Narrative

After Sandy Hook

/ Gerry Wilson / 5 Comments
Season Collage
Season Collage/Wordsmith Studio Photographers

Lovely images, aren’t they?

Fun. Sweet. Cozy. Nostalgic. Beautiful.

But other adjectives stick in my head this morning. Unspeakable. Horrific. Tragic. Unbelievable.

None of them are sufficient. There are no words for what happened to twenty young children in Newtown, Connecticut yesterday. I keep thinking about the parents who had already shopped for Santa or who were engaged with their children in other holiday traditions. I think about the mom or dad who dropped a child off at school yesterday morning. An ordinary morning. Maybe homework had gone undone the night before. Maybe they were running late. Maybe there was a last-minute hug before the child got out of the car. Or maybe there wasn’t.

In light of the tragedy, I can’t write fiction today. I can’t write about smiling snowmen or bright lights or children mesmerized by a Christmas tree. If I had to choose one image, I would write about the one at the lower right, that ghostly image of a child’s backyard play set lost in a sea of blue-white, snowy light. The emptiness of it. The cold.

This morning, all those children are missing from their parents’, their siblings’, their grandparents’, their friends’ lives. That kind of emptiness is beyond my imagination. I’ve lost people I loved–a marriage gone to hell, my parents and grandparents, other relatives, friends–but I have been blessed to see my children grow to adulthood and now my grandchildren, too, three of them in their teens. I simply can’t imagine waking up every day with the kind of hole in a life that the death of a child creates.

I witnessed my grandmother’s grief when my mother, her only child, died. My grandmother lived nine years after that, to a stunning old age–almost 98–and she never got over that loss. My mother was 65, and I felt her life had been cut short.

But these little lives, in such a senseless act of violence?

Two things 

I have made it a point to stay away from politics on this blog, but I have to say two things today:

We must do something to keep automatic assault weapons out of the hands of those who should not have them. What ordinary citizen needs a gun that fires off multiple rounds in seconds? I don’t believe this is what the founding fathers had in mind when they proposed “the right to bear arms.”

We must do something about how we care for the mentally ill in our society. The only way I can conceive of someone committing such a horrific act is to believe that person was seriously ill. Who else could act without conscience, concoct such a plan, and carry it out? We are failing this segment of our population. We throw drugs at them and expect the drugs to work the cure. Granted, we don’t know much about this “shooter” yet.  Surely there must have been signs. Maybe those around him were doing all they could to help him, but somebody missed something.

They say a tragedy like this brings out the best in us as a community, as a nation. I want to believe that’s true, but unless we change things, this event too will be forgotten by all except those most closely affected. We’ll move on, and nothing will be different. And there will be a next time.

That’s all I have to say this morning. I still want to write that story, but not today.

That empty play set is too haunting. Heartbreaking.

Please keep those parents and the whole community of Newtown in your hearts. Hold your own children close. And tell me here how you cope with a tragedy of this scope. What are you telling your children? What are you telling yourself? 

Changing Seasons

/ Gerry Wilson / 3 Comments

Actually, I think about the weather a lot. I’m a devotee of the Weather Channel, especially when storm fronts come rushing at us from the west or a hurricane spawns out in the Gulf.

I’d guess you don’t know much about Mississippi weather, though. Maybe you think we go barefoot year-round, sit on our verandas and watch the heat shimmer, and sip mint juleps.

Au Contraire

Allow me to enlighten you.

In central Mississippi where I live, we do have seasonal changes. Spring and fall are gorgeous, my favorite times of the year. Go 150 miles north, and you’ll see more distinct seasonal swings with much colder winters, even occasional snow. (That’s hill country, where I grew up.) Go south, and you’ll find balmy temps most of the year, although our coast can get pretty chilly. Sometimes it even snows farther south, when a warm, moist front out of the Gulf meets a cold front barreling down from the north. If they tangle just right, that scenario has been known to drop six to twelve inches of the white stuff south of here, and we don’t get a flake.

Where I live, snow is rare but not unheard of. We are just south of what I call “the snow line,” maybe fifty miles north. Sometimes I wish for a front to push a little farther south, but I’m careful of what I wish for. A few inches of snow shuts us down. We lose power. Looking befuddled, road crews throw gravel, sand, and salt on our bridges and overpasses. Schools close. Only essential personnel report for work. It’s for the best. You don’t want to be out on the streets with folks who don’t know how to drive in snow, and believe me, we don’t know how. We get so little practice.

Fear of Ice

A little snow, we deep Southerners can handle, as long as we can sit inside by the fire (we do have fireplaces), sip a little something, and watch it fall prettily outside our windows. No power outages, no digging out, just a day or so of hibernation and waking up to a glittery world when the sun comes out the next day. Most likely, by afternoon, the streets are passable, and it’s over.

But ice? Ice is terrifying. We have all these big old trees, you see. The pine trees bend until the ice gets so heavy they can’t take any more, and then they come down. Hardwood tree limbs snap like toothpicks. The smaller limbs go first, then the bigger ones, and if the frozen stuff piles on heavily enough, those big, hundred-year-old trees come down and wreak havoc.

I remember my first ice storm. I was about ten. We got the precip as sleet and freezing rain overnight, and as ice accumulated on trees and power lines, all night long I heard the crack and crash of limbs coming down. It didn’t take long for the power lines to go. By morning, it was snowing. Beautiful, but oh, so cold in our house. We were without power for at least a week. (For a related post, see Age Ten: The Hush of Ice and Death.)

Sunny and Mild

Lots of folks believe our winters are generally getting milder. I tend to agree. I doubt we had more than six weeks of cold weather here last winter. (FYI, cold here means highs in the forties or fifties, lows in the teens or twenties.) Today, the eighth of December, the high will be seventy-five. (Unless you live in south Florida, you are envious, I know.) But it won’t last. In a day or two or three, an Arctic front will make its way down, probably with heavy weather in front of it–thunderstorms and hail and wind and maybe even tornadoes–and we’ll hunker down until it passes. Once it does, the temperature will drop within minutes. Go to the grocery without a sweater, and by the time you come out, you’re shivering. It’ll be winter again.

That’s our weather roller coaster. And we haven’t even touched on the hundred-degree summers. Another time, maybe.

Mississippi weather? Picture a famous movie star (Southern). Mercurial. Sultry. Petulant. Gorgeous. Cold. Unpredictable. Stormy. Sizzling. Fickle. So think twice before you envy the Southern weather paradise!

Here’s a sample of what our seasons look like:

The Sisters’ Story

/ Gerry Wilson / 11 Comments

Enter a room with four elderly women–all in their nineties–in various stages of infirmity and alertness. They are sisters, and all of them grew up with my mother in a small town in north Mississippi. This means they were all born within a few years of 1920. They were girls during the Great Depression, young women around the time of World War II. I’m visiting with them just before Thanksgiving. They are having a grand reunion, and I’m grateful to be included for a little while.

I have driven to the family farm on a gorgeous late fall day, caught up in my own memories, a little apprehensive, not sure what to expect. One of the sisters, the one I see frequently and have stayed most connected with over the years, has Alzheimer’s and is declining. I’m relieved to see that the others–Julia, Eleanor, Genevieve (what beautiful names!)–are in fair shape physically, considering their advanced age, and their minds seem reasonably sharp. They all exclaim over me and say I’m the image of my mother.

Eleanor is exactly the age my mother would be. They were very best friends growing up and throughout my mother’s life. With some difficulty Eleanor stands when I walk in the room, comes to me, and hugs me hard. In spite of her age and having suffered a broken hip a few years ago, she stands straight and tall, but she feels fragile in my arms. I can still see the Eleanor of fifty years ago in her features. When we sit on the couch together, she takes my hand and holds on tightly.

Stories

Over the course of the afternoon, Eleanor tells me many times that she and mother walked to school together “from the fourth grade on.” I wonder how that was possible since they lived across town from each other, but I don’t ask. I have brought photos of Eleanor and of my mother and dad, hoping to jog her memory, hoping for stories. She talks about how beautiful my mother was and describes in detail a blouse Mother wore about the time she and my dad married. “It had a beautiful, pleated collar that framed her face,” Eleanor says. Remarkably, she has described the blouse in the photo below. Mother would have worn it around 1940, more than seventy years ago.

My mother, about age twenty
My mother, about age twenty

My mother died in 1985, and I never see Eleanor that she doesn’t tell me that she still misses her. But Eleanor’s stories are changing. She tells me she has letters Mother wrote to her about my dad when they were first dating. The last time I talked with Eleanor, the letters were about Mother’s pregnancy with me. I’ve never seen them. I’m not sure they exist any longer. The topic of letters reminds me that these women went off to college, and my mother did not. I wonder how painful it was for Mother to be left behind. Of course, if she had gone away, she wouldn’t have met my father when she did. They might never have met. She might have had an entirely different life. I wouldn’t exist.

Recognition

One of the other sisters says, “You played at my wedding reception!” It’s true. There’s a photo to prove it: Genevieve in her beautiful wedding dress, standing beside me at the piano. I was ten. Today, she has a lovely, serene face. She chats and smiles. But when it’s time to go to the table, her daughters lift and carry her.

Reception
Reception

During lunch I sit next to Eleanor. There is lively conversation, but she’s quiet. After lunch, a couple of the sisters doze in their chairs. “When are you coming to see me?” Eleanor asks. “Will it be soon? Will it be December?” I say I’m not sure, already feeling guilty, thinking about all the reasons I should go and all the reasons not to. They aren’t valid excuses. What better way could I spend my time during the holidays than to take a day–just one–and go and visit her?

Leaving

When it’s time for me to leave, I’m filled with sadness. I wonder about the memories and stories my mother might have contributed had she been here. I think about how, when I laugh, it’s my mother’s voice I hear.

Eleanor insists on getting up from the couch and following me to the door on her walker. She stands in the doorway and waves as I’m driving away. My last glimpse of the farmhouse, she’s still there at the door. I wonder what she’s thinking. My eyes fill with tears. I hate to leave her especially, not knowing whether I’ll ever see her again.

I’m overwhelmed by such an accumulation of life and memories and years gathered in that house. I’m struck, as I am so often now, by how stories change over time. I’m sure my own stories are changing, but what time robs from us it also invents, as long as we keep telling.

Are  you “in between” the very young and the very old? What are you doing to preserve the stories?