Canton, North Carolina

 

I arrived in Canton, my brother backed my Honda Accord off the trailer and my son backed the big truck down the mountain and into the driveway of my new home. My brother, two of his sons and his ex-wife helped us unload everything into a charming apartment built under my son's home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

The yard was filled with blooming bushes and trees. The woman who had rented it before me planted butterfly bushes that attracted dozens of beautiful butterflies and the Rose of Sharon bushes that lined the fence were covered in brilliant pink blooms! They were also covered in big fat bumble bees absolutely covered in pollen. As I walked in the fence they were buzzing all around me. My brother said to just say, "Go away bees!" and the sound of my voice would drive them away. He seemed to be right. I never got stung and neither did anyone else. My part of the yard was small and fenced in part way by a wire fence with apple trees and all sorts of blooming plants. Everywhere I looked I could see mountain peaks. It felt very isolated and lovely, but in truth there were houses scattered here and there down the mountain behind my yard. They were just hidden.

The apartment was spacious, but not really finished or decorated in any way. Just livable. That was okay with me. I had plans to decorate it my way. There was a large living room with a window looking out on butterfly bushes and flowers. A kitchen with a nice view of the mountains, but no refrigerator or oven. I bought a toaster oven and refrigerator and installed a pretty rustic chandelier with candle like lights. My washer and dryer fit in here, but there were no hook ups. My son said I could use their washer and dryer upstairs. The bathroom was functional and due to a fluke when it was hooked up had a hot water toilet! It took a while to notice the heat when you used it, so no one had ever switched the hook ups. There was a large bedroom in the back with a window looking towards the side yard and our neighbor's house. Clyde was an interesting neighbor. He liked to sit on his rocking chair on his porch and he shaved his beard off once a year, on Easter. Clyde used to leave me wild flowers on my gate. There was a smaller bedroom in the front with two windows. One facing the mountains in back and one with kudzu creeping in between the screen and the window that looked very exotic.

My first night alone I met my roommates. Spiders! The first one appeared beside my chair, but on the floor. With her leg span she was probably as big as my hand! I originally didn't want to step on anything that big, but I didn't want her running around, or jumping around, my house. Eventually I stepped on her and hundreds of baby spiders crawled off of her and began to scatter! She was the largest one I ever saw, but all of the spiders in this house were bigger than silver dollars and there was an unending parade of them from the corners and crevices in all the rooms. I finally bought some spider spray and sprayed all the edges of the rooms. Unfortunately I didn't really think this through, so when I sprayed the ceilings a lot of it drifted back down on me! I nearly axphyxiated myself.

Mountain towns are difficult to navigate because they don't just build around blocks. They build tunnels and bridges and winding roads to deal with the steep incline of the mountains. Riding my bike turned out to be impossible for me. Too many very steep hills no matter which way I went. Just going from my backyard up the road to my son's porch above me was so steep that in winter the ice could make it almost impossible to walk up, let alone drive up. But I ended up letting my son use my car for work much of the time, so his wife could have theirs for errands. I didn't mind. I was watching my grandson and playing with him most of that time.

My son's wife was known for her sharp tongue and sarcasm. That is what made her good at the poetry she wrote and performed locally, but it didn't make her a pleasant person to be around if she wasn't enthralled with you and it turned out she hadn't really wanted me to come out there at all. No matter how hard I tried to include her and love her and respect all her insane rules, she was never happy. Not even the freedom my babysitting gave her made her happy. She was so jealous that it made her furious if my son and I even ate lunch together in my apartment while she was gone. On holidays I was invited upstairs, but she seldom even sat down in the same room or at the table with us. She just ran in and out announcing who had responded to her Twitter account.

I wasn't allowed to drive anywhere with my grandson alone in the car with me, so no going to the library, or park, or whatever unless my son went too. And even then it often caused repercussions, I was not allowed to walk him outside of our yard either. She was a very possessive and jealous woman. At first she wasn't going to let me watch him in my own apartment, but I put my foot down there. I would watch him upstairs at night if they went out so I could put him to bed. Otherwise, I would watch him in my own home. Her comfort and convenience could overrule her neuroticism.

It was so much fun having my grandson there! I bought a little round red cherry child's table and chairs set so we could have tea parties like I had with my children. Only we would get a little shaggy dog cake from Ingles for dessert. We built all kinds of things with wooden architectural blocks.  I put together a basket of marbles and metal objects that we could make marble runs with on the refrigerator. We colored and painted, read books, cooked together and played with his power rangers and Transformers. He like to play on my piano and sing and once gave me good advice saying, "Grandma when you sing you don't use your regular voice." He had the sweetest baby voice and he could remember anything! 

Sometimes I let him play with the water in the bathroom sink and sometimes we played with his plastic bat and ball in the back yard. He was a pretty good little batter! One day his mother showed up and had to show off. She hit a home run over the fence and down the road next to it. That road wound around and around, down the mountain and it took her twenty minutes to walk all the way down before she could stop it and walk back up.

I would have been glad to help her out with some household chores, but she was furious the one time I took her clothes out of the dryer and folded them before putting mine in. I took an old wooden toy castle someone had given them and refurbished it. I painted a stone facade and plants on it and bought miniature horses, knights, and even an elf princess who looked like her for my grandson to play with. She claimed I was trying to steal him away from her by doing this! In the last few months she got in the habit of rolling her eyes and looking at her friend and shrugging as if I couldn't see her when she picked her son up after work. She complained about my piano playing even though you could only hear it vaguely in the kitchen and I never played if I thought they were in there. She was the truest most complete narcissist I have ever met. And the meanest. My son always supported her which seemed right, but she was not kind to him either. The only friends he was allowed to have had to be her friends or she made everyone miserable. Just one of the problems with this was her habit of practically living with people who were friends for a while, then suddenly finding them so horrible no one could even mention their name.

And then one day she banned my son from the house and told him if he loved me so much he could live with me and if I didn't leave she wanted a divorce. I was stunned. She and I really only saw each other when she picked up my grandson up after work by that time. The rest of the time I never went up to their house for anything except to do laundry when she wasn't home. I left the next day.

I moved down there in a moving van with a trailer and came back in my Honda sedan. I put my bicycle on the back, my dog in his carrier,and the clothes that would fit in the backseat and drove back to Illinois. There had been a landslide on the main highway and it had been closed for cleanup for months, so I took back road all through the mountains to get out.

She sold or gave away everything I owned that she didn't want, clothes, china, washer, dryer, books, almost everything except my furniture, which was very nice. The only other exceptions were my fifty some photo albums that my son kept in his rooms on the second floor. I never could understand how she could give away $1500 worth of china without blinking an eye. Money was tight for them. 

Living in this house was both a blessing because of being able to see my grandson and son and a true trial trying to make her understand I wanted to treat her like a loved member of our family. I failed at that part.

Silver Street

 

I stayed at my sister's house for a few days after St.Louis, then I rented a small house two doors down from my brother, Tom and his wife. Illinois is full of coal mines and Peabody number ten was once the world's largest coal mine. It runs under much of the area in and around Taylorville. The house I rented was probably once a marshy area, mostly inhabited by people who built functional tiny homes on crawl spaces with big yards because they outhouses in the old days. There was a small sink hole by my back stoop that was swarming with slugs. They were everywhere around that neighborhood. They crawled up the sides of houses and you had to be careful because they might be right on the door handle of your screen door. They could get in through the tiniest crack or hole, so they would show up on an inside wall, or floor once in a while too. If I opened the trap door in the second bedroom floor I would be looking down at a floor almost moving with slugs, except they don't move a lot. My landlord had a man put something under the house to get rid of them, but it only worked for a while and not very good then. I finally put the lids of jars, filled with rock salt under all the legs of my bed and sprinkled rock salt around the edges of all the rooms. 

I actually sprinkled it around the outside edge of the house too and one of my neighbors came over to ask if it was to keep away bad spirits! These same neighbors had a teenage son who eventually stole two bicycles from me, but I could not prove it. 

The neighbors across the street used to comment on how pretty the little gardens that ran around the sides of the house were. They said no one else had ever grown flowers that they could remember. I didn't bother to tell them were just select weeds I left and let grow. Then I went to Walmart and bought bunches of small pretty flowers. I cut single stalks off and placed them strategically throughout the weeds!

I bought a modern version of the old push mower and mowed the yard. It didn't cut as evenly as I might have liked, but it got the job done. This was how I met my other neighbors. Mr. Dilley was the 98 year man next door. He used to watch me out his kitchen window and sometimes invited me in for iced tea. He would tell me stories of how, as a teenager, his job in Nokomis was to go around to the street corners and write the time and name of the local movie that was showing on the sidewalk with chalk. Later he was in the Civilian Conservation Corps and sent money home to his mother. He originally lived in my house, but when his came up for sale he moved because it was slightly bigger. He paid $5000 back then! Mr. Dilley was a hoot. He used to make his own homemade hooch, but one day there was an explosion followed by a bunch more and all his work came pouring out of the cabinet he stored the jars in. It was such a mess his wife told him no more. His wife died just before I met him and his son bought him a new television. Mr. Dilley loved that tv. He told me this television was not only in color, but it got basketball games! I don't think he understood his son got him cable.

Then there was Natalie who lived across the alley from me. Natalie was a short, red haired woman of probably 80 who drove a low slung purple sports car with a convertible roof. I would look out and she would be walking around the steep roof on her garage cleaning gutters, or pulling a wagon load of trash out to the alley. Natalie was independence plus!

My brother's house was the place to gather if you were up at 6 am. A motley assortment of people would already be there smoking cigarettes and drinking pot after pot of coffee. Tom was disabled from a rather wild and free life that ended when he attempted to move a five hundred pound stove by himself. He had a wife and two step daughters who lived with him along with two little dachshunds called, Sadie and Sophie. His best friend left him a farm where he could go and be alone if he wanted to and he loved that place. One day I drove out to see him and there was a large bird eating a rabbit in the middle of the drive. As I got closer, the bird rose up and flew directly over my windshield. It was so big its wings completely blocked my view! Tom said it was a golden eagle that had been hanging out there for a week or so. Animals loved him He could walk right up to most wild animals for some reason. They seemed to sense that he was safe. I used to go with him to feed the geese at SangChris Park. As his little blue car pulled into the lake area, the geese rose up and flew behind the car until it stopped. Then we got out and fed them. They knew who it was! He took me to a town on the Mississippi river to see the bald eagles two different years. They go there in February because with the dam the water isn't frozen and they can fish. It is amazing to watch one fly over the water, dip down and come up with a fish in its talons. It is also amazing to see that many bald eagles in one place. The trees are literally alive with them. The second year there were fewer bald eagles, but tons of pelicans.  When Tom died his daughter had one of the most meaningful funerals I've ever been to. We met at his favorite fishing spot where a little bird chose to fly in and sit on the cooler beside his children while his daughter spoke and read the twenty third psalm. Then we all drove out to the farm where everyone participated in sharing his ashes over the ground he loved so much. I have a photo of his four children throwing his ashes up to start everyone off. Each one has a cloud of their father's ashes hovering over them. It felt both significant and heart rending to me.

Years ago I would put Ninna, my first dog, in a basket on the front of my bike and I could ride anywhere. She never tried to jump out and she loved the wind in her face. Here I tried to teach my new puppy, Chauncey, a shih tzu,  to do the same. In the beginning I put a harness on him and hooked it to the basket. I'd never done that with Ninna, but I was being extra careful. He seemed to be really comfortable so I got a little less worried over time and would just stuff the leash in the basket with him. That worked great. Until it didn't. One Sunday afternoon as we approached a corner, some jogger ran past and Chauncey threw himself out of the basket. It caught me completely off guard and his leash caught in the wheel so that I ended up riding my bike right over him. I will never forget his scream! I thought I had killed him. Someone put my bike in his truck and drove us back to my house where I called the vet at home and she met me at the office. I will never understand how, but he seemed totally unscathed. She said he might be a little sore but he never even acted like that. However, he was now afraid of all bumps in the road, whether on a bike or in a car and he never really got over it. We gave up bike riding and I bought him a screened in cube type doggie seat to ride in in the car. It hooked with a seat belt and was high enough that he could look out the window. It took a long time, but he eventually got used to that, because I took him everywhere. I would put him in his bag that was disguised as a purse, by asking, "Want to go bye bye?" He'd leap in and wait for me to zip it. Or I was push him in a doggie stroller and just throw a baby blanket over the screen when we went into restaurants or stores. He never barked and people just assumed it was a child.

Before I got Chauncey I tried adopting a five week old mixed breed Australian cattle dog. Someone had dumped the whole litter at the pound. He had the bluest eyes and he was the smartest puppy I've ever met. I took him out once and he was housebroken. I threw a tiny ball and he instantly knew to retrieve it, but he had a nasty growl when I tried to pick him up and bring him in if he didn't want to come in and he was snappy about anything that didn't go just his way. My brother's wife, Cheryl, teased me about this a lot. "Awwww, did the whittle bitty puppy scare winda?" One day when she said that she picked him up and he bit right through her lip! He was barely six weeks old, but I realized I was out of my depth here. I found him a new home with a farmer on a big farm. I saw him many times after that and he seemed totally happy. He was always totally engrossed in whatever that man was doing. I asked him how hard it had been to train him and he said, "Oh I just slapped the ____ out of him a couple times and he stopped biting right away!" I could never have done that. It just wasn't my style, but there was no denying how happy that dog was, on the farm, in town, in a truck, off leash, he was perfect.

My sister would come over from her house and we would take Chauncey on a leash and my cat, Nijinkski, in the stroller, for walks around that neighborhood. She and I also use to ride bicycles on the trail out towards Pana, Illinois. It was made from the old railroad tracks and ran alongside the highway. One time there was a big snake lying right in the middle of the trail and instead of just letting us both ride around it, she grabbed my bicycle in a panic, knocking me off almost on the thing! I was so angry. Another time I was riding alone out there just before dusk and a big old coyote came out and stood in the middle of the trail staring at me. I immediately turned my bike around and went the other way.

One night I woke up because my bed was shaking! Then the whole house shook and my first thought was oh my God we are going to fall into one of the coal mines! Growing up I had seen semis that had fallen through the streets like that in Springfield, but this turned out to be a real earthquake! One of the rarest things we ever experienced in prairie country. By the time I thought to get up and stand under the door frame, it was all over.

I lived here about three years, alternately seeing Eman8tions and thinking that we were not really good for each other when my youngest son offered to let me come back out to North Carolina and live in the mother-in-law apartment below their house. My nephews loaded all my furniture, including the piano, into a moving van. We put my Honda on a trailer to be towed behind it and one of my brother's ex-wives drove her car with me and one of my nephews behind this while my brother and his youngest son drove the truck. We were on our way to North Carolina.

It was not a perfect solution, but it seemed like the thing to do.

St.Louis

 

Eman8tions lived in a typical St.Louis Tudor four-square apartment building. His apartment was on the lower right with a spacious living room, huge middle bedroom and large kitchen. It had a front porch and back porch and access to the basement. I had given him my old stacked washer and dryer when I lived in the condo on Linden and he put that down in the basement.

When I arrived his apartment was filled with boxes. He had never bothered to unpack them because he really didn't know what to do with much of it. I sorted through everything and moved much of it to shelving in the basement. He eventually turned the room with the washer/dryer into his workroom where he made his drums and other projects. I stored my bicycle down there.

We were barely a block from Tower Grove Park, a lovely old St.Louis fixture with a pond and leftover Victorian ruins. The Botannical gardens were just a few blocks the other way and the house my grandparents lived in when my dad was born was right next to the gardens! I loved this neighborhood and rode my bike all through it. It was close to Grand and not far from The Hill, an Italian neighborhood where you could get yummy cannolis. There was a wonderful Irish pub called O'Connels with an antique store above it that had fish and chips on Fridays and the best hamburgers you could buy. We used to go Kaldi's coffee house in La Due and find lovely places to eat in the Central West End. We spent many wonderful hours at The Living Insights Center where Eman8tions played his flute and led meditations. I bought my beautiful Quan Yin statuette there and she still sits in my living room.

We did so many things together while I lived there. He gave concerts at different churches and locations all over the St.Louis area and even other towns and I always sold his CDs and books afterwards. We took a trip house sitting in Sedona, Arizona and made a side trip to the Grand Canyon. We camped in Chaco canyon and walked through Anasazi ruins. I remember the road into the campgrounds was so bumpy we had to crawl over it while tiny mice scampered across the moonlight ruts. I'll never forget how the wind blew threw the cliffs there, sounding like flutes from some far off past and the giant ravens who squawked over our tent that first night when we barely got inside before a huge thunder storm hit. We also traveled to pow wows to sell his drums and books and helped make labyrinths for people who wanted them.

One time we went to visit one of his friends from the symphony. The guy was a percussionist. He invited us in and we all got acquainted without much more talking. He had one of us gently tapping on a big gong while the other played a drum. He and his wife joined in too. Afterwards she read us some of her Haiku poetry and then we went outside and rode the electric train he had made. You could sit on the flat cars, or lie on two of them and feel like an alligator riding around his yard! It was so much fun. Both of us could ride at the same time. It was a very long small train on a winding track.

He was a huge proponent of AA and loved to tell his story. One of the women who was influential in his life was dying and her children rented an apartment for us so we could stay with her and take care of her. At first we cooked and took her to see things like The Gaither Family concert. Later we sat with her as her friends stopped by to visit and tell us how she influenced them. I remember how the people from a group of Children of Alcoholics would come one night a week and bring Chinese food to share. She was a much loved woman. I began knitting a multi-colored scarf and once in a while, when someone came to give us a few hours off, they would knit on that scarf. I gave it to her daughter after she died. At the end I was the one who gave her the drops of morphine to ease her pain. I watched her carefully, counting her breaths, because that was they told us we would know if she was in pain. After a while her breathing continued to get more rapid and I eventually gave her the extra drop of morphine. She died. Not alone, but with me right there and with no obvious reaction except a sudden peacefulness. Weeks later we drove to Springfield, Missouri to a memorial for her and both of us spoke. I did not intend to speak, but somehow found myself up there trying to explain how she'd felt like our great gray-haired child in the end. I never realized it at the time; I was too nervous when I sat down, but they gave me a standing ovation.

We also visited his friends like Jack who lived out west of St.Louis. Eman8tions mowed a labyrinth through one of his overgrown fields for him. This was where he and I attended a sweat lodge. It was much different from the one I had done in Illinois. In Illinois we didn't wear clothes and we jumped in a freezing creek afterwards. Here I had to wear a long sleeveless dress so no one would be offended and I declined to jump in the green stagnant pond. But the rocks were the same, so hot they glowed from the inside.

Another time we drove out west of St.Louis to see the elk and buffalo. It was a park divided into two sections to keep them separated by cattle guards. The elk were so close we could hear their antlers clicking as two big males began to fight. When we drove through the buffalo section we got so close to some of the buffaloes that one charged at our car! For a moment I thought we were in really big trouble. I envisioned those gigantic horns piercing my hood or even my windshield, but at the last moment he veered off.

I loved this period in my life except for the other women. Eman8tions had a powerful need to experiment with different women and lifestyles that led to me leaving several times. Once I went all the way to North Carolina to stay with my son. I got a job up on Black Mountain working in a cute little tourist spot. The owners were friends of my son and hired me to sell ice cream, hot dogs and retro type sodas at a place called Dukes. It was fun and something I'd never done before. When I first started there the owner showed me how to use bear spray if I ever needed to protect myself from someone if I was alone. He also showed me how to set up the big umbrellas they put out in pre-drilled holes in the boulders surrounding Duke's. They were not allowed to have picnic tables because they did not have a public restroom. The rocks became a shady place to sit if someone wanted to eat there. We put them out every morning and took them in at night. Then the owner, who also ran White Dog Press, asked me to come work in his printing office. He had two immense Alsatian German Shepherds. They were his children and went everywhere with him and his wife. They had their own air conditioned trailer to travel in, but they were guard dogs. I could not go from the back of the shop to the front without calling out to Will who would then inform the dogs it was okay! It was scary for someone who was already leery of dogs. During this same period I helped my son and his wife move into their first house in Canton, NC and made plans to stay out there when Ema8tions called. Somehow I thought I asked me to marry him, so I packed up and went back to St.Louis. He said I misunderstood. 

I don't count my time in North Carolina as a legitimate move since it didn't last very long and I just stayed with my son and his wife. It was more like an extended vacation. Being back with Eman8tions didn't really work for either of us. I finally ended up moving back to Taylorville, but we remained very good friends.

Nokomis

 

The house I called the Nokomis house was actually in the middle of nowhere. It was about twenty miles to the nearest town and if I wanted to go to the show it meant a seventy mile round trip. The house had been built by this farmer's parents when they were young and it was probably just a cabin type home to begin with. The kitchen and living room were slightly separated by a large wide double opening and a very narrow bedroom ran along side them. The bedroom had no closets, just two boards, one on each end with four clothes hooks on each, which I assumed were his and hers!. There were two doors, one at each end of the bedroom leading into the living room or the kitchen. I had to use the door on the side of the bed I got out of, because there was no room to walk around it. 

It looked they had added a bathroom and an enclosed staircase to two bedrooms upstairs later on. Each bedroom had a bare bulb hanging in the center of the room, connected to a string they strung over to the door so I could pull it and turn the light on as I went in.

There was an enclosed porch attached to the kitchen and behind that a concrete foyer that had two doors. One went to a new double garage and the other out the side of the house. I looked upon this as my guarantee no snakes would get past all this into the house, because there were snakes everywhere! I didn't know this until I began mowing the yard or I might not have moved in. The house actually looked nice. It was just uniquely old fashioned.

The bath tub was so filthy when I moved in that it took me three days of soaking and scrubbing to clean it before I considered it usable, but they were heavy good quality fixtures. There was no stove, but I had a microwave and I bought an electric stove second hand from Goodwill in Springfield, nearly fifty miles away. There was a dishwasher, but even after it was repaired it only worked twice before failing to drain again. There was a pile of junk in the upstairs bedroom. I hauled most of it out to a concrete burn pad in the back yard, but I found a door with seven glass panels that fit between the kitchen and glassed in porch. That worked great for my cat, Midnight. He could use that missing pane as a door to get in and out to his litter box.

However Midnight disappeared the day after he moved in. I looked everywhere for that cat and only the fact that his food was disappearing kept me convinced he still lived there. He was a very large, long haired black cat who probably weighed fifteen pounds. I began to think he was like the Cheshire cat and could make himself invisible, but it turned out he'd taken up residence inside the rolled up carpet in the closet. After a couple of weeks he came out.

Eman8tions came up from St.Louis and we planted a 75 foot diameter sunflower labyrinth in the back yard. He dug the holes and I crawled along behind him planting seeds. (I still wasn't aware of the snakes.) As the weather got nicer I needed to mow the grass. First I went around and picked up about a million spent shell casings and corn cobs, then I revved up my hand mower and got to work. The first time I waited too long and the grass was so high I had to rake it up like hay and carry it by the armloads to the ditch across the street. Thank goodness the snakes did not make an appearance in my arms! Later, mowing became a full time job as the weather improved and the grass grew faster. I would start mowing early in the morning, stop for lunch and continue on until it got too hot. Once I got to the end it was time to start over and do it all again.

I wore an old sun hat, leather work gloves, and drank gallons of water, About this time I discovered the snakes. The first one I saw was a dead baby one and I felt bad, hoping I had not mowed over it and killed it. After that they would suddenly appear in a place where I had not seen them a moment before, leaving me totally freaked out. I really am afraid of snakes. They don't make any noise and you never know where to expect them.  One lived right at the end of the labyrinth, which kind of destroyed the peaceful meditation of walking it for me. It would slither away just as I approached that part every single time.

One afternoon as I was mowing, the mower locked up and I thought, oh, another corn cob, so I jostled the mower up in the air to dislodge it and a swirling, writhing snake came flying out! I felt almost sick. I had probably cut that animal and I was also quite startled by it. I didn't see any blood on it, but when I looked down at my feet I realized I was standing in a huge mass of writhing snakes! I guess they call it a mating ball. I called it my worst nightmare. To my credit I finished mowing the yard, shaking like a leaf, because I knew that was my job if I lived there, but I was hyper-vigilant after that.

I learned that one of the downsides to getting back to nature was that snakes, mice and bugs are part of nature and the farmers loved the snakes because they ate all the others. However quite a few mice escaped the snakes. I never really saw them, but my kitchen cabinets and drawers were just full of mouse turds. I could scrub them out at night and the next morning they'd be full again. I ended up putting all my dinnerware, utensils, pots and pans, etc. in large plastic cases on the counter. Leaving the cabinets to the mice. I put out some Decon once and one poor dead mouse smelled so bad I found his rotting dehydrated body on the porch, but nothing changed in the kitchen, so I stopped that. I put out live traps, but I never caught one mouse. I don't know what they ate. I kept all food in my refrigerator whether it needed to be there or not.

Then there was the living room carpet. It was very old variegated green and brown shag. Just perfect to hide the little bugs that would sometimes crawl across it.

I asked my landlady how to deal with all these things because her house appeared spotless, but then so did mine! She just said, "Grandma used to kill them black snakes with a shovel if they got up in her yard." I couldn't imagine myself doing that.

In total frustration I did pour Mop and Glow around the snake area in the labyrinth one day and my sister used to tease me that now I would have glow in the dark snakes crawling around the yard.

It was the perfect place for bird watching. I put up feeders and blue bird houses and saw all sorts of birds. There were finches of every sort, cardinals, crows and starlings of course, pheasants, and even quails. It was a bird watcher's paradise. It was not a paradise for blue birds though. They laid eggs and some of them hatched, but eventually they all flew off and I found dead babies and leftover egg shells in the houses. The farmer said the snakes probably got them.

I also had house wrens who persistently built their nests over the lights by my doors. I would knock them down immediately, before they laid any eggs and hope they would go build somewhere else. I don't think they ever got the idea.

I was miles from people and it was so quiet out there I could hear if two people were talking in a nearby field, but one day I heard what sounded like a crowd at a football game. Curious, I walked out my back door and there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Canadian geese and snowy white geese flying over my head.  Some were so low I could actually feel the wind beneath their wings! And they kept coming for a very long time, maybe twenty minutes! I've never experienced anything like that before or since and doubt if I ever will again. It was breath taking.

The geese liked to settle in the empty spaces and the farmer and his friends liked to come out with shot guns and kill them. It seemed wrong to do that. I would be riding my bicycle down an empty country road and suddenly hear blasting coming  from behind the trees. I knew they were shooting geese.

One weekend Eman8tions and I brought his granddaughters out to visit. I got out my little table and chairs and used the linen table cloth my grandmother made me, just like I did for my own children. We played dress up and had a tea party with my beautiful antique doll china. I made tiny sandwiches and bought minature Oreos, cheese balls and a tiny cake. It was so much fun. That night he built a fire in the back yard so we could roast hot dogs and make s'mores. The girls chased lightning bugs and put them in jars like children have done for hundred of years. They had never done any of these things and they were enchanted. So was I. This was part of living the dream for me.

We sat there in the dark and we could have been any pioneers on the Illinois prairie at any time in history. As the moon grew brighter the coyotes began howling and calling to each other. First on one side of us and then the on another until we were completely surrounded by what felt like hundreds of them. It was awe inspiring and a little bit scary.

During the time I wasn't mowing the grass, I was tending the sunflowers and one afternoon as I stood there with the hose, the ground shook! Now we really don't have earthquakes in this part of the country. There have only been two that I can remember in my lifetime, but the earth under my feet vibrated! I wondered if it was going to crack open and I would fall down into a crevice like I'd seen on old movies. I finally ran in the house and called my brother, Tom. The earth wasn't vibrating where he was thirty miles away. He said maybe it was moles. That was pretty scary too. Imagine moles big enough to do that!  Several days later I discovered there was a rock quarry five miles away and they had been blasting.

I got used to the total deep darkness of country nights and even found it charming when I turned on the outside lights to see deer in my yard! Of course when the light came on they ran away. Have you ever heard the sound of deer hooves on hard packed fields? It's intriguing. Of course the deer were there to eat the peonies and other flowers I planted, but I figured that was the price I paid for the experience.

I turned one end of the long downstairs bedroom into a cozy little library and wrote My Thots in there and for a while I thought I was there forever. I began trying to figure out how much heating oil to order for winter. The only unsettling thing, besides all the critters was the overwhelming smell of old lady's perfume that would occasionally envelop the house at night. I told myself it was probably the smell of her powder or soap in some cupboard that hadn't dissipated. 

By July the novelty was wearing thin. The corn near the house was getting taller and taller. It came up to the second story windows now. and the sunflowers along the edge of the labyrinth were also extremely tall, while the middle ones barely topped three feet.  That gives you some idea of how potent modern day fertilizer must be. All I could see from my house or my yard now was corn, tall, endless corn. I was living on an island inside a sea of corn. That must be what a rat feels like in a maze.

I found a ladder and climbed up to wash the second story windows on the outside. I could see the corn reflected in the glass and the sky behind it and to this day I still think I also glimpsed a woman staring back at me! I nearly fell off the ladder. I tell myself it must have been my own reflection, but the hair was wrong and so was the blouse. And yet it was only a glimpse. Maybe I confused the sky and the corn with my own self? My son Jim and his wife came to visit me and they slept in that upstairs bedroom with no problems at all.

In August Eman8tions invited me to come live with him for a while. My nephews helped me put all my things in storage and I put my piano in my sister's house. I was very careful storing everything. One of my nephews gave me wooden pallets from where he worked and I lined the floor with these. Then I put bags around to absorb moisture and repel rodents. I wrapped, or packed everything in waterproof containers. Finally I packed up my cat and my clothes and set out for St.Louis.

Ash Street

The house on Ash was nice. It was down the street from my brother's ex-wife and his son and had the oldest tree in Christian county in the front yard. It was a small wood frame house with two bedrooms connected by a long skinny closet. There was a living room, separate dining room, eat in kitchen and a laundry room off the kitchen. The bathroom was off my bedroom. There was a front porch, a small side porch, and a glassed in porch that could only be accessed from the outside. It even had a basement where I stored many things I wasn't using. That turned out to be a mistake as the basement wasn't as dry as it looked.

One of my favorite things about this house was the small high window at the end of the long closet. My sister had given me a stained glass frame that fit perfectly in this window giving the closet a wonderful rich look. I put the king size bed in my room and the queen in the guest room along with my computer. I bought a 1940's cherry chest with a hidden make up drawer for my clothes and a small table for the kitchen. Everything else I had fit in perfectly here. I even put hanging plants along one side of the dining room.

My neighbor offered to mow my grass when he mowed his for ten dollars and who could beat that. I put my bike in the garage, but not my car because I couldn't put a garage door opener on it. It opened the wrong way. 

Becky and her new Guatemalan boyfriend came for dinner here one time. Bobby and Barbie came  just before Barbie's thirtieth birthday. They brought their new puppy, Eben the second, a beautifully trained Australian cattle dog. Bobby was in the kitchen telling me about the surprise proposal party he was planning for Barbie's birthday when there was a horrific explosion! We heard Barbie scream and ran in to see what happened. She was getting up off the floor! 

Lightning had struck the tree across the street, knocking branches off of a it before jumping to my house, hitting my tree and my electrical wires. No one was hurt, but it destroyed both my computer and my phone.

This was a cute house in a quiet neighborhood in a small town, but one night as I was watching television, a man came rushing into my living room. He didn't knock or anything. Then he stopped dead and stared at me like I was trespassing. Imagine my shock, and his surprise, when he discovered his friend no longer lived there. Still I felt very safe there except for the occasional feeling that I was not alone. That didn't bother me enough to want to move.

For a while I made dinner every night and my sister would come eat with me. We went on long walks at Rock Springs Conservation area near Decatur. We loved to look for deer and one time when we got lost we saw a big white owl high up in a tree looking down on us. We also loved to just sit in their bird room. They had microphones so you could listen to the birds as you watched them eat at the feeders. I thought how lovely it would be to live out in the country and be able to experience these things all the time.

The seed was planted and the search began. I really didn't expect to find a house in my price range like that, but I talked about it with everyone I knew. Finally, my brother's wife said her sister's husband had an old family home out in the country and it was available if I wanted it.

It was time to move!

Linden

 

I was both surprised and tickled to find the condo on Linden for sale. It seemed to have a mini version of those things I loved about my house on Monterey. There was a large pond, or lake, with the condos built up around it like some kind of Swiss village. It was a two story with a balcony off the bedroom looking down at pine trees and the lake. There was a jacuzzi bath tub that was even better than our house, because it was exactly the right size for me and I could fill it up every day if I wanted to.

Downstairs there was a good sized kitchen with a dining area next to it, facing the lake. And the living room had a wood burning fireplace, a smoky mirrored wall opposite two tall windows that flanked the fireplace and a step up to the foyer. The foyer led to an open staircase with a skylight and there was a small sheltered porch directly in front of the door to my garage. It was spacious and private with two bedrooms, a large walk in closet and two large extra closets upstairs. There were two baths with the lower one having a washer and dryer instead of a tub.

The condo fee was only $60 a month, but the monthly fees in the beginning were pretty steep for me. I was working at State Farm, still part of a dream group, and had a new best friend who lived at Ironwood, which wasn't too far away. I put a garage door opener on my garage and stored my bike in there. This condo was right off the Constitution Trail so I rode daily, usually out into the country and back, but sometimes all the way across town to the grocery store, or through downtown Normal.

I joined a divorce support group that taught me a lot about what to do and not do as a recently divorced person and enjoyed this group so much that I continued to go to it for some time. The first winter was hard. I had not worked at a full time job for a long time and I had pneumonia three different times that year. We had a snowfall with so much drifting that my second story windows were halfway blocked and going from my porch to my garage was like going through a hallway of snow taller than my head. And I bought a computer!

My friends from India, who I had known since our boys were playing first year soccer together kind of took me under their wing. She offered me help with weight watchers and he put together my first computer, then showed me how to use it. Soon I added internet to my life and got my first email address so I could communicate with my friend Carol in California. Carol had grown up with my ex. Her dad was the priest at the Episcopal church by his house, but she had kept in touch with me throughout all the years of our marriage. First we used snail mail. Now we emailed and through these emails I learned to navigate the internet.

Carol was a counselor and knowing my ex as well as she did, had a lot of information for me. I actually flew out to California to see her twice and while I was there I got to visit one of My Thots subscribers, Suzanne. Suzanne was a fantastic musician, singing and playing guitar and I will never forget the first day I met her. She played and sang for me in a little garden house on a hill behind her house. Then we cut up apples from her yard to make applesauce and picked blueberries to sweeten it. She had rescued dogs and turtles and it was a magical afternoon. One of her turtles followed me up to the porch at the end of the day and I was enchanted. Carol was the person who recommended books on Narcissism and helped me to understand my crazy marriage. These vacations were the first time I learned to travel on the BART and explore San Francisco and the places near by on my own. When my son, Jim, went out there with me to buy his classical guitar we spent hours at the shop while he played them then picked a different ethnic restaurant for lunch everyday. One day we walked across town, through the park to see a school he was interested in. We ended up off the trail and came across of pond filled with turtles. There were so many turtles sunning there that they were stacked up one on top of another and as we came in they all tumbled into the water. 

I only had one scary experience during these trips and that was the night I rode the BART to hear Latif Bolat perform in Berkley. I got on a bus going the wrong direction and thought the bus driver was throwing me off because I was asking her questions. It turned out she was merely pointing me towards a bus that would take me back the way I needed to go. I went to that concert, met Latif and his wife and walked back through Berkley late at night all by myself to catch a bus to the BART and then walk back to Carol's house. It was quite a night.

Jim got really sick that year. He had tonsillitis and the doctor said they had to come out. We decided he would stay with me during this time and all might have been okay except for the weekend before surgery. He must have gotten into some poison ivy while camping out. It wasn't really noticeable, but the nurse did see it just before they put him out. He just had a patch on his wrist that they decided to put a bandage over and ignore. Unfortunately during his early recovery he must have scratched it and spread it over large parts of his body. The medicine they gave him for pain for his tonsils helped some, but the itching was intense. He spent nearly ten days at my apartment suffering. I gave him my big king size bed so Jenny could stay with him and help him while I was at work. We made jello and soup and did whatever we could but he was miserable.

My first email was with Juno and later AOL. Carol sent me emails by someone who wrote as Eman8tions. I loved reading them and thought it was really just her pen name at the time. I also began talking to people through messaging and enjoyed the anonymous flirting and discussing of so many things. Once in a blue moon I actually went out for coffee or a drink with some of these people; like I did with the guy who loved Hildegard Von Bingen. We met in the lobby of his hotel, both of us carrying our Rumi by Coleman Barks books to recognize each other. None of these meetings amounted to anything, but I loved hearing, "You've got mail!"

One day I did not get an Eman8tion and I was so disappointed that I decided to write back. That was the beginning of My Thots and a new relationship that has lasted to this day. He turned out not to be my friend Carol, but instead a man who was based in St. Louis and a former symphony conductor.

Then I met Pan. Pan and I started out on instant messaging, pretending we were Wendy and Peter having adventures in Neverland. We were two night owls who just had fun connecting online until one night he asked to meet me at Denny's for coffee. Imagine my shock when I walked into Denny's after midnight and met a six foot three, blonde haired, blue eyed, twenty two year old! He didn't seem put off and we talked for hours. Then we went to Miller Park to watch the sun rise. As we walked under the trees he would spontaneously twirl me around like we were dancing, or hold my hand and just start running. It was magical and so sweet. When he said goodbye, as we ran for our cars he raised his hand and called out, "Remember! Second star to the right and straight on to morning." Pan and I saw each other for several months, but his mother's name was the same as mine. She was also my age and he was so much younger, I began to feel a little awkward. Then Eman8tions, who I had started writing to, and actually met, acted jealous and I decided to end it. Pan cried. I was sad too.

Eman8tions was a man seven years older than me who wrote meditations and poetry and played Native American flute. He was hobnobbing around the country visiting the subscribers to his thoughts and finally ended up back in St.Louis living with one of his best friends, a woman and her husband. He was her maid of honor at her wedding. The first time I drove to St.Louis we went to a kite festival at Forest Park. The second time was mother's day and I took my two adult son's with me to meet him at the Butterfly House in Chesterfield. He had another woman with him and I ended up taking us all out for Chinese food after he finished performing. I was already hooked, but so were a lot of other women. Including the woman he was with that day. That was the beginning of a long relationship where I learned things and did things I never expected to be part of. Wherever he performed there would be women madly in love with this sparkling eyed, modern day guru who spoke with such heartfelt words. He also filled in for some religious places when their ministers were out of town and I often went with him. He spoke to the Science of Mind people in Milwaukee and quite often at the local Unitarian church. He officiated at a Wiccan wedding and several other places. We explored different philosophies like the Vedanta Society and a sweat lodge. He made Native American drums and I helped, then we sold them at pow wows or just to people who wanted them. I had birthed my own drum many years ago on a small farm outside Blue Mound, Illinois. That was a very ritualistic and meaningful experience, but working with him was also meaningful in a different way. 

One time we were invited to a psychic fair in Atlanta and drove all the way down there to put on his concert and attend their fancy masked costume ball, but the person in charge evidently did not do enough advertising and they lost money on it. They still paid us with a big check, which promptly bounced when we tried to deposit it. We never did get our money for that, but I did get to meet his mother on the way home. And we also stopped at Bobby's house in North Carolina on that same trip home. We arrived around midnight, put on our costumes for the masked ball and knocked on his door. When Bobby opened it he was greeted by a very large bumble bee complete with antennae and gossamer wings and an angel with real feathered wings! 

We were very active politically, going door to door to make sure people got out to vote and even giving rides to the polls. I remember we ate breakfast with Dennis Kucinich and I used my first mobile phone to make calls from his headquarters. We sat on the floor for hours going through our lists.

When he was on the road and I was alone I would build a fire in my fireplace and burn incense and practice meditating. I even made a doll that looked just like him to sit across from me. It wore a tiny navy blue jogging suit, real tennis shoes and had a brown yarn ponytail. Typical of me it was all or nothing. LOL

In the meantime I still had my dream group. I have always been a very prolific dreamer and I remember some of my dreams as if they were actual experiences. My dreams are so real it is as if I have two lives. I've always wondered if that is a throw back to my Ojibwa great great grandmother. My friend, Tom, was still a big part of my life too. Both in dream group and with my son, Bobby. Being on my own for the first time, I was clueless about things like taxes and ended up having to pay $3000 that first year. I didn't have it, but Tom loaned me the money and I paid him back little by little.

I had my piano, but I wanted to learn to play the flute, so I bought a flute and took lessons. At first I couldn't get a sound out of it! I was used to the oboe or saxophone and blowing over the flute took me a while to learn. Eman8tions was the person who finally taught me how to do that.  At the end of the year I actually played in a recital, but I didn't tell anyone about it. I was so nervous. I'd never played a recital anywhere, so just doing it was enough for me. My teacher accompanied me on one piece and a Russian conductor/pianist accompanied me on another. It was a success and I felt pretty proud. In fact I was kind of sorry I hadn't invited anyone to hear me, but there were a lot of other people there. Mostly parents whose children were learning to play instruments for the first time.

Christmas that year the boys played their guitars, I played my flute and Jim's future wife played the piano while Eman8tions sang carol's.  It was a dream come true for me to have everyone together like that.

The next year on Christmas I moved the big round dining table into the living room by the fire and put the tree up in there. It felt very old fashioned and cozy. Everyone was there, Eman8tions, my boys, Becky and my three tiny granddaughters, Brooke, Tiffany, and Alicia and we opened presents. The following day I cooked a big traditional Christmas dinner for all of us and we waited. We waited and waited, but Becky never showed up. I didn't see or hear from her again for months. It wasn't the first time this kind of thing had happened, but it was still a disappointment.

Eman8tions helped me get Jim ready for the Honors program in Austria. Being a musician who had done some traveling Eman8tions helped him pack his classical guitar so it could withstand the trip, Bobby went off to work at Camp Arrowhead Boy's Camp in North Carolina for another year as a camp counselor. I heard Becky was staying at the Mission with the girls and I went over there to see if I could talk to her. It turned out the door was already locked. It was past opening, but as I turned to walk back to my car someone assaulted me, knocked me to the ground and raspy, alcohol tainted breath breathed down on my ear. I don't know what would have happened, but right at the moment a carload of rowdy teenage boys came zooming through the lot, screaming and yelling and whoever was on top of me ran off. Nothing really happened but I was traumatized. I never went back.

My job at State Farm was great when I was assigned to work with some of the career level women in our department. I got to travel and help run seminars for our top agents and do all sorts of wonderful things, but the woman who ran our department was horrible. She would go through our trash and check out any floppy disks to see if they were really useless and she did not train anyone. If you couldn't get trained yourself you would be out of luck. 

She had been told I could do anything and for some reason she just didn't like me. I've never had that problem before or since, but it made my life miserable. She bounced me from one person to another so I was always working for somebody different.  I had several people ask for me back, but she always had excuses for why that couldn't happen. Then she decided to have us all take the Myers Briggs test. Afterwards she called me in and said, "You are a square peg in a round hole and you better just get over it!"  I started looking for a new job. 

She wouldn't let anyone transfer out of her department, so I looked outside of State Farm and stumbled on Novak Flowers on Main St. I had no idea what a job there would be like. I imagined just waltzing in and arranging flowers in vases. I got the job! However I learned their flower arrangers had degrees in some kind of horticulture or design. One even had a masters degree! I worked in the front showroom answering the phone and helping customers. They said there were no benefits and I would start at the minimum wage for six months, but a couple months later they gave me a big increase and when my State Farm Cobra insurance expired, they paid half my health insurance on a private policy! It was a family business and such a great place to work. I loved it there. I learned how to take orders for funerals and weddings and just general flowers. I learned to use the computer to do long distance flowers and in my spare time I plucked the roses and fluffed the carnations! I felt like one of the family. I never learned to make bows though! It became a standing joke that I would wear out my practice ribbon before I ever got a presentable bow, but I knew how to snip the ends of stalks and wrap them in wire for simple vases. I knew how to add a bit of filler and I helped people identify the potted plants in the greenhouse. It was a very fulfilling job. By the time I moved on I knew the name of almost all the plants and flowers.

During this time I got a call that my father had died. My brother's friend, a nurses assistant, had been feeding him breakfast and he simply died right then. No pain. No suffering, but unexpected. He was just a few months short of his 73 rd. birthday, I had asked him what he wanted for Christmas and he said all he wanted was to be with my mother. He died December 26, 2000 and in some ways I was happy for him. He was a man who had started college at barely sixteen and been called one of the most intelligent men the Superintendent of Public Education had ever met when I was a child. The nursing home had nothing to help him stay mentally active or happy and he had no will power left. Eman8tions and Jim played at his funeral and I gave a speech about his life. It was the best I could do. To me he was the greatest man I've ever known.

The condo elected a new board and they decided the snow needed to be scraped off the roof tops that winter. We'd never done this in Illinois and it was a bad idea. They destroyed big parts of the roof, dropped snow down on my deck crushing my furniture and left some apartments with big leaks in their ceilings. Mine was fine but everyone's condo fees went up way over a hundred dollars. My mortgage was reevaluated and went down.

Eman8tions and I were seeing each other regularly by then. My first attempts at using my own charge cards had left me with two large accounts. I wanted to pay them off and I wanted to move closer to him so I wouldn't have to drive so far when he didn't come to my house. I began house hunting in Taylorville, Illinois where my siblings lived. Life was much less expensive there.

I finally rented a small house a block from my brother's ex-wife and on moving day I rented a big moving van and drove it to my condo. Then two of Jim's friends came to help me since he now lived in Seattle. My sister also came, bringing her new boyfriend who turned out to be more of a hindrance than anything. He insisted he knew how to pack everything into the truck and turned what should have been a couple of hours into almost a whole day. It was frustrating because I was paying the boys and they were doing their best in spite of him. Eman8tions helped too, but he had to leave early to get back to St.Louis. My sister's boyfriend drove the van to Taylorville.

Monterey Drive

Building the new house was fun. We found a lot across the street from our old neighborhood on Nicki Drive. We picked a house our builder had already built somewhere else and added three more feet to the width and nine feet of windows to the master bedroom facing the lake. I was able to make almost all the changes I wanted, which included taking the laundry area in the back hallway and turning it into a half bath with a pocket door. That left room to put a laundry room hidden behind our master closet with a built in ironing board and some storage.

Our master bathroom had two sinks and a large jacuzzi tub as well as a tile floor. We used a greenstone rocky colored tile everywhere but the bathrooms and a green tartan carpet throughout the main parts of the house. In the bedrooms we used a beige plush carpet.

The house had three bedrooms, one downstairs was the master with an ensuite and a door to the deck, two were upstairs, one the size of our master and one smaller. There was another bathroom upstairs, and a loft overlooking the living room. The kitchen and living room were one big L shape with white cabinets that were two sided between the kitchen and dining room with glass doors. There was crown molding and a sliding patio door that looked like French doors. We couldn't have the real thing because of the space we needed for our round antique table and my husband's family's antique sideboard with my mother's huge antique gilt mirror above it. This was a family home.

It had a mallard green shingled roof and dark red brick front with our house number embedded in stone next to a dark green door built under a curved stone lintel. Every detail in this house was carefully curated by me. Even the basement had an egress window and the house was built using steel beams so we would have unimpeded room for the pool table. Bobby added stone block steps in the little hill going down to the lake and I planted pink lilies and French lilac bushes around the outside. We had a landscaper put in three big Austrian pines and I thought we would live here forever. The house was big enough for the children to come home to and small enough for retirement.

We had one big Thanksgiving dinner where I came out carrying my signature beautiful bird to a table filled with my children, my sister and her new husband and I planned for one big Christmas dinner to follow in December. I'd spent weeks making Raggedy Ann dolls for my granddaughters. One big one for Brooke and a small one for Tiffany. I made matching clothes for both of them. Our tree was a lovely one, right in the front window, but I got the flu Christmas Eve and my husband soon followed me into the bedroom where we lay moaning while the kids opened gifts without us. Bobby made spaghetti for everyone and on Christmas day we felt better. However nothing was defrosted or cooked for dinner and no restaurants were open, so we had French Toast!

Becky was divorced and had to go back to work, so I babysat the girls and potty trained Brooke using stickers and some cute 101 Dalmatian panties that she really wanted. At first this was fun, dancing under the sprinkler, coloring, and reading stories. Then my dad fell and broke his collar bone. His wife had been an impulsive mistake on his part. She had no interest in helping him at all, so we brought him to our house. We intended to put him in our smaller bedroom upstairs, but halfway up the steps he froze and could go no further. We had to call Jim and Bobby to come help us get him back down and set the bed up in the dining room!

Suddenly I had days spent with the television blaring because my dad was going deaf while I tried to keep my granddaughters from annoying him. It was wonderful and it was horrible trying to juggle the three of them. He would wake up in the morning and my husband helped him get to the bathroom and dress. Then he wanted two pieces of bacon, two eggs, two pieces of toast and coffee made just right. We bought a second hand bicycle cart so we could take the girls on bicycle rides around the neighborhood and  just dealt with all of this for a while.

My dad had no privacy since his bed was in the dining room and it was very hard for him to get around because of the weird way a collar bone cast must be worn. When he needed to go to Springfield to have his hearing aid checked I nearly lost him on the steep ramp into the building. The doctor, himself, actually came out and helped me get him back down. Shortly after that we arranged to take him back to his apartment and his wife. She promised to do better. She didn't. A few months later we got a call from the family. They had put him in a nursing home until his collar bone healed. He was only 72, but he never got out. 

My husband's computer was in the upstairs loft and if he was home he was usually up there. I started writing and began using his computer more. One day I discovered all his messages with other women. One where he tried to arrange for her daughter to get into our son's band. Another full of the kind of sweet talk you make trying to woo a woman. It was a blow. Nothing had changed. We had numerous screaming arguments about all of this and then things settled down.

He seemed to be more receptive and was spending more time with me and our granddaughters. Everything appeared to be in good order. Until the night before his 52nd. birthday. I was trying to make him treats to take to work when he told me he was moving out the next day. He moved out March 6, 1998. Our new house, the proof that he would never leave, wasn't even a year old.

He had already moved most of the clothes in his drawers without me noticing it and he moved into an apartment complex about a mile away. He wouldn't give me the address because he said he was afraid I might do something mean. He also said this time he would pay for an attorney that I picked.

The next morning I called the attorney my friend Tom had told me about when I was in the hospital. She looked exactly like Xena the warrior princess and was part of a good local firm. She told me if he would agree to go to mediation she would do the divorce for a flat fee. 

He called the next day, accusing me of stealing his Jeep windows.  I had no idea what happened to his windows and I could have cared less. I never even drove by his apartment to see what it looked like. He said I'd better get a lawyer now! He was not being kind, but I told him I already had one and what she said. That surprised him. 

He liked the idea of saving money and agreed to go to the mediator the lawyer recommended. He made a list of everything we owned and we took turns picking who got what. Of course he took his family's heirloom sideboard first. That seemed fair since his great great grandfather had made it. He promised it would go to Bobby some day, since Bobby was the only kid who wanted it. 

I'll admit these were hard days for me. Suddenly I was living alone for the first time in all my life. I alternated between riding our stationery bike for hours on end and walking around the neighborhood at night looking at all the houses where families sat together inside and, I assumed, were happy. Our friends and his co-workers came by, or called, to tell me stories of my soon to be ex-husband taking photos of girls in the park and telling them he was scouting for Hollywood models, or lewd photos at the billiard hall where he claimed to be doing advertising photos. Evidently he was fond of   stories about his escapades at work.

I found a good counselor, Feli Sebastian, who helped me navigate all this. When Feli asked me what I wanted from her I had to think. All those years of counseling had never seemed to do a thing, but I needed help. For the first time I knew I was in counseling to change me. I asked her to be my mother and tell me what to do. She told me to get a notebook and write down the first time I did anything new. Then she told me to start looking in the papers for a job I might like. And so we started. I got my first checking account in just my name. I did small things with a big impact and wrote each one down in that notebook. It was the most affirming thing to look at. It showed me what I could do and I still have it.

We finally started mediation at a hundred dollars per hour. It was the best thing I ever did. Our mediator had us fill out seven pages listing every bank account, all our stock, our salaries, every tiny detail of our financial lives. It was easy for me I was a retired preschool teacher. He, it turned out, had secret bank accounts and all sorts of other things I didn't have any idea existed. (This from a man who once refused me enough money to buy bread and toilet paper for our house in between paychecks!) I had spent our marriage scrimping away to dress our children and myself and make our life affordable according to what I was given to work with. After ten sessions with the mediator, a much more educated me made him an offer he totally refused for alimony. We discussed it under her supervision and thank goodness one of the contract rules we had signed on for required us to always be civil and never raise our voices. We divorced September 6, 1998 and the judge commented that he had never seen a couple who seemed less likely to want a divorce. I thought that was interesting.

I ended up getting enough money out of each of his paychecks to live comfortably, if frugally, even if I did not get a job. 

I got a job in Education and Training at State Farm and on the day he got his paycheck and realized how much of it went to me he called my lawyer and screamed at her so loudly that other people in her office could hear him. Then he called me, at work in the same building, and did the same. 

For a while he was very combative, refusing to answer questions or give me any information that I needed in order to file my taxes and do all the things our mediation required me to do. I finally told him if he didn't want to cooperate I would simply not file my taxes the way we agreed. (Which was to his benefit.) He wanted his little chunk of my tax money, so he complied. Money always spoke to him.

We sold our house and I was able to get a mortgage on a lovely condo in Normal. 

Schroeder

 

Our marriage was suffering, our kids were growing up, and we decided we could use a house with a different layout. When we drove by the house on Schroeder it looked like a great neighborhood and when we walked into it for the first time it seemed even better. Looking back I think we were in love with the huge living room window and as we turned around all we saw, in the distant dining room window, was a Japanese maple backed by a gigantic swimming pool. The whole backyard was a swimming pool, complete with water slide and steps on the wide shallow end and a diving board on the smaller deep end. A rose garden surrounded the pool and there was a big screened-in porch off the deck. Inside were five bedrooms, three and a half baths, two family rooms, a formal dining room, formal living room and a sprawling kitchen with a patio door looking out at the pool. There was even a balcony off the master bedroom and a fireplace in the main level family room. It seemed too good to be true and we bought it.

We lived there until both boys graduated from high school and it was a trip. The first thing we noticed right after we moved in was that we would find the front door wide open on many mornings. We began double checking to make sure it was locked the night before and we made sure Becky locked it when she came in late at night. That mystery was never solved. 

One night I was in bed reading when my husband came in and went into our walk in closet to change clothes. He did this because the big patio doors in our bedroom provided a clear view of anyone standing up at night with the light on if the curtains were open and I liked to watch the water shadows on our wall when I went to sleep at night. But I was not sleeping this time. I saw him come in and walk into that closet out of the corner of my eye. I continued to read for a while and he didn't come back out, which finally seemed odd. I yelled at him and asked if he was okay, but he didn't answer. Finally, I got up, went over and opened the doors to the closet. No one was in there! I couldn't believe it. I knew I hadn't seen him come out, so I went downstairs and there he was in the family room. Fully dressed, reading one of his technical magazines. He said he had not come upstairs at all and he thought I must have been dreaming. I know I was not.

There was a small hallway between the front foyer and the back of the house where our kitchen and family rooms were. It had a half bath and that was all. I can't tell you how often someone thought they saw someone standing in the doorway to that hall. Sometimes at night I would see someone in my peripheral vision there too. No matter how hard we tried no one could figure out what was causing this sight. There was just no explanation for it.

We had a lot of vandalism in our pool area from people who had a problem with the previous owner, so we installed outdoor motion lights. We never caught the people who destroyed our mailboxes, or our pool robot cleaner, but we did catch a lot of raccoons and opossums , and, once, a fox, who crawled in under our porch when they came up from the Constitution Trail that ran behind our neighborhood.

Birds, mostly ducks would fly into the dining room window, stunning themselves and sounding like a small bomb had gone off. In the winter ducks liked to fly in and swim in the water that collected in the top of our pool cover. They made a lot of racket as the males chased the females round and round trying to mate.

I was still working part time at Noah's Ark. The boys had part time jobs after school and Becky was working at Hardees, but we had many social events at this home. First of all it was perfect for Bridge nights. It accommodated my Dream Group when it was my turn to host. We even had our shamanic meditation group meet there, because there was room for everyone to lie down and travel and still hear the shamanic drumming.

Jimmy had found his place in high school He was an outstanding student who reveled in the social life available to kids his age. He was on the Valentine court and wrestled varsity. He was in the next to the top band class and that caused many problems. The band teacher wanted him in the top band class and Jim refused. He didn't want to devote that much time to band, which was already pretty time consuming. My husband and I were band parents and traveled everywhere the band went to play or compete and that was a lot of work. It was a class (5A, I think) band. We would carry the timpani around the football field and set it up for a performances, or do whatever needed doing.The head band teacher had bought our house on Nicki Drive and blamed us for problems they had after they moved in. In the end problems with this teacher cost Jim National Honor Society and we took him out of high school and put him into college early to avoid more problems. The school superintendent lived across the street and he sympathized, but could do little more than advise us. We bought Jim a used guitar and he taught himself how to play. A couple months later he qualified for the classical guitar classes at the University and that became one of his majors. He was now a psychology and performance major with a minor in German. He published under his professor in psychology and went to Austria with the Honors program to study for a semester in Vienna because of his music major. 

Bobby finished junior high and began high school.  He also began going places with one of my friends in the dream group. Tom was an ex-chemist and psychologist who went to our church and did an internship at Noah's Ark so he could experience young children. He and Bobby would take long bike rides through the countryside, or go to indoor climbing gyms to practice belaying. They even did some climbing competitions and Tom taught him to drive a stick. Bobby ended up joining our dream group too, because of him.

The basement pool table was a hit with all the kids, but the backyard was the big draw in this house. Everyone loved the pool. When we had our house blessing we invited seventy people to come and join us. Our new priest knocked on the door and asked to be let in. Then he went to each room and blessed it. I've always assumed if there was anything unusual living there, besides us, it probably wasn't evil although that is not why we did this. It was more of a social occasion and reason to show off the house than anything else. The day of the house blessing a big old possum came up and licked the grease off the bottom of our gas grill while our enthralled visitors watched. Pretty typical for this house I would say.

My husband bought me a used white convertible and put a new roof on it. It was beautiful and my license plate said, MRS A 2. That was because MRS A was our neighbor's plate! My husband drove it in most of the parades around town, as did hers. White convertibles are very handy for displaying pretty girls. He bought himself a Jeep that he could take apart or put together like a large tinker toy. He liked to take the roof and doors off and drive around the countryside. The kids learned to drive on an old Buick Skylark we bought for cash (and he immediately burned the engine out on it when he forgot to put oil in it, so we had to put a rebuilt engine in it.) We didn't buy them cars. I figured those were things they could purchase when their studying paid off and they wanted to buy something.

Television was something I had carefully controlled the whole time we had children. Instead of just aimlessly watching it, we read books, played family games, rode bicycles, or participated in local events. When they graduated from high school, we bought each of them a television.

Becky was dating now. She was twenty two years old and working. We took half her pay and put it in a savings account for her in lieu of rent. Over time I noticed she seemed to be getting heavier, but she insisted she could not possibly be pregnant until I finally insisted she see my gynecologist. She caught the chicken pox right after that and I gave her some crystals and taught her how to focus on them to help with the itching. She had some false labor pains, but used the crystals to work through them. Then one night Bobby woke me up and said Becky was sick. 

She was wearing long harem pajamas with elastic around the ankles and I'm glad I told her to throw on some clothes while I called the doctor and her dad started the car. We drove up to the corner across the street from her elementary school when she stood up and exclaimed, "Mom! The baby slipped out!"

I looked back and there was the baby swinging from its umbilical cord through the leg of her shorts! I don't remember how I got to the back seat, but I scooped up that tiny baby and it was barely bigger than my hand! It was silent and I knew you couldn't spank a baby that small. I tipped her forward and used two fingers to rub her back while saying, "Brooke Michelle You breathe for Grandma!" And to my great relief she began to mew. She sounded like a little kitten, but she was alive and, I hoped, well. Then I said, "Welcome to the world Brooke Michelle. I am your grandma."

We arrived at the hospital minutes later and they carried her in on Becky's stomach, leaving my husband to park the car and me to find a place to wash my hands. I remember opening the bathroom door in the waiting room and a big man was in there peeing. It felt as surreal as the rest of the night. The Peoria hospital sent an ambulance straight down with lung surfactant and they transferred Brooke to the intensive care nursery at St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria. Brooke is now Social Worker!

This was just the beginning of a very long and very rocky relationship with Becky, the baby's father and his family. Becky, even though in her twenties, was still pretty immature and she was very possessive about the baby. She would only allow us to see her if she was with us, but she lost interest in sitting there quite soon. It was several months before Brooke could go home and even then premature baby clothes were too big for her. Becky moved in with the father and thus began many years of on again, off again relationships with our own daughter. She had another premature baby (Tiffany) with the same man and we learned about it through a friend.. We saw her babies when it suited her or she needed us. She remarried when both Brooke and Tiffany were under three and one day I went to visit only to find her in bed with the baby and the older two eating peanut butter out of a jar in the living room. That marriage disintegrated too, mostly because Becky still had needs that mature men couldn't deal with. She delivered a son conceived when her ex-husband raped her just before she married her second husband. They put that baby up for adoption. Her second marriage produced another girl, Alicia whose father got custody of her when they divorced.

The best thing about her son's adoption was that Jim, who was adopted, was old enough to understand what was happening and be part of it. He watched her go through counseling and helped us make a book for the baby about her childhood. He watched us decide which of the prospective parents might be a good match and he was there when we handed the new baby to his new adoptive parents. Ironically they wanted to keep a name Becky had given him as well as using one of their own, so he ended up being named the same as Jim. James William was adopted in an open adoption and they kept in touch with Becky through Babyfold until she lost touch with them and never really reconnected.

Life was never straightforward and easy on Schroeder. Our old church hired a man who lied about being a priest and we changed churches. We loved our new minister and I began printing a church newsletter that came out once a month. I stopped teaching Sunday school and attended the adult Sunday school. Jim was the first child confirmed by the new Bishop and our priest, John, the one who blessed our house, took him out for burritos the Saturday before. Jim always told people all you had to do to join the Episcopal church was eat a burrito as big as your head! (That was the way that restaurant advertised.) The Bishop loved telling people his first confirmand was an angel. That was close to the time when both boys began digging in their heels and not wanting to go to church anymore, so it was a little embarrassing when the bishop came to visit and in front of the whole church said, "My first confirmation was an angel! Is he here now?" He was not.

In the summers I went on retreat for several days with my friend Sheila to the Benedictine Monastery (not called a convent although they were all nuns) One time I felt homesick and called my husband, but it annoyed him. I learned why later.

On Jim's eighteenth birthday we went to Red Lobster and when we came home my husband told me he would be serving me with divorce papers the next day. He said he would keep the house and I could move out and get a better job so I could pay him child support for Bobby. I was in shock. He had moved out without warning once before, but I thought things were better now.

The next day was our big Fall parent meeting at Noah's Ark and I was scheduled to read Leo the Late Bloomer, like I always did, to an auditorium full of parents that night. I got up, showered, dressed up and filled a cooler with Diet Coke. Then I wrote a letter to Bobby, our only child still at home, telling him how much I loved him and laid it on his bed. I took the book I was reading and took a Xanax. I was so nervous. I just wanted to be calm enough to get through the meeting then I planned to drive out to the country, take the rest of the bottle and read until I fell asleep. Hopefully never to wake up.

While waiting to go into preschool, I still felt so nervous I took another Xanax and then another. I was so worked up they didn't seem to be doing any good, so I took more. Finally it was time to go inside for the meeting. I got out of the car and found myself tipping towards the stone wall of the church, ripping the should of my dress! One of my co-teachers saw me and I have no memory of walking down the stairs to my classroom. I vaguely remember sitting in the big rocking chair as Janice got ready for the meeting. It turned out she had also called Tom, the psychologist friend who was in my Dream group and like a second father to Bobby. Tom was out of town, but his wife came and picked me up. I thought I was being very chipper and normal as she drove me to the emergency room where they had me drink a glass of charcoal. 

I woke up in a huge, empty room the next morning.  All that was in there was my bed and a bathroom that had little teeny tiny towels with a camera on the ceiling. A nurse told me to shower and get dressed, then she took me to a room where they gave me my dress and a thread and needle and told me to repair the rip in my dress. I was in the psych ward! 

Most of the other patients were older teens or young adults, but there was one sad man who was bipolar. Every day the nurse would come in and ask if I wanted to hurt myself and of course I said no. (Lying at first, of course.) Then she would unlock the little locker with my deodorant and toothbrush in it and let me shower. After that breakfast came to my room on a tray and then we had a day interspersed with art therapy, drug classes, group therapy and free time when I either played the piano or played ping pong with one of the boys. I had guests around noon and my friends came bringing books about St. Therese who did simple things with great love, or books on divorce. Tom's wife sent him with the name of her old divorce attorney, and Tom kept me up to date on how Bobby was doing. He made a special effort to be with him during all this. 

I met my psychiatrist who treated me like an intelligent mature adult and had some concrete suggestions for how to support myself if I got divorced. My friend, Sheila, brought me a gigantic pink and white teddy bear who took up half my twin bed, but who I slept with every night. I was there for two weeks and then the night before I was to go home Becky went over to our house and found her father upstairs filming a woman in our bed! He told her he was just interviewing her to be a maid, but Becky called me crying. 

They made me stay another week after that.

When I went home Sheila's husband went in first and walked through our house to make sure nothing strange was going on. That night my husband came home from work and told me he was so moved by me wanting to kill myself that he had cancelled the divorce. To prove his love he bought a new mattress for our bed, one no other woman had slept on, and promised to build me the house of my dreams. He actually said this should prove he loved me, because I knew how much he loved money and he would never waste it on something like a house if he didn't mean it. 

I should have known better. We had been to many counselors in the past and nothing had ever changed, but I wanted to believe him, so we began to think about building our own house. 

I found out much later that it may have only been that he discovered his divorce attorney was known for draining every last cent from his clients, often leaving them with nothing to mediate except how to pay him. My husband may or may not have loved me, but he definitely did love money.

Nicki Drive, the middle years

 

I loved being a mother. I was able to volunteer at the elementary school library and junior high nurse's office. I made popcorn in the junior high cafeteria at lunch and some years I was a room mother for all three children at the same time. I always made a booth for our fund raisers and one time it was an Indiana Jones bean bag toss. I played the theme song on my boombox and made three animals out of giant cardboard boxes that I covered in fabric to match the critter. There was an alligator, a hippo and a lion (I think.). A few well placed stuffed toy lions set around the room and me wearing one of the boys' Indiana Jones cowboy hats set the scene.

I became a den mother for cub scouts for both boys at different times and both her dad and I helped Becky sell Girl Scout cookies. She took dancing in the early years, but that turned out not to be her thing. She loved soccer and so all three played soccer. On different teams. At different parks. Not always at different times. We were busy.

I began teaching all three of them basic piano skills while they were still quite young, but later they all took lessons from other teachers. Becky learned to play a quite complicated piece called, The Pines, from her second teacher and we were so proud of her. Her recital was at Weslyan's recital room and she did such a lovely job. For a child with eye hand coordination problems this was a real coup. Jim learned to play, but he really wasn't in to it and he did other things, so we let him quit a few years in. He has a natural musical ability that allows him to play almost anything. Bobby took lessons from a teacher who did a half hour of music theory with two students and then a private lesson on the piano. He played in a festival every summer where he accrued points towards a gold trophy. He really wanted that gold trophy and worked hard, but when he got it, it was plastic and he was disappointed. However he became quite good on the piano back then.

In fifth grade all students were given the chance to play another instrument. Becky wanted the flute, but the school suggested she would do better on clarinet, so that was what we picked. I've always wondered if we did the wrong thing, because she never got any better on the clarinet and she never wanted to practice. In fact when I asked the school if I should re-rent the instrument I found out she had stopped going to lessons early on and nobody bothered to tell me. The boys were more successful. Jimmy started on trumpet and moved to French Horn. Bobby played the trombone, although what he really excelled at was decorating it for special events like Christmas with lights and tinsel and greens.

Bobby had a creative gene somewhere. In junior high all kids had to take both home economics and shop. In Home Ed he got extra credit for making a Husky dog stuffed animal. It was really well done with glassy eyes and a tail that bent.

We often took the whole family to Miller Park to see plays in the summer and Jimmy was enthralled by Little Orphan Annie. When our Community Players Theater had a part for a boy I called Jane Thomley, the University school Drama teacher, and asked her what he should do. She said just have him come and tell her a story, so we went to auditions. They did auditions by having a group of people go up on stage and read a few pages. Everyone had a script except Jimmy. He looked so cute up there. He was less than half the size of everyone else and when he realized he didn't have a script he was quite indignant! In the end he read his part and got it. That  was a month before he turned seven and the beginning of our entire family becoming involved in local theater.

Jimmy often had a major part in Community Player productions while Bobby and Becky sometimes got small parts and even my husband got involved. He was Eeyore once and Santa every year. He used to joke that I had finally made an ass of him. I began helping with costumes and it turned out I was good at it. Once I custom made a tutu for a ballerina who wanted to commission me to make more, but I never wanted to make another one again. It was a bear! I did make lots of other things though, including the sailor suits and play clothes for all the children in The Sound of Music. Soon I was making costumes for Miller Park too and I made the Santa suit they still use. Those were good years for our family and good for all the children. Becky and Bobby learned to perform comfortably in front of large audiences and Jimmy became well known for his acting and singing, especially in the Christmas pageants. They did big articles about him in the newspaper and he was offered the chance to actually make some money doing television commercials with a local man on channel 3.

In April 1983 we brought my mother-in-law down to a very beautiful nursing home to be near us. I went to see her every day and often took Bobby with me, but she had smoked all her life and now had emphysema so bad she had to be on oxygen a lot and even that was not really helping her anymore. She and I agreed to both quit smoking together on April 1st. It worked for me, but it was too late for her. She loved playing Bridge and we found a fourth at the home so we could play at night when my husband was off work. She was happy, but she forgot she was supposed to call for help when she got out of bed and one night she fell, breaking her hip. It was a nightmare. Because of her emphysema they couldn't operate or give her anything for the pain. That night I had a dream that I was her. I was driving our car looking for us, but I was so tired and I couldn't find our house. Finally I drove back to the nursing home and just as I hit a tree in the dream, I woke up. The phone was ringing. She had just died. 

We drove to the funeral in Dixon, Illinois with Jimmy so sick from asthma that we had orders with us in case we had to stop at a hospital. We thought it was important for the children to experience a funeral of someone they knew, but were not particularly close to. When they looked into her coffin Jimmy remarked that it didn't look like her. I told them, "The part of her that loved you and played with you and laughed with you is gone. This is just her shell." They accepted that quite easily.

June 3 1986 was the last day of school and we were winding down for the day when we got a call. My mother was being air lifted from Springfield to St. Louis and we needed to come as soon as possible. I threw the basket of clean unfolded clothes into our van along with a loaf of bread and some lunch meat and we drove to Taylorville. My sister's friend, a nurse, offered to watch all of our children while we were in St. Louis. 

It was close to ten p.m. when we pulled into the hospital parking lot. We slowed down to get our bearings and a hand came through my window nearly scaring me to death as it clamped on my shoulder. It was my brother who had been watching out for us. Even under such dire circumstances he had a sense of humor. I only got to see my mother for two very short times that night. She was in ICU and everyone wanted to see her. My four siblings and my father were there. My grandmother, her mother, was there. My godmother and uncle, her best friend and her brother, were there. We sat in that waiting room all night long. Nobody talked, sometimes we dozed, but it was just a long night. My grandmother paid the thousand dollars the hospital required to treat my mother and they took her into surgery early the next morning. Eight heart doctors worked all day long trying to save her life and we waited. Then a woman came into the waiting room and had us all go into a tiny conference room. She said my mother had eight aneurysms in the main aorta to her heart and less than a third of a kidney left. If she had survived she would have been on dialysis for the rest of her life, but they were never able to get her off of the heart bypass machine. My mother died June 4, 1986.

It's hard to say who was in more shock at the moment. Her mother, my dad, or me.  Mom was 58 years old and had been out in her yard planting roses a few days before. My dad hugged me as we left the hospital and said vaguely. "Your mother died." He was never quite the same after that. The bills completely wiped him out. He was penniless and lost. The love of his life since he was 21 was gone. Grandma suddenly became strange and even though he had lived next door to her and cared for her and cooked dinner for her for years, she accused him of things he never did, like peeking in her windows from his house next door, or causing my mother's death. Grandma's way of grieving was anger. At my dad, at my mother's father, at an unjust world, I guess.

I grieved deeply for over five years. It was almost impossible for me to comprehend how this person who had always been there was suddenly gone. I remember writing thank you notes for all the flowers and food with my sister while my dad made a Tombstone pizza. I'd never heard of Tombstone pizza and it seemed hysterically funny to be eating it at that particular time. We kept laughing at almost nothing and it seemed odd. Now I know it was to release the tension. I didn't really understand what was happening, but every time we went home to visit my father, I had the flu and spent the whole trip lying down or throwing up for the whole next year. I dreamed about finding my mother living in some house near by, or thought I saw her driving a car on the road when I was driving. One day, while sitting on my screened in back porch I was suddenly surrounded by the smell of roses, my mother's favorite flower. I had the strangest sense that she was right there. Then one day after church we were all in our van going to visit a parishioner from our church, to see his train layouts, and our van was filled with the smell of roses. We all smelled them! Who knows what caused this, but it felt good to me and brought me some peace.

We had a pre-scheduled family portrait done shortly after this. In it I am wearing my mother's clothes. Bobby is sporting a haircut that was trying to hide the big chunk he cut off his bangs while at the babysitters when we were in St. Louis. Nobody but my husband looked quite right.

These were the years of soccer and baseball, long summers reading for prizes at the library and family vacations where I thought camping would allow us to see places without costing an arm and a leg. It started by tent camping with the teachers. Then we bought a pop up camper and finally a used motor home. I remember that motor home seemed so familiar, like it was meant to be. My sister explained that on our first camp out in it. She walked in and said, "This looks like the outside of a Kleenex box!" And it did. That brown coppery one with swirls that was my constant companion during allergy season.

Camping out was always an experience no matter what we camped in. I would spend all year planning it and my husband would just show up to drive. We broke down everywhere. We had to replace vehicle parts and once even got bad gas, because he had no real interest in any of it. 

Still we did many things. We went to the Hiawatha festival in Pipestone, Minnesota and watched Native Americans mining the sacred rock and carving it into peace pipes and turtles. We drove through the Badlands. Bobby wanted to see Mt. Rushmore so we went there and then we went to see the very beginning of the Crazy Horse Memorial. We spent the night in the parking lot of Wall Drugs the world's largest drug store that sold Jackalopes and squashed pennies that said Wall Drugs. We went to Yellowstone the year of the great fire and saw lots of animals up close and flames shooting off the distant mountains. Ashes floated down over our campsite and when we left it was through smoking, fire destroyed land. We even hiked in-country with a park trooper who taught us to identify scat from different animals and showed us a fresh grizzly bear kill. 

I played John Denver music, or folk stories on tape while the kids played a card game called Predator where my rat takes your bacteria, or my lion eats your fox. I kept the van full of children's books about the states we would drive through, gave them all diaries to write in and no one was allowed to bring radios or tape players. It was family bonding as I saw it, but I could tell when it was wearing thin the year I heard one of them say, "If I see one more tree I'm gonna puke." 

We had a yard full of toys. The swing set was set in concrete so it couldn't tip over and I could put the wading pool under the slide with a hose on top to make it a water slide. Our neighbor, the head of ISU's Industrial arts department helped my husband build a club house over the sandbox and there was a big picnic table we built for lunch outside. When my husband's mother died she left us some money and some stocks. He refused to share the stocks with even the children, but he did use the money to finish our basement into a bedroom for Becky, another bathroom, a pool room and a family room. He also allowed us to build a beautiful screened in porch off the back of the house. All the neighborhood kids gathered at our house.

My husband and I only played in one Bridge group now, with some friends. We were all very active in church. He was still thurifer and in charge of the acolytes. All three children were acolytes and I taught Sunday School. Our best friends there were the Rehagens. We often let the children spend Sunday afternoons at one house or the other together and Marirose and I took oil painting lessons together. 

These were the years of big birthday parties and Halloween costumes that were homemade and extravagant. We made yearly trips to Chicago to see the zoo, the aquarium, or the museums. At home I took lots of pictures and organized them into albums, made teacher's gifts in the shape of Kleenex houses with tissue smoke, or Victorian scissor holders and sometimes made matching outfits for all three kids to wear.  Life was very busy, but good.

But there was always an undercurrent of something feeling wrong. My husband moved out for a month and during that time our yard was infested with grub worms. While I was trying to spray that I discovered a pipe had broken in the basement, so the whole time I sprayed the sod, the basement was filling up with water! Luckily this was before we refinished it, because everything down there had mold growing on it or in it. We lost all our old yearbooks and most of our winter coats.

He did move back in after that month, but my trust in him floundered. Especially after I discovered the reason he wanted Becky to take piano lessons was that his girl friend taught them.  She came to our house every week for months before I realized who she was. Between his infidelity and refusal to put any of his mother's stock in his and the children's names (Which she had always done with her children.) our marriage was beginning to suffer.

This might have been the beginning of the real end. Becky graduated from high school in this house. Jim started high school here and Bobby, who was almost fifteen was finishing his last year of junior high when we moved. We did what so many couples in trouble do. We bought a bigger house thinking it would make things better.