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Thankful for Mrs. Helmuth’s Famous Green Bean Soup

It definitely took a village to raise my son.  One of its most pivotal members was Magda Helmuth, founder of and long-time teacher at Purple Dragon Daycare, the pre-school that my son attended from just under three years of age until he started kindergarten upstairs at PS1 Elementary.  Under Magda’s tutelage and tender touch, Patrick refined his early reading skills, acquired some rigorous math chops, and prepared for his climb to the second floor.

But one of Mrs. Helmuth’s greatest gifts to me and my son was her Famous Green Bean Soup.

I struggled with ill health in those days.  Exhaustion gripped me.  With a full-time law practice and no partner, I barely got chicken nuggets on the table.  Moreover, I had not learned to cook anything after I left home.  To make matters worse, I can’t myself digest meat.  Patrick endured a boring menu of badly composed casseroles and store-bought cookies.  At school, though, he ate whatever Mrs. Helmuth served, which corresponded with the Letter of the Week.  A was not for apple but for artichoke.  B stood for borscht.  C represented carrots.  And so forth, marching through a litany of healthy foods with a strong German bent.  If memory serves, Mrs. Helmuth immigrated during or shortly after World War II.  She taught with a modified version of the Montessori method with which Patrick already had some familiarity from his first two years at another school.

Her methods proved successful.  Our children learned as most kids do not.  I vividly recall standing outside my son’s fifth-grade traditional classroom with another Purple Dragon parent at a parochial school.  She smiled at me and shrugged as we prepared to find out how our bored-to-the-gills sons fared in the crowded class.  Do you think we made a tactical error, she asked.  Sending our sons to the best teacher they’ll ever have before they reached the age of 5?  

Mrs. Helmuth held my hand through a few frightening days.  When I collapsed on the stairs with the first of many shingles episodes, she made sure my son got to someone’s house who could care for him until I got out of the hospital.  She phoned me from the emergency room on his birthday, three stitches testifying to the stray bolt that another parent came to fix after my son’s injury.  She made a similar call when a child pushed him backwards into a marble window sill upstairs during first grade (four stitches) and when he spiked a temperature while I was in a trial.  I got to the school shortly after five o’clock.  She wrapped my sleeping son in a quilt and carried him out to the car.  He never even stirred, she was that gentle.

Patrick loved Mrs. Helmuth.  He would do anything for her, including getting himself out of bed and dragging me to school for the first session of the day when he attained Work Group status.  Through it all, he begged me to make some of the food that she cooked for him, most especially what he called “Mrs. Helmuth’s Green Bean Soup”.  I constantly demurred, while paging through my Joy of Cooking and my mother’s battered copy of Cooking the Austrian Way for something that a four-year-old might consider “green bean soup”.  No luck; and I never had time to ask in the brief moments at the start and finish of each day, with other parents mingling around and coats to gather, backpacks to sort, and mittens to collect.

One day I stopped at the grocery store and came upon Mrs. Helmuth pushing a cart through the produce section.  I greeted her somewhat softly, with an air that I sometimes feel myself adopting when I’m unsure of my standing with someone.  But she beamed, and spoke my name in her lovely accent.  We chatted for a few moments.  Finally, I gathered some courage and asked her about her green bean soup.  Patrick loves it, I admitted.  I’d like to try the recipe.

She looked puzzled.  Then suddenly, a flash of realization flitted across her features.  She laughed, a throaty laugh which made me think of my Austrian nana.  I will show you, she said.  We paraded with our carts down several aisles.  She stopped in front of the frozen vegetables.  Reaching into one section, she lifted out a bag of green beans.  I cook them in water, she explained.  Then serve each child a few beans and some of the liquid.  Your Patrick, he always asks for more.

That night, for supper, I made her recipe.  My son crowed.  He ate three helpings from a little blue Fire King bowl, one of a set that his Syrian-Austrian grandmother had given me a decade before his birth.  After supper, we read books and sang together.  He drifted to sleep with a dreamy smile on his peaceful face, whispering to me, Thank you for making Mrs. Helmuth’s Green Bean Soup, Mommy.

I don’t know if Magda is still alive.  But wherever she is, in this world or the next, I want her to know that I am thankful for everything she gave my son, especially the delight of her famous green bean soup.

It’s the twenty-second day of the one-hundred and nineteenth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Three friends who met at Purple Dragon and stayed friends through high school.

 

 

Sunrise, Sunset

I barely saw the eastern glow that wakens our island each morning.  For once, my alarm remained silent.  But I still opened my eyes as the fullest rays broke through the small piece of fabric covering the window in the sleeping loft of my tiny house.  I thought about coffee, and new beginnings, and steps forward.  I sifted through everything that might happen as the day progressed.  Then I contemplated whether I should make a cup of coffee.  Before I quite realized what had happened, I stood in front of the two-burner propane stove top thinking about the grounds to water ratio and whether I could get a load of laundry done.

In just six days, the shop that I’ve dreamed of starting opens.  My to-do list still has about ten items.  Sunday loomed but not large.  Just ten hours from sunrise to sunset and a corresponding ration of energy.  I watched the gauge in the kettle move towards a boil and considered whether I should scramble eggs.

By noon I had done that load of clothes and started another, watered my porch plants, gotten a list of supplies from my cohort, and slung a full bag onto a backseat cluttered with the debris of my busy existence.  It’s true that I have no social life.  But the job, the shop, the market, collecting for charity, and my addiction to reading old police procedurals fills every conscious moment.  As I drove toward Rio Vista, I pulled open the mental browser on which I have saved my task list and reviewed it, praying that the bridge would stay level with the street.  I retain my tourist penchant for photographing big ships from the car window, but I had no spare time this day.

Hours later, the new store all readied for tomorrow’s fire inspection except the battery-operated emergency exit signs, I locked its door and headed for home.  First I connected with my friend Michelle to hand off the custom-mixed paint for the temporary sign.  We stood on sixth street chatting about her sheep, goats, and geese as the sun slowly descended in the west.  I pulled into my lot a few minutes before five o’clock, in time to turn and watch the amber glow spread across the horizon through the trees flanking the levee road.  Then I went inside to find something nourishing to make for dinner, wondering, for the umpteenth time, how my own road ever turned to land me in this place.

It’s the twelfth day of the one-hundred and nineteenth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

 

The new shop’s name comes from Arabic to honor my Syrian grandfather. 

“Mubdie” means “creative” or “an innovator or inventor”, someone who finds things and makes other things out of them. 

It is a membership-based space for creative persons in the Delta to sell their art.

City / Home

I should have known better than to book a hotel room through Airbnb.  I found it with my GPS guidance, annoying though she can be.  But once parked, I could not enter.  Construction blocked half of the ground floor rooms and the entire entrance.  I would have to scale a rickety, makeshift set of steps and descend to a rubble of concrete.  

Eventually, I got into a room.  Thoughts of a short stroll to a Chinatown restaurant vanished.  The elevator could not open on the street level.  My car had been captured by the valet-only, no in-and-out basement parking lot which had the only  functioning lift to my third-floor room.  I ordered from DoorDash and ate at the simulated oak table.  I tried to be philosophical about the lost romance of the evening I had envisioned.

In the morning, I checked out far earlier than planned just to escape.  I made my way to the neighborhood of my scheduled appointments, trolling for a parking spot decently near any open breakfast venue.  My luck asserted itself and I landed at Jane on Fillmore with a delicious egg-topped avocado toast and a seat next to a pleasant retired attorney who swims every morning in East Bay.  Imagine that; swimming in something that I only spy from an overhead bridge at fifty miles per hour.

After several hours of grueling examinations of my uncooperative eyes, I found a vegetarian restaurant for lunch.  One out of two dishes rose to the lofty menu descriptions.  But I had a view of the Golden Gate bridge, even though they don’t seat parties of one by the window.  I drank hot tea and read a few paragraphs of the next in a well-written series that I recently discovered.  I’m dreading the day I turn the last page of the final book.  The author died in 2009.

I got lost trying to find the entrance to the highway that would take me home.  Eventually, I turned down a street with the same name as the levy road on which I live.  That took me to the proper turn-off and I started east.  A moment occurs in every trip to the coast when I say goodbye to the ocean.  On this trip, I saw a flash of it from the Bay Bridge on my second circuit around the city.  Somehow I got confused, or stuck in the wrong lane.  I went north on the Golden Gate, east on the Richmond, and back west on the Bay before I finally got straightened around.  My advantage lost, I settled into the groove of afternoon traffic, resolved to endure a three-hour drive that would have been ninety minutes had I been paying closer attention.

When I finally dropped my overnight bag on the floor of my tiny house, the sun had set over the Delta.  I had watched it from my sideview mirror as I waited for an accident to clear on Highway 12 a few miles west of town.  I poured a cold glass of water and sank into the easy chair that my friend Tim the pig farmer gave me.  Whenever I go to the city, I spend a lot of time stressing over whether I should spend the money for a hotel or rise hours before dawn to beat the rush hour traffic headed in the same direction.  Then I pressure myself to pack food to save the restaurant expense.  Each encounter with a host who queries if anyone will be joining me causes a moment of panicked realization that I have indeed arrived at late middle-age alone, just as my mother predicted.  All of these things overshadow the pleasure of moments at my beloved Pacific and the thrill of finding a used bookstore just steps from where I have breakfast.  

Back home from my two days in the city, I scrolled through the dozen photos that I snapped from my car window.  I had not taken time to drive to the headlands or northwards to the rugged shoreline at Point Reyes.  But I had seen some sights.  Then I had returned to the countryside, and the simple views of my daily existence.  The shadow of the city lingered, flickering just out of sight.  Night fell.  I stood out on my porch and listened to the eager yip of distant coyotes and the mournful lullaby of a pigeon settling into the branches overhead.  I pulled my shawl close around my shoulders, then went inside to prepare myself for sleep.

It’s the fourth day of the one-hundred and nineteenth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

There are eleven photos in this gallery.  Sometimes the galleries lag; if you click on the frozen photo and then exit out of it, the scrolling should resume.  Please enjoy.

Invasive species

My house turns cold.  Our oak trees rise high enough to perpetually shade the small dwellings in which we live.  This soothes in the short spate of hot weather but come October, the deepening gloom brings chill.  I struggle with whether to turn on the heat.  I loaned my wool blanket to visitors and haven’t gone to retrieve it.  The night will be long.

Migrating flocks return to our island.  On the morning drive, I pass large swathes of them as they settle on the shimmering surface of the Mokelumne River.  I pause to watch their easy drift.  I know my cell phone’s camera would not do justice to the sight of them.  I don’t even try.  I watch from the car window as they lift a lazy wing to change course.  Envy grips me as I press the accelerator and continue towards town.

I take a short cut to Highway 160, headed towards a physical therapy appointment.  Beside the slough, I let my engine idle.  Huge swaths of hyacinth choke the flow of water.  Birds nestle among the clusters of green.  Around one corner, I spy the swans that we’ve been watching all summer.  I thought they must surely be gone, but I see a little group of them.  I take a photo before continuing. Later, I run the picture through an application on my phone that tells me it’s a mute swan, an introduced species that threatens the ecosystem of the environment to which its drifted.  The California Department of Fish and Wildlife cautions that I should report these sightings.  I decline to do so.   I decide instead to pretend that they aren’t what they appear to be.  Perhaps their months of huddling amongst the weeds in the slough near my home has morphed them into an ex-pat, a refugee from the place whose shores they no longer remember.

Meanwhile, the days grow shorter.  I watch the weather in my own home town.  I have not seen a first snow in five years.  I have not stood on cold concrete steps to sling salt across an icy sidewalk since December of 2017.  Someone else will be calling the chimney sweep and stacking wood on the hearth where I once sat reading books to my toddler in front of a crackling fire.  Instead I crank my neck backwards and study the skies for signs of rain.  I look at the air fares and wonder where I will spend Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or New Year’s Eve.  I contemplate the wisdom of trading my Midwestern roots for the loamy soil of the California Delta.  Unlike the long tendrils of vegetation and the heavy brown bird, I chose to come here.  Perhaps, like them, I do not belong in this verdant land.

Yet here we all are:  A Missouri girl, the water hyacinth, and a flock of mute swans, all just doing our best to thrive against the contours of a world far away from anywhere that we feel certainly, surely welcome.  

It’s the twenty-fifth day of the one-hundred and eighteenth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

 

 

A Day I had Rued

The hardest part about starting with a new therapist has to be all the pretending.

They pretend that their evaluation shows that you’re doing fine.  You pretend that you don’t assume they roll their eyes behind your back as you struggle to lift your leg three inches off the exam table.  They start with that high pitch voice which implies you might be deaf or mentally impaired but at the suggestion of which belief they gasp in overblown chagrin.  You shrug off any intimation that the movements overly challenge you while clenching every muscle and orifice to keep from screaming.

Friday went like that.  I started with this new therapist two weeks ago but the honeymoon period vanished about ten minutes into our second session.  She asked me questions and drew a diagram on the whiteboard as I talked.  By the time she finished, a tortured depiction of the sensations that I strove to explain had emerged, a tangle of red and blue marker surrounding a crudely drawn, genderless humanoid.  She cast a bright look in my direction.  I returned her query with a tremulous smile.  She had written, “Imp CNS, 2nd to Ch Inf, Poss Incr 2 some degree Ch Trauma RW Npth”.  Impaired central nervous system secondary to childhood infection, possibly increased to some degree by childhood trauma resulting in rewired neuropathways.

I nodded, hiding my dismay at being reduced to a succinct sentence.  She pulled the curtain back, crossed the room to grab an exercise ball, and returned with a cheery, “Now, we work!”

The problem, of course, is that physical therapy to forestall what some would consider an inevitable decline only occupies a small segment of my time.  Between sessions, I work four days a week at a straight job, run a small nonprofit, try to write, manage several websites and about five social media accounts, and — in my off-hours — keep my tiny house clean and shop for groceries.  So I lay on the table and waited for her instructions, already dreading how I’d feel by Sunday morning.

In between then and today, I orchestrated the purchase of decor for our Harvest Market, ran into Lodi to buy larger pots for my overgrown succulents, organized my kitchen cupboards, and sorted through the sweaters under my loveseat.  A trip to Michael’s and Goodwill to scrounge for baskets made it to the list; groceries did not.

Thus we arrived at October 15th, the day before I have to mail my tax return.  I rose early, scrambled eggs to eat with leftover veggie stir fry, and brewed fresh coffee.  After breakfast, I sorted laundry, put away clean towels, got a load started, and tallied the expenses for my book release last September to list in my Schedule C.  A few more chores later, noon lurked.  So I loaded my favorite china plate with sliced apples, softened goat cheese, fresh tomatoes, and a handful of gluten-free pita chips.  With the Spode plate in one hand and a cup of water in the other, I started outside, hesitating only a second to wonder if I should have used the old metal dish from my great-aunt instead of something breakable.

I definitely should have.

Two steps out the front door, my right leg collapsed for absolutely no reason whatsoever except that I allowed my new physical therapist to torture it for an hour on Friday.  My years of training automatically assumed control of my body and twisted my torso into fall position, while my brain instructed my right hand not to dare let go of that plate while giving my left hand permission to jettison the tin cup.  Water showered across the deck.  My bum hit the hard wood but that right hand held on tight.  Food tumbled to the ground.  A little table that I’d scored last year at a thrift store collapsed under my weight as I staggered. 

When all motion ceased, I had come to rest in a pile of sliced apples on my Welcome mat, still holding the blue china plate.  My brain derided me:  All right smart girl, how do you plan to get off the ground?  Easy.  Gently set the plate on the pad of the rocking chair.  Ease yourself towards the steps to the little garden.   Plant both feet firmly on the second stair.  Grasp the big brass handle screwed to the side of the deck rail.  Pull yourself vertical.

The person who installed that handle arrived at my place right after I had cleaned the mess and made a new plate of food, this time definitely on that metal plate, a closed door on an empty barn.  My neighbor Bri does various chores for me, and in turn I insist that she let me pay her more than she feels comfortable taking from someone she knows.  Today she finished repotting some of my bigger plants, including rescuing two that she’d recently refreshed but which a critter had apparently tackled in the night.  She worked while I ate.  We chatted about sports (she’s from Texas and does not root for the 49ers) and the comparatively quiet week we’d each had.  I told her about my  fall, and the new therapist, and my recalcitrant right leg.  She gave me some garden advice, waited while I bagged my trash and recycle, then gently took both burdens from me.  She started to leave.  I called her back, thanked her, and insisted that she let me pay for her hour’s work.  She demurred but work is work, and if I didn’t pay her, I’d have to pay someone else.

She finally took the money, and then we thanked each other.  Later, I sent her a message:  You did me a lot of good today!  She replied, “Actually, ditto you – me!”  I could not help but smile.   My neighbor and friend Bri had saved some part of a day that I otherwise surely would have rued.

It’s the fifteenth day of the one-hundred  and eighteenth* month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Dust of Snow, by Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

*You can be forgiven if you’ve lost track of how long My Year Without Complaining has endured.  Let me explain.  I strove to traverse 365 days without uttering one complaint. I started on 01 January 2014.  It is now 15 October 2023.  I have thus been on this #journeytojoy for 9 years and ten months.  Once in a while, I get confused and say it’s the “one-hundred and tenth month” when it’s the one-hundred and ninth or one-hundred and eleventh month.  But, I used my fingers and my computer’s calculator to count tonight.  Do it with me:  2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 (yes, we have to count that year), 2021, and 2022.  That’s nine years.  It’s October 2023.  October is the tenth month.  Nine years (9 x 12) equals 108 months.  Plus ten.  We are in the one-hundred and eighteenth month since I start my journey. If I did this wrong, please enlighten me.  In the meantime, I will try to keep track.  

Of books and boots

I live in 198 square feet.  I do not need more stuff.  So I strive to tame my secondhand shopping.  I troll for small iron pieces, books, and — until I completely filled the allocated shelves — hand-thrown pottery mugs.  I cradle each piece in my hand.  Does the handle perfectly fit my clumsy fingers?  Will this old iron winch hold the screen door open if I inch it forward with one foot?  Does the first paragraph of that paperback entice?

When I spied the tall waders, a little thrill ran through me.  I don’t fish.  I don’t muck about in stables.  But I’ve known enough people who do that I recognized the brand.  The heft of them alerted me to their original value, which a quick search on Google confirmed.  Each boot had a nick on the curved surface.  One of them had been poorly repaired.  I imagined a cleaning knife slipping; I pictured an awkward leap to the cluttered deck of a fishing boat.

At three dollars, this sturdy pair had to come home with me. I had no use for them, but I live across from a marina.  Though I don’t spend any time in boats, I know lots of folks who do.  Most of them treat their vessels like summer toys, but a few live aboard.  Surely, I reasoned, I know some serious fisher-folk.  And there’s the rainy season.  And camping.  I live on an island inundated by fierce sheets of water for three weeks each winter.  Someone could use these.

In the dim light of my tiny house, I picked at the bubble of glue over one hole until it pulled away, revealing the damage that it had been intended to remedy.  I searched for my patch kit. Failing that, I deployed a square of duct tape and Gorilla glue.  A day later, my mend had cured and seemed perfect, but by then, I had ordered a new supply of repair squares for five bucks from Amazon.

Once I had executed a perfect mend, I took a photo and showed it to a couple of people with mountain abodes.  I figured they might need such fine footwear.  The lukewarm responses did not deter me.  One evening, I thought about my friend Tim, the Andrus Island pig farmer.  I texted a photo to him.  I found these at Goodwill for $3, I disclosed.  I repaired two small holes and they seem as good as new!  Can you all use them down there?  “Down there” meant two miles around the Loop, at the Delta Community Farm which spans a dozen acres of our island.  

He did not hesitate.  I have a boot library for visitors, he told me.  These will go great in that!  thanks!

A smile crept across my face.  I sent a heart emoji back to let him know that I would save my rescued treasure for him.  I poured a glass of water and went outside.  The evening began to settle around me.  I contemplated a library filled with boots of every size and color.  Children raced to its shelves, hunting for the perfect galoshes.  A tired worker exchanges his worn waders for a shiny black pair.  Teenagers vie for vibrant rainboots and leave with linked arms.  Patrons nestle on comfy corner couches, crowing over glorious finds.  

On the same thrifting adventure, I had found a book by one of my favorite authors.  I stood in the aisle reading the first few pages.  If I had previously enjoyed this volume, I could not remember the plot.  At ninety-nine cents, the risk seemed small.  I set the book in my cart beside the tall green boots, and moved toward the cashier.  I tried not to seem smug, but that’s certainly how I felt.

It’s the eighth day of the one-hundred and seventeenth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

From Tim Anderson’s Facebook page:  “The farm is a giant hydroponic system. there’s a giant sponge of tule peat underneath it that gets constantly soaked from the water pressure of the river being higher than the land. years of farmers have moved dirt into the wet spots so it’s not flat but it’s fairly uniformly damp except for the roads. compare this to the brown hills that have been dead and dry for months. they got the same rains we did, this was a wet year which means it rained maybe four times since spring mostly just sprinkles.
“The community garden got some hand watering but once the plants put their roots down they took care of themselves. had we started it earlier they wouldn’t have needed any watering.”

Time Flies

Lucky Cat sits on the shelf in front of my mother’s green cup and saucer.  I don’t know Lucky Cat’s gender so I’ll just assume the feminine.  She waves as I glance around my tiny house.  Breakfast dishes clutter the counter.  A box of summer hats crowds the tiny drop-down live-edge cherry table.  I can’t see into the laundry unit but I know that a load of clothes which I washed on Thursday threatens to reabsorb the ambient moisture if I don’t soon attend to them.  My tiny life might implode.

I spent Friday getting ready for a meeting about my latest project which consumed Saturday.  I confess that by late on the last day of September, my brain had grown a bit weary and my muscles screamed.  Yes, I can get everything done; but sometimes my aging crippled body longs for rest.  I crawled into bed with a book at nine last evening, and slept until the sound of the new owners of a neighboring tiny house hitching it to their pick-up for removal awakened me at six.  I’m sad to see them go; and sadder knowing that another of my neighbors, who actually left the park nearly a year ago, is pulling her house out on Monday. 

Those of us who remain in the community hope that other folks will join us.  We love all of our neighbors, regardless of their dwellings.  As long as people want to stay and occasionally share potluck in the community room, we make them welcome.  But I like the look of the varied tiny houses marching side by side down G-Row.  I contemplate those who already left.  Derek and Kelly moved to Montana with their cottage on wheels.  Melanie found a spot on private property in Sebastopol.  Laurie went on the road in a converted van and then moved to Asheville.  Michele went back to Tennessee and a traditional house.  Louis and Helix found a community in Florida.  Sarah went to SoCal.  Laura moved back to Colorado.  

I sit on my deck porch and watch the dog walkers.  A lot of my neighbors have little canine companions, mostly some variation of Chihuahua but here and there a larger breed.  They can’t really see me this far from the road.  Occasionally I call out to them.  Now and then one will pause and chat, sometimes from beyond my range of hearing. I nod and smile.  I invite them to come sit with me.  I offer drinks.  Usually they just wave and continue.  I go back to my book and the coffee growing cold in its mug as coffee has grown cold on every porch that I’ve had my entire adult life.  My mother did the same, except instead of an assortment of hand-thrown pottery mugs, she drank her percolated coffee from a green Melamine cup sitting on its matching saucer — the very same cup which now gathers dust on the shelf behind Lucky Cat.

In the nearly six years that I’ve spent in Angel’s Haven at Park Delta Bay, the tiny house section of the community has grown from four to sixteen.  Expansions and contractions take people in and out of my life.  Time flies.  I’m letting my hair grow grey.  I restarted physical therapy to combat the confluence of the natural decline of the human body and the unnatural impairment of a post-encephalitic brain.  The constant battle challenges me.  So far, I think I’m winning.

It’s the first day of the one-hundred and eighteenth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

We’ve been watching the swans on nearby Twitchell Island all summer.  I hope they winter here.

 

Flashback

I heated a bowl of leftover pasta last night and thought, wouldn’t this be lovely out on the porch.  The sun had slipped far enough in the western sky that the broken rope of the umbrella wouldn’t ruin my evening.  The useless sunshade awaits repair or replacement; but I didn’t need to contemplate its short life.  I could just pretend that I had it closed so as to maximize enjoyment of the evening air.

So I poured a cold glass of soy milk and set a fork on the counter.  Book in hand, I glanced at the door.  I needed something; a tray, perhaps?  Don’t I have one of those?  I lowered the steps on the old stool for which I paid too high a price on eBay, perfect though it is.  Standing precariously on the highest of two slim red painted treads, I eased a silver, wooden-handled fake-antique from under the cabinet perched on top of the built-in washer cubby.  

Then I saw it, nestled inside the larger item:  A tray that I found in a thrift store years ago, the match of one from my childhood.  I had forgotten its existence.  I held it for a few minutes, leaning on my washer-dryer combo-unit.  I wondered which of my siblings got the original in the up-rounds and down-rounds by which we dispersed the flotsam and jetsam of our parents’ sad lives after my father’s death in 1991.  Oldest picks first then down to the baby; youngest picks first then up to the biggest sister.  Ann, Adrienne Joyce, Kevin, Mark, Mary, Francis, Stephen.  The infinity  Corleys. On and on we went, through each room.  Up round, down round.  In the middle of it, one of those lucky bastards got the tray on which one of my brothers — Mark? Frank? — brought me vanilla wafers and hot tea the first time I took to bed with menstrual cramps that he didn’t understand.

I loaded my dinner on this gallant pretender and tucked a book and my phone under one arm.  Cruising along the perimeter of my narrow house, I scooted out to the deck without benefit of gait aid or fanfare.  The sweet evening breezes indeed freely flowed around me.  I opened my book, lifted my fork, and took a deep breath.  Suddenly, an unbidden flash of deja vu overwhelmed me.  I’ve passed this way before now, I whispered, to nobody, to the haunting spirits, to the memories that I would not stop if I could.  

Someone recently asked me if I had a normal childhood.  I felt one eyebrow raise, surely the most automatic mimic of my dead mother that I could have employed.  “Normal?” I played the word back with incredulity.  “Did you?  Did anyone?  Does that even exist? Is that really a thing?”  I shifted my face into a fair imitation of a rueful, humorless smile.  “Maybe,” I finally admitted.  “That entirely depends on your definition of normal.”  Then I turned away and left the speaker to regard my haughty, prideful back.  I didn’t snap over my shoulder, yeah, except the fifteen years of violence and chaos.  I let it be, for once.

Within the days, and weeks, and months of that seemingly relentless turmoil, I did have some moments of normalcy.  Like the time that one of my brothers poured boiling water over a Lipton tea bag, shifted a pile of cookies onto a small plate, and headed out of the kitchen towards his ailing sister.  Like the moment when that brother carried the steaming mug, sweet comforting treats, and the comic pages of the day’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch on a black metal tray into the front bedroom where I lay clutching a heating pad to my midsection.  Like the pause as he stood in the doorway and asked, Do you want this? before coming into the dimness of the front bedroom and setting his gift on the bedspread within easy reach.  Like that.  Surely, that was normal.

It’s the twenty-third day of the one-hundred and seventeenth month of My Year Without Complaining. Life continues.

 

At the table

Here’s the thing about hostels.  You can skate through, head down, backpack slung over one shoulder.  You avert your eyes, deny a grasp of English, and flick your fingers sideways as you click the front door closed.

Or you can share your butter, sit at the kitchen table, and introduce yourself.  That’s me.  Now I listen to a climate journalist and her partner who live down the street from my friend, whose house they think they might pass on dogwalks.  I don’t know anything about the city and the steps that take you down its hills.  But their animation intrigues me.  So I pour another glass of water and keep alert.

Earlier I chatted with a man from Northern India who recently moved to San Francisco from Oregon.  He admitted that he came to Pigeon Point to escape a houseful of relatives.  We traded slightly witty repartee about self-help books and the relative merits of iPhones versus Androids.  He favors the former and, in fact, just worked through the exhausting release of the most recent iteration.  He promised to convince me before the sun set.  As it happened, we stood in the doorway of the dormitory together, watching the crimson orb slide into the ocean.

Now darkness sits on the sea.  The conversation continues.  I’ve eaten my mushroom pasta and consumed enough cold water.  Peace surrounds me in this magical place.  I dread the dawn and my inevitable return to civilization.  I have another night, and a morning.  I intend to make the most of it.  After breakfast, I plan to carefully pack the car and head south to Davenport, then east into the mountains by way of Bonny Doon Road.  Another guest  warned me that the redwoods sustained a lot of fire damage and I might be disappointed.  But I will drive to the summit and gaze to the west, at the wide expanse of water, before turning towards home.

It’s the sixteenth day of the one-hundred and seventeenth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Once More, With Feelings

Here I am, again.  At a kitchen table in the hostel at Pigeon Point.  I’ve had dinner, a long conversation with a stranger, and a cup of contraband wine.  Through the open window, gentle air carries the sound of the sea.  

The doctor appointment that should have brought me first into San Francisco got cancelled.  I came on the diagonal into Half Moon Bay and down the coast.  As I drove, the irritation loosened its grip.  Certainly, I will regret the missed meeting which might have led to a fix of the poorly made spectacles that I’ve had to shove in my glovebox for another few weeks.  But I do not lament the ability to come to the sea without dragging my feet through the grime of the City.

My friend Joyce writes on her laptop at a table in the living room.  At the kitchen counter, a Parisian clears the clutter of his small repast.  Nothing has changed, except the dishes which I believe the hostel replaced during lockdown.  We didn’t know how long the virus would linger. We all discarded the blouses that we wore during our own bouts with Covid.  We shuddered as we burned the kerchiefs we wound around our heads.  Only later did they tell us, it doesn’t work like that.  We shrugged and told ourselves, better safe than sorry.  

But all of that has ended.  The hostel re-opened, and now I have returned.

I’ve written at this table on so many occasions.  I’ve made breakfast with people from New Zealand, and Santa Cruz, and Boise.  I celebrated my 63rd birthday here.  The poster on the wall has not changed.  I recognize cracks in the tile on the floor of the accessible shower.  The old Adirondack chairs behind this building maintain the perfect position to gaze at the cove over the long expanse of ice plants straddling the flood wall.  The cant of the evergreens might be more stooped; but the rocks stand sturdy just beyond the buoy. Seagulls fly low as the waves lap the shore, maybe the same ones that I’ve striven in vain to capture on other cell  phones, just as I did today.

Here is where my love affair with the coast line began. When I arrived,  I eagerly claimed the bed by the window and dragged the slatted chair to a closer position so I’d have somewhere to sit while I dressed.  I’m sure it’s the same chair.  Perhaps the sheets have been replaced; and the pillow shams; and the quilts.  But it all looks the same.  It could have been just yesterday that I last visited.  Perhaps Genevieve from Down Under, whom I met here and with whom I drove into the redwoods on that birthday five years ago, will come around the corner.  She’ll sit with a cup of tea and tell me about her new life in Canada.  Maybe Michael, who worked here for at least two decades and retired in 2019, will saunter down the sidewalk smoking a joint.   I could swear I saw him, just a glimpse in profile, down at the point watching for whales.

The sun has set in a soft gathering fog.  It will rise in eight hours and find me sleeping, soothed by the sweet voice of my Pacific.  Pigeon Point, same time, this year; once more, with feelings.

It’s the fifteenth day of the one-hundred and seventeenth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.