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.]

Die Bibliothekarin: A Sestina

About the stacks I weave my check-out cart,
pause, ponder, do my part, fill every bag
with fiction, magazines, and picture books,
all destined for my Amish patrons, when
at their farmhouses, bags in hand, I will light
to visit Kinder, Frauen for a while.

Anticipation rises in me while
I check out and bag each book, load, and cart
them to my waiting car. They are not light--
these canvas sacks hold more than words. Each bag
contains a glimpse of the wide-spread world. When
I go to their doors, Kinder grab their books.

They danke me and run off with the books
clasped firmly in chubby fists, run off while
with Mutter I chat (gardens, quilts, jams), when
“Ach, look!” says Bruder, not at horse nor cart--
my auto runs away down the drive! Bag
hits the grass. I’m on the run, footfalls light

and fleet, though not enough; car comes to light
amid a web of barbed wire. All the books
are unmixed--I see to that bag by bag.
My patron friends, eyebrows up, watch me while
around the car I crawl, snip, collect, cart
away the snare. With mirror broken when

it swiped a fence post, scattered scratches when
it lunged the wire, a crack in the tail light,
my car is a sad sight. “A horse and cart
may thus so go astray, as do the books
the Kinder take to the fields,” they say. I while
away the time, not anxious yet to bag

the trophy at the library for bag-
to-back route accidents. For surely when
co-worker friends hear this, they’ll laugh a while.
But I about the mishap will make light,
for their world is made larger by these books.
Through library doors I trail my red cart;

each bag holds books consumed by minds alight,
and when time, I will once again choose books
that might beguile mind, wile heart, from my cart.

[This poem originally appeared in Montana State University: Read This.]

The Warmth of Wool

[For a year, I worked as a home service librarian at a small library in rural Ohio. My job consisted of choosing, checking out (and in), bagging in canvas bags, and hauling books to 70 Amish families. This atypical librarian's job allowed me access to a community that is largely stereotyped, and this peek into my patrons' lives led me to write a number of pieces about them. This one was originally published in Ozark's Senior Living Newspaper.]

Somewhere in America, in some kitchen or living room or bedroom, the wool skirts I wore in high school have gained new life. Good wool is hard to give up. For a decade I kept the earth-tone skirts on a multi-tiered hanger at the back of my closet. Church rummage sales came and went while the skirts slept cosily in their hideout.

Then I met Mrs. Miller, number 42 on my route of home-service deliveries to the Amish patrons of a small, rural library. Despite living in a tiny, white house adjacent to her daughter and son-in-law’s farmhouse, the elderly Mrs. Miller seemed lonely. For company, she had two border collies that she had trained to herd a small flock of sheep, she had a flower garden full of brightly colored perennials, she had Mr. Miller, who suffered from dementia--and she had me. On delivery days I always spent some extra time at her house. I asked if the books I had delivered the month before suited her. I asked about her health. I smelled her flowers.

One day I arrived while she was braiding a rug. Her arthritic hands carefully worked the two-inch wide strips of blue fabric that she had sewed together in continuous strips and wound into balls. As I looked closer, I saw that the cloth strips were not cut from the cotton or wool fabric I had expected. They were polyester. I knew that the local Amish women liked to make their dresses out of the synthetic fabric. Even though it didn’t breathe as well as cotton, the polyester didn’t wrinkle or fray. Yet I had never imagined someone making rugs from it.

Mrs. Miller made rugs to keep busy and to sell. When I expressed interest in her work, she showed me how she made long braids. Then she sewed them together to make round or oval rugs. She had a wool rug half done, but affordable wool was scarce—even at the resale shops where she went to buy wool items to recycle. Then I thought of my old skirts. The next day I made a special trip to her house, my cache of wool in a bag, satisfied that my skirts would have a useful, and perhaps beautiful, second life.

Recipe Box

My brown wooden file holds a life
of tattered, kitchen-soiled 3x5s:

Brown-sugar coconut topped Oatmeal Cake
retired from the middle school home ec contest
after winning three years in a row, written
in my mother’s school-teacher cursive.

Grandma’s German Dills & Gherkins,
seven sweets & sours at holiday dinners.

Christmas Sugars & Wagon Wheels,
in a younger sister’s green-inked calligraphy.

A high-school best friend’s never-used Nacho Recipe,
lost like she was, for over fifteen years.

Clove & nutmeg perfumed Pumpkin Bread,
in a younger brother’s then-round script.

Chinese marinade Shiska-Bobs roasted
over a wood fire in a South Dakota warming house,
after a full-moon night of cross-country skiing.

The reinvented in-law family secret
Chili Sauce, ground just right, typed.

From the hundred-year flooded Mississippi,
Wisconsin Beer Batter for fresh-caught fish.

Indian Curry in Buffalo from my cardamom-scented
walking partner, in her British-schooled hand.

Almond Biscotti translated into English measurements
by a first-generation Italian mother of three in Ohio.

Eucharistic Bread given in Communion
by hard-praying Rhode Island women,
who gifted me with much more
than a hand-flung pottery batter bowl.