Father's Flannel

Though monochrome, the photo colors bright
the unadulterated joy of my small dimple,
pressed to his, in warm delight.

His strong plaid flanneled arms encircle me
with love so rich, deep, yet ever light,
give me sure knowledge of eternity.

Shirts, night gowns, pajamas, all flannel, they
hold magic that by fleece cannot be worn,
nor can the quick, passing years wear away.

Three decades from the camera’s eye, so too,
my toddler’s take-along becomes for me,
no dust cloth, but a flannel memory.

[First published in the journal Kudzu, 2008.]

Books & Barbs

[The magazine editor who excerpted this piece from a longer essay called “Library Lady” was right about the piece needing a better sense of closure, so she added the last line. It’s really not the thought of barbed wire that makes me cringe, though; it’s the sound of barbed wire scraping metal that has this effect! ]

Ever since I first learned to drive—in a sluggish car with a manual transmission—I’ve had a love-hate relationship with cars, so I never would have dreamed that I one day would be a delivery person.

Yet on a hot, humid afternoon last summer, I found myself sweating through my library home-service route in Geauga County. Nearing the next-to-last stop, I turned into a gravel drive and sped to the crest of the hill. I hastily parked, hoisted the canvas book bag off the seat, and, leaving the door open, headed for the house.

Two preteen boys and their older sister, each wearing a puzzled expression, greeted me.

“Library delivery,” I started to say, holding out the bag.

“Ma’am,” one of the boys interrupted, “your car’s rolling down the hill.”

I dropped the bag and spun around.

My blue sedan was indeed rolling backward toward the barbed-wire fence that enclosed the horse pasture.

Impulsively, I ran to the car and grabbed the driver’s-side mirror, thinking stupidly that I could stop the car. As it dragged me along, I realized that if I held on, I would end up tangled in the barbed wire. I let go.

Grimacing, I watched the car hit the fence, screeching worse than fingernails on a blackboard. The mirror snapped off as it hit a wooden post, which fell over. My car finally came to rest with the back bumper against another fence post.

I surveyed the damage, wondering how to free my car from the strand of wire that ran underneath it and another that had left a web of scratches on the roof. First, I climbed in through the passenger door and put the car in park.

While the boys rummaged in the barn and found a wire cutter, I learned that the children were home alone, so there was to be no adult assistance.

Using the cutters, I snipped the top wire. Then I crawled under the car and snipped the other, carefully untangling it from the undercarriage. While I was doing this, the boys’ sister told me that I was at the wrong farm—they weren’t supposed to receive books.

To this day, I still cringe at the sight of barbed wire.

[This anecdote was first published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer Magazine, June 12, 2005.]

Writing Between the Lines of My Existence

When I was a teenager, my parents told me not to rush into that first job because I’d be working all my life. But I did anyway. I got a job at a French restaurant, where the owner made passes at the waitresses and cheated the IRS. While a college student, I tutored students in my majors--French and English--and as an usher at the performing arts center, I got to watch half of each show.

After graduating, I fell into a publishing job, one that I continued when my husband and I later moved out of state so he could attend graduate school. As a freelance writer, I wrote articles and edited scientific reports. Then I landed a steadier job as a secretary at the university, first in the agriculture college, later in the Foreign Language Department. I still wrote.

Being a writer allowed me to take my work wherever my family went—and we did. Almost every three years, my husband and I and then a daughter, another daughter, and a son (each child born in a different state) packed up our lives and headed for a new destination. I wrote during naptimes, while nursing the baby, and watching the children play.

Sometimes I dreamed of the day the children would be in school. When it came, I found that I could concentrate my work hours and then enjoy my family in the afternoons and evenings.

Three books and hundreds of articles later, I was ready to get out of the house. Yes, I liked my garden and my loyal springer spaniel, who lounged on the wide ceramic window sill adjacent my desk. Yet--

So, I got a part-time job at a library, where I delivered books and magazines to seventy car-less Amish families. I wrote (about the day my car rolled backward down a drive and into the barbed wire fence enclosing the pasture). I worked as a secretary at a nonprofit historical society. I wrote (about the oldest apple butter festival in the nation).

After yet another move across the country, I went back to school and earned a teaching certificate. For a semester, I tutored foreign students in an international program at a local university. Now I assist in teaching developmental writing at a community college and, of course, I write. I know that the only constant in my life will continue to be the need to write, whatever other work I do.

Black and White

At the outskirts of town,
the black-and-white sign reads:
“Fourth largest Amish community
in the nation.” On Main Street,
a horse trots, pulling a black buggy.

A bearded face peers ahead,
while his weathered hands dance the reins.
A toddler perches on his mother’s lap,
clutches a Sparkle bag of corn chips,
waves a chubby hand at me, a Yankee.

Over the hill crest careen skaters
in Granny Smith green dresses.
White bonnet ties flying,
they race past schoolhouse,
wood-pile, privies.

In straw hats, suspended blue pants,
with Igloo-cooler lunch pails dangling,
aluminum baseball bats slung over shoulders,
Amish schoolboys talk box scores
as they trudge home to chores.

On lines from white house
to carriage barn, to maple,
teal, maroon, violet polyester dresses
wave long sleeves and skirts,
like unpieced quilts.

Nutmeg Belgians pull plows
across stubborn corn stubble,
while on steep ditch slopes
men wielding gas-powered Weedwackers
cut quick swathes.

At Yoder and Miller farms,
aboard a rainbow-sided Bookmobile,
deutsch-chattering girls, proud
mothers at sixteen, check out
romances by the bag full.

After midnight hooves clatter.
A beer bottle crashes
in the derelict churchyard,
where once an Amishman
hid his forbidden automobile.

When sons or daughters Yank over,
do parents cease loving them?
In my mother’s heart,
I somehow know
their black-and-white life is not.

[This poem first appeared in Pennsylvania English, 2004/2005.]