And I remember and it still floods me with tears how my Mommy came with my Husband to pick me up to take me home, and while I was surprised and pleased to see her I didn’t realize why she was there. When you are young you are so DUMB. You are so naive it hurts. Well when they started to wheel me out (so silly, I could walk fine) all the sudden I burst into tears and couldn’t stop. It was as if the heavens opened, I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t explain it and my Mommy said, it was O.K., it was perfectly normal. I had to leave my babies behind for care I couldn’t give them, to get well. But my heart was just too sad to leave them and it was O.K. to cry.  She wasn’t a touchy feely type of Mommy but whenever I needed her or was just heart broke, she was there. Always.

What a wise and wonderful woman to come and explain that to me at that scary time in my life when your sure your every move is wrong for your children. She knew because she had had to leave a few babies in hospitals and realized just how hurtful it was. And I just wanted to tell my babies just the type of Woman their Grandmother was. AMAZING. Raised 9 kids 1 husband 2 dogs and with no whining and damn little drinking.

 She did not tolerate fools and had more compassion for truly hurting or sick people than anyone I’ve ever met. My Mommy, their Grandmother that woman just LOVED those tiny babies, she couldn’t get enough of holding them. They put her in mind of her own as we were all pretty small at birth. They should know my children, the strength they come from…there’s nothing they can’t do.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100308.html

 Not me, not my God, she wouldn’t have me born a slave…she loves me , right? 

Now wait a minute, Adam is born by the breath of God, in his image to glorify him. Period. Eve’s comes from an extra rib on Adam….right? From a leftover ribs to do the scutwork? Who wrote this shit? Talk about the original “Second Hand Rose”!

 I love this whole Garden of Eden scenario- like he’s king of the Universe, but he needs a helpmate because he can’t find his way out of a paper bag.

Then I got to thinking how Eve got a bad rap just for trying to make sure that Idiot didn’t starve to death.

Maybe that’s where all the “Mom” attitude started…after all if you’re going to blamed for the downfall of humanity for just trying to make sure the Idiot didn’t starve to death it’s going to leave you with a little attitude.  And after a  little overexposure to the helpless clueless Adam, I’m sure Eve was more that ready to strike out on her own. That rotten Adam just knew where all good things came from so he followed her.

Can you imagine the kind of cruel god that would only bring half of the human race into being to be slaves of the other? Eden wasn’t a fine spot at least not for the “Hand-Maiden” or “Helper” or whatever you want to call that supposed upright rib of Adam’s who’ll never get a fair break because she’s a girl. So as a little girl I hear this story and I think…no way…just born to be somebody maid? Not my God, SHE wouldn’t do this. To this day I’m convinced this rule book was written by a bunch of old stinky men with an agenda…keep the girls in their place …well below us. I mean even before Adam and Eve broke out of the big house, Eve had all the work to do. Hmmm, not a lot changed after that either. So I guess Eden was for only one guy anyway.

And we’ve come a long way, baby..believeing in that crap…from the Bible to Desperate Housewives to the sad soulless images projected by the caricatures of Jersey Shore.   

 I started writing how currently the media uses such stereotypes as; Desperate Housewives, The Bachelor…you name it, there’s just a host of terrible stereotypes out there. And then during my research on the web I ran into a multitude of articles that talked about shows like Jersey Shore or Housewives of Orange County, shows that took woman already marginalized by their Barbie looks and I realized as long as we continue to believe this garden of Eden crap, helpmate crap were doomed to be caricatures of ourselves. Drop the fake stories whether they be in a  bible or a fairy princess storybook and claim your own life and realize that you ARE the reason for any number of peoples survival and that doesn’t take a helpmate slave…that takes a hero, YOU.

And that’s who you really are, the every woman…a hero, somebody who works the job, pays the rent , hunts and gathers and raises those children. The real heroes are the one’s that just do it.

I can remember years ago, a writer friend of mine needed a little extra income (o.k., any income) and I did also, so we brainstormed which between the two of us is rather like watching a summer storm  pass through, lots of noise with very little results. Anyway,  we came up with the idea to start a cleaning company. I don’t know what possessed us. After a little advertising in a local paper we came up with two leads.

The first was a lady and her husband who had a huge immaculate house to themselves on Clifton Blvd. in Lakewood, the house was perfect and she cleaned it herself with all natural products as she showed me around top to bottom it was more like a tour of her accomplishments. I was sure we would let her down, there was no way we could come in once a week and keep this thing up. Perhaps because she’s clearly a neatnik and was also a retired Teacher and I worried that we would ever be able to meet her standards and having had the experience of letting down any number of principles and teachers I recognized a losing prospect when I saw it and just felt lucky to escape the job interview and walk out of her life period, sans Report Card.

The second opportunity was more along our lines of something Tidy and I could accomplish without depressing the owner. In the upper reaches of a Lakewood’s Gold Coast there lived a lovely couple in a double sized penthouse suite, a double wide if you please…like a trailer but not. Kings of the veritable castle they where, and nice quiet couple to boot this attorney and his wife.

 They had bought the next door penthouse and knocked down the common wall so as to create a large gourmet kitchen for the wife with sizeable dining area that looked over their lofty balcony onto a shoreline dotted with boats and ending with the cityscape of Cleveland twinkling at your feet.  Well I interviewed with the wife for the job of cleaning the family abode for reasonable sum and Tidy and I started the next week. We only had one scare while working there and that was on the first day when I had outfitted both the Tidymeister and myself with pails, mops and scrub brushes and directed him to one end of the giant Penthouse and I would start at the other. That rascal came back right at the beginning and tapped me on the shoulder and in ”first time Jitters” asked, “where do I start?” Then I remembered what his office looked like…dust bunnies the size of his dog Harry. Yipes…”Start at the top”, I told him. First swipe the top of all the walls for spidy webs and then dust down the walls then clean every little table make every little bed and finish vacuuming or scrubbing the floor whatever’s required. And damned if we didn’t meet back at the pass…(the center of the apartment the front door) in about 4 1/2 hours. Pretty good for a first run.

So years later, I’m living far far away and I get invited to join this rather exclusive ”Book Club” at this County Club out here. Already I’m thinking, “Country Club”? me? what?…o.k. I’ll bite. So I go to the “Christmas Party”, meet some really nice women hear some of their good writing in their annual christmas greeting to each other, and I’m all nervous…then suddenly it occurs to me, I’ll NEVER be here again, then I can relax and just really enjoy meeting each and every one of them and listening to their stories. At one point (across the Creme Brulee), the woman directly opposite, tells a story about Scuba diving with her husband in the Caribbean..and I’m looking at her and I can really see her underwater, hair swishing gently around her head mask in place, and I think, boy can these women tell some great stories.

 About 2 am it all came back to me, it wasn’t her storytelling abilities…I had acutually seen this woman and her husband underwater. Everytime I dusted the silver framed pictures on her Credenza in that huge penthouse. 

What a life, you never know where or when the dots are going to connect. She hadn’t recognized me and until my subconscience had a “Upon further review ” period, I hadn’t realized I was staring across my Creme Brulee at a former employer. Small wonderful world.

You just never know where that cleaning lady will show up. So stay kind!

“One minute I was looking out my window into the greeny-gold twilight under the live oak, watching a towhee kick up the leaves, and the next I saw that the air beyond the tree was scratched with fine rain.”

-the air beyond the tree scratched with fine rain…” I put the book down, I closed my eyes and could see the rain scratching the air. Such is the power of a well turned sentence. And I am in awe of it.

I treasure a well done sentence above jewels. I collect them and occasionally bring them out and ponder them with amazement. This ability with just a few words to place a perfect stranger in any setting the author wishes, anytime, anyplace. The author Stephen King (2000) in the book “On Writing’  (Superb) explains as only he can do just how amazing the time and place machines engaged in writing are. Get the book “On Writing” by Stephen King and read it, it’s wonderful.

But when It comes to sentences, I’ve already found my personal favorite. This is the sentence I turn to make sense of the world when all else fails me. It was written by a brilliant woman/mother/nurse/scholar/author named Elizabeth Berg and it’s as good as anything my hero Steinbeck ever wrote.

It’s from Berg’s (1995) book “Range of Motion”.

“I am living on a planet where the silk dresses of Renaissance women rustled, where people died in plagues, where Mozart sat to play, where sap runs in the spring, where children are caught in the crossfire, where gold glints from rock, where religion shines its light only to lose its way, where people stop to reach a hand to help each other to cross, where much is known about the life of the ant, where the gift of getting my husband back was as accidental as my almost losing him, where the star called sun shows itself differently at every hour, where people get so  bruised and confused they kill each other, where baobabs grow into impossible shapes with trunks that tell stories to hands, where rivers wind wide and green with terrible hidden currents, where you rise in the morning and feel your own arms with your own hands, checking yourself, where lovers’ hearts swell with the certain knowledge that only they are the ones, where viruses are seen under the insistent eye of the microscope and the birth of stars is witnessed through the lens of the telescope, where caterpillars crawl and skyscrapers are erected because of the blue line on the blueprint– I am living here on this planet, it is my time to have my legs walk the earth, and I am turning around to tell Jay once again, ”Yes, here.” I am saying that all of this, all of this, all of these things are the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude , and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of my might. 

Be kind to yourself, remember “Elizabeth Berg” and get some of her work.  I’m off to finish Wallace Stegner’s “All the little live things” (1967)…

Berg, E. (1995). Range of motion. New York, New York: Random House, Inc.

King, S. (2000). On writing. New York, New York: Pocket Books.

Stegner, W. (1967). All the little live things. New York, New York: Viking Press.

Now keep in mind that my father had acquired a huge green formica topped table, he then hacksawed off half of the lead pipe legs to make it really short to get it down the basement steps. He somehow managed to squeeze it through that side door and down those steps.  The thing was huge. It must have been 4 foot across by about 12 foot long. He had some friends that were in the dry cleaning business and I suspect when they remodeled their facility Daddy jumped at their huge laundry table. Well what had seemed like a good idea soon became the catch-all for any and everything in the basement. And with a family of 8 daughters and 1 son the tides that surged back and forth across that table with every change of the season. The only consistent thing was the dog. My nephew had a little pug named “Ty” who just loved to snuggle up in those clean clothes. And every night that pug would be put into the basement for the night so it wouldn’t go all over the house.

The only problem there was once it got tired of being kept on that cold cement basement floor so ”Ty” figured a way to jump into those clothes. Dad couldn’t figure it out, I mean after all the table top was at least 3 1/2 feet off the ground. There was simply no way that tiny pug could jump that far.  At least that’s what Dad thought. And he was right. Ty simply “thought it out” and climbed the stairs and leaped into those warm clothes. Once my Father figured out that was how he did it the race was on. Just like outsmarting the Raccoons, Dad was going to crack this case and keep that damn dog out of his laundry.

Well Dad’s solution was ingenious, and very profitable for Home Depot, I’m sure. Start with a few 2×4’s, make a frame 12 foot by 4 foot  and make it 1 foot deep. Now run chicken wire all around the sides. Make a frame top covered with chicken wire and set the lid so that it opens and closes with a pulley system involving a sand filled bleach bottle. You get the picture. All this in defense of a dog the size of a big rat.  A giant chicken wire box to keep the dog out and the clean clothes safe.

I still think Ty would occasionally stand on the top and pee just to get even with Dad.

But what was worse occasionally the pulley didn’t work or jammed or  whatever and Dad’s mechanically challenged daughters and grandchildren would all stand around cursing our captive clothes. I’d swear I could hear that dog snicker…it had a kind of asthma where you could hear it breathe. Eerie!?!  And I can’t tell you over the course of years how many of us hit our heads on that damn thing. I can only imagine the scar tissue aquired to this day. But at least he kept the dog out, kind of…

I did notice shortly after the academic challenge of the basement, Dad started talking to Ty when they were alone together. And finally he actually started greeting the little guy everytime he went to the basement. He was just amazed that the dog figured it out. I think he was proud of him.

This reminds me of a story about my husband’s Dad. This happened years ago when Bill tried to get a loose dead branch out of that giant Oak tree that stands still in front of his childhood home in Lakewood. That tree is over 80 feet tall and towers over Westwood Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio. Well Bill, (Dave’s Dad) tied some twine around a hammer and threw the hammer up into the tree to snag the branch. Well it got stuck so Bill pulled and pulled and darned if that hammer didn’t come back flying at him. At this point his son (my Dave) suggested perhaps a tennis ball with an eyehook screwed into it tied onto twine and pitched into the tree would work… with the thinking that if that thing comes back and hits us it’s not gonna hurt as much.

But the best was their garage. Why does every Dad do battle with the structure of the Garage and the permits required by City Hall? Well, they had this old warped garage out back that had shimmeyed and shammied and warped itself out of all proportion. The side walls were bowed, similar to a cowboys legs. Well , Bill had just the fix for this. He recruited his boys help. Both Tom and Dave where there for the great straightening out attempt.

What they did was this, they put heavy-duty hooks in each wall opposite each other and then attached a tool called a “come-along” (already this sounds bad).

The tool had a ratchet handle with cable with hooks at each end and you attach the hook to another hook then the other hook so your finally standing in the middle of the garage with cables attached to each hook…then you crank the handle slowly to draw the cable ends toward each other …thus pulling the “bow” out of the wall.

How do you say; LOTS OF TENSION.

Well, with the last twist something snapped and the three of them took off running out of there as fast as they could. “Upon further review”,  from the front yard they could see the garage was still as crooked when they started. Ah, but now there were handy hooks on the wall to hang things from….except 1 hook…that was totally straightened out.

All this to straighten one hook. Guys and Dads…you gotta love ‘em.

I will only explain this once more;

The operative part of the word “washer” is wash. Washing is not an intriguing or adventurous task. It’s something that requires one to roam this three-story home in search of clothing, to carry the load down into an old-fashioned,shadowy, damp, underground room which is littered with incompleted projects and dirty clothes, tends to be inhabited by large miscellaneous insects and is occasionally flooded. There is nothing more distressing than reaching for an article of clothing on such a floor, only to discover it moves much faster than you do. After gathering enough clothing to actually fill the washer ( because cleaning only one thing is a waste of water and time ) the search for detergent begins. After chiseling the correct amount of soap from the box and turning the appliance on, most people have experienced this basement enough to know that they shouldn’t walk , but run. Mission completed, it’s off to bed. Of course, by the time you’re conscious again, it’s already too late. As you stand before the washer, both shocked and forlorn, you find that the clothing, so painstakingly cleaned, have met their fate in a puddle on the floor. I don’t think you understand the trauma Mom. You couldn’t know how it feels because it’s never happened to you. But someday, you must tell me what it’s like to reach into a load of fresh, watery clothes and instead of helping on their voyage to cleanliness, you carelessly toss them into a pile on the floor. They are left there like a trophy of your evil-doing, while in the morning their owners are left to mourn the loss. This tragedy continues to grow in frequency as nearby a mystery also thrives. How is it that when so few clothes reach their goal of being dried by a machine instead of a drafty basement there remain at least twelve static-removing dryer sheets in the dryer at all times? It’s a question that boggles the mind. But worry not, as said by the Bible; “They that hope in the Lord will renew their strength…”(Isaiah 40;31) So pick up dripping laundry and carry on, for the goal of dryness is literally only inches away. It’s thoughts like these that provide the persistence needed to carry the same shirts, shorts, and towels to the washer three times in a row. Now with these encouraging words in mind, I leave you with some wise advice that was passed on to me at an outrageously early age.

Step 1# Finding the Clothes

Walk through rooms and wander the basement. The clothes are usually restricted to the floor under the strict laws of gravity, so keep your eyes down. When you have found enough for one entire load go to step two.  – Hint; Collect either all whites, all colors, and be careful – because like broken hearts, clothes do bleed.

Step 2 # Finding the Washer

On the far wall of the basement are two large, white, metal boxes. If you face them, the one on the RIGHT is the washer* (refer to end of pages). Place the clothes into the washer. It opens on the top and the clothes do not need to be put inside in any particular order. Find the detergent and measure out the right amount indicated on the detergent box. -Hint; If no detergent is present, use some shampoo or dish soap. Avoid bar soap No matter how good (flowery, lemony) the soap smells, DO NOT TASTE IT.

Now close the lid and push the dial in turn the dial to either “medium” or “large’ to indicate size of load. Close the detergent and exit the basement, preferably the same way you entered it.

Step 3# Transporting Clothes

When the washer has stopped for more than 30 seconds remove the clothes by reopening the lid. They will be fresh and watery and you will be tempted to drop them on the floor. Don’t. The clothes won’t say this so you’ll have to take my word for it. Place the clothes into the dryer. Close the dryer door (it’s in front). Clean the lint trap by pulling it out from the top of the machine. The soft stuff clinging to the screen is the lint. Peel the lint off and replace the screen trap. Throw the lint away. The lint may look colorful and feel soft, but don’t keep it, for there will be more. I’m sure that the dryer has at least a roll or two of static sheets , so don’t add any. Turn the dial to a time that you know will sufficiently dry the clothes. Push the start button. You’re doing well. – Hint; The dryer may seem nice and warm, but if cold turn up the heat. Turning the dryer on won’t work. Use the thermostat to warm the house. Don’t put anything alive in the dryer to get warm, the dryer is for clothes only.

Step 4# Handing the Clothes/Folding

Remove the clothes from the dryer. Use the plastic hanger to hold the dry clothes in the air. This keeps them from wrinkling. Use the hangers hooks to suspend them on a bar or  fold the clothes neatly. -Hint; Folding clothes isn’t like folding paper. Remember- this isn’t a situation like paper, you don’t need scissors.

*Washer- (wash’er, wo’sher)n. 1. One that washes, esp. a machine for washing. 2. A small disk, as of metal, placed under a nut or at an axle bearing to relieve friction, prevent leakage, or distribute pressure. aka washing machine. Source The American Heritage Dictionary Published by Dell

sincerely,   Your Children

P.S. I love you. 

***A note from my Sue when she was 13…she nailed it to the basement door…

just click on that above and enjoy this info.

Thanks to TED and TYWKIWDBI