’d known all my life?

For I was determined not to let them disappear, that somehow our presence would make a difference, would hold further degeneration at bay. If they couldn’t fight dementia, we surely would fight it for them.


1929 I loaned Vince some money I’d been saving, just until he gets his first paycheck. He wants to look for a diamond ring as soon as he gets paid! I’m so happy.
A letter from Mother. Tofelia ran off with Gordon! She’s only sixteen. The fool. Read More 

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 1

Discovery

After the decisions had been finalized and we began clearing out the house, stripping it of its memories, silencing its echoes, and leaving only ghosts to ramble the empty rooms, my brother Ray found the diary.

The discovery of a diary was akin to a plot contrivance in a fiction novel. What would we find next, a faded hand-drawn map with a red X marking treasure buried in the cornfield? Hoards of hundred-dollar bills tied with old shoelaces? A decomposing body in the basement?

I had heard Ray bumping and dragging boxes in the attic above my head for the past hour. He’d tackled wading through stashes of receipts, legal forms, and tax returns that dated back at least forty years, filling cardboard boxes and stacking one box atop another to maneuver down the narrow stairs – actually a slanted ladder – and to the pit behind the barn for burning.

Forgetting his six-foot five-inch frame and the low-ceilinged attic, my brother had risen and cracked his shoulder against an open rafter, jostling loose a leather-covered volume from above the beam. It thumped to the wooden floor at his feet.

I worked downstairs in the kitchen, sorting dishware into grocery store boxes I’d marked with crayon: DONATIONS, CONSIGNMENTS, AUCTION SALE. There was so much. An appraiser had already inventoried and crated up the Royal Winton china, the Limoges and blue flow plates, the mantel clocks and rarer pieces of German porcelain. Kitchen drawers had yet to be tackled, closets still stood closed and untouched. The best of the antique furniture – the Arts and Crafts pieces: the Stickley table, a Roycroft chair, an Eastlake dresser and the Tiffany lamp – had been delivered to an antique auction house in Indiana. In the living room only the old sofa stood against a wall. A Gingko-patterned rug pocked with black holes from fireplace embers still covered the oak floor in front of the fireplace. The beds had been stripped.

Lights blazed inside at ten in the morning because outside, cold rain steadily fell. From somewhere water dripped in a monotonous cadence. The house already had that indefinable abandoned smell. Not of decay or rot, but of absence: no baking or washing or freshly brewed coffee. No showers or alarm clocks or radio voices.

“Take a look at this,” Ray said as he entered the kitchen. Gray cobwebs were tangled in his hair, his forearms smeared with dust.

I wiped my hands on a cotton dish towel and took the small bulging book. Its embossed cover was frayed along the edges, a thread of loose stitching dangled from the spine. A leather strap and a tarnished lock with a small round button, the same as a diary I’d received on my twelfth birthday barely held the gilt-edged pages together. The golden words A Line a Day scrolled across the cover above art-deco embossing.

“Is there a key?” I asked my brother, holding the book gently in both hands.

“It’s not locked.”

It wasn’t. I sat on the taped box marked CONSIGNMENT and thumbed the little button to the left. The covers leapt apart, crammed so tightly with inserts that the binding had sprung. I gently fanned the pages: browned newspaper clippings, poems, dried flowers and butterfly wings, photos, notes in English and Lithuanian, were wedged between the sheets. And on every page: Aunt Louise’s distinctive handwriting.

I spoke the obvious. “She kept a diary. Did you read it?”

“Only the first page. That was enough.”

I turned to the inside front cover and read, “In case of death: To be destroyed or to be read by Wm. L.”

“I knew that wouldn't bother you,” Ray said.

William L. was Bill, our Aunt Louise’s mysterious first husband who’d died young. I’d seen a few old photos: dapper and slender, mustachioed, rumored to have been the black sheep of a wealthy Dutch family. “A lot of flash,” our father had commented in an amused voice.

An envelope slipped from the diary and wafted to the floor, creased and browned, one end torn open and folded over to protect what was inside. I shook it and detected the whisper of movement. Inside was a handful of dried seeds, golden-fringed and weightless. On the envelope’s front, Louise had written: "Coral ivy. They only grow in tropical climates. A little frost and they will perish – like me."
The leather volume held five years of Aunt Louise’s life, from 1929-1933, written during her tumultuous twenties, years of the Depression and Prohibition when she’d lived in Chicago before returning to rural Michigan.

Some pages she’d filled with dense, cramped handwriting that spilled into margins and crowded other entries, some dates were blank, others held only a succinct line or two. Most intriguing, lines here and there had been rendered in code, a series of numbers, letters, symbols, and vague references. Small sections had been scissored out, leaving slashing tracks of ink along the excised edges.

I kept the diary, nosy and eager to meet the young Louise. Over the following months, I tip-toed my way through the minefield of her youth. Most of her encryptions I was able to cipher out, others I inferred from content, still others eluded me. My brother declined to read any of the diary entries in any form. “I’ll just remember her the way I knew her,” he said.

In a way, after reading the diaries, what was most surprising was how little she had actually changed in the intervening decades.

1929 Today is my birthday. I’m now 21. Gee! Getting old! Ed, Al, and Johnny called. Mae and Sylvia, too. Mother and Sis sent cards. Vince called twice and we’re going out tonight at 9:45.
Mrs. B. was kicking that I get too many calls and I said, “I can’t help it if I have a lot of friends.”
“It’s not the tail that wags the dog,” she told me and slammed the door!
Well, if the dog doesn’t wage its tail, who will?? Hah!
But it’s Vince I love. I care for him alone – and how! There’s no kick out of the others.

~~~

We Begin The Year

From the first page of Louise’s diary, 1929:

A Way to Success
Be Polite
Be Willing
Don’t Whine
Don’t be a Snob
Try to Forgive and Forget
Don’t be Selfish
Think of Others Before Yourself
(Or maybes this is a way to Sainthood!)


We’d been dodging snow for two thousand miles: racing ahead of a state-wide blizzard, and trailing a snowstorm that still lingered white along the aprons of the freeways.

By the time we reached Michigan and turned into the farm’s circular driveway, it was dark and a thin spit of white had evolved into steady loose snowflakes buffeting like static in the headlight beams.

“At last,” I murmured, already unbuckling my seatbelt.

“Where are we going to live?” Kipling asked as he parked our small pickup truck behind my sister-in-law Barbara’s Subaru. Barbara had assured me over the phone that either she or Ray would wait at Louise and Mike’s for our arrival, “no matter how late.”

Kipling squinted toward the two houses across from the larger house, all three outlined by the yard light, the two smaller buildings dark. One was my aunt’s antique shop, the other was separated from the main house by the narrow driveway, less than twenty-five yards away, front door facing front door.

In the silence my ears rang. We’d driven fifteen numbing hours on this final day, determined not to suffer another restless night in a motel, wary of the snow creeping up at our backs.

“The house under the trees, with the glassed-in porch and cement steps. Everybody calls it ‘the little house.’”

He nodded, accepting. No doubts. Kipling exhaustively examined the pros and cons of every decision. He made no choices lightly – or quickly. I had watched him debate and compare features for a half hour before he purchased a new flashlight, and he read every breakfast cereal ingredients before he dropped the box into a shopping cart. Unlike me, once he’d made his decision, he didn’t second guess himself, didn’t consider the avenue he might have taken. The verdict had been passed, let’s get on with it. It was occasionally maddening.

We climbed out of the pickup, buttoning our coats. Kipling paused to lock the doors.

“Why bother?” I asked. We were in a driveway in the middle of rural Michigan in a snow storm.

He shrugged and the lock clicked. We were coming from the city. Changing our habits would take a while.

After the warm truck, I gasped at the frigid air. Snowflakes feathered my shoulders and head. I couldn’t resist holding out my hand to watch them land and collapse, vanishing. Snow was still a novelty.

The tall pines around Louise and Mike’s house swished and shooshed in the wind, perfect accompaniment to the falling snow.

I didn’t knock. Over the years we’d learned to open the breezeway door and call out, “Hello.” If the door was locked – which it frequently was –Louise and Mike weren't accepting company, and that was that.

Fragrances prompted the most evocative of memories, I’d read, and opening the door invoked the past: a rich potpourri of apples, fireplace logs, furniture wax, indefinable spices. I was walloped by a rush of memories: raucous oversized family gatherings highlighted by too much food and too much alcohol, an increasingly loud cacophony of Lithuanian and English.

In the yellow glow of lamps – Louise disliked overhead lights – Barbara and Louise sat at the oak table in the kitchen. Barbara touched Louise’s arm. “Look who’s here.”

The room, like the entire house, was packed with antiques and oddities from years of collecting. Blue plates and a mishmash of art hung the walls. Silver salt cellars, Toby mugs, and colorful bird feathers shared shelves with Dresden figurines, Limoges china, faded photos, a quirky celluloid figure of a toddler boy peeing in a pot, stones and peculiarly shaped glass. Clocks of various sizes and rarity ticked in the background. Old prints and articles or books that had caught Louise or Mike’s fancy were stacked in precarious piles along with letters and ads and envelopes that she planned to reuse. To the right, the living room waited in darkness.

As children, the house’s tumble of treasures had been unbearably tempting, and we’d eagerly awaited the holidays when instead of only staring and staring, once the liquor began to flow, we could poke around beneath the adults’ radar.

Louise rose unsteadily from her chair, her smile wide, her blue eyes sharp. “My goddaughter. How nice of you to stop by,” she said graciously and nodded to my sister-in-law of seven years. “Do you know Barbie?”

1929 Got home at twenty minutes to two last night – this morning! Vince will never really know how much I care for him. I long for him so much.
I helped Mrs. B. prepare for a big dinner party and burned my hand in the deep fat. I thought I’d die. Nobody noticed except Mr. B. Lucky me he’s a doctor. He salved and wrapped my hand and told Mrs. B I had to lay down. She said it was “providential” I’d already done the cooking.
I wish Vince would call. I worry he doesn’t care for me like I do for him. Why??
 Read More