I was thinking about Mema last week more than I noticed until yesterday. Sometimes I do that with thoughts: I look them over, nod, and toss them onto the library cart for re-shelving. Better than ninety-five percent of the time, that works like it’s supposed to, despite my mental library’s being staffed by penguins.
That less than five percent, though, y’all? When the system breaks down, it can result in ideas I can’t shake for days, or worse, not until I translate the root disturbance into bad poetry to trap its troublesome ass so it no longer vexes me.
Yesterday’s system failure was not so dramatic. Or maybe I’m understating the drama, because it really doesn’t compare to the current drama going on with our septic system, but … that’s another pile of crap. Literally.
So, my current project is drawn from a number of books, folders, and burned diaries stored on my imaginary shelves. I don’t have many recent photographs of the real-life areas I’m converting to fiction, something I’m gradually correcting when I find myself at a loss for the bigger picture that the characters could see if they looked around.
Yesterday, I pulled up Mema’s house on Google Maps to remind myself what it looked like when I last saw it: 2016, when I went back for Mom’s funeral. Mom sold the property in the early 2000s, years after my sister and I left.
This is where I come from. It did not look like this in 2016.
There are two lots in this picture. I grew up in the house that’s possibly abandoned (though that is not guaranteed) and definitely overgrown with weeds. There used to be another house where the broken driveway led to. The ghost home belonged to Mrs. Winstead when I was a kid, and it was sold after her death to someone who decided to rent it out. I forget how many sketchy tenants next door it took for Mom to get fed up and convince the property owner to sell it to her. Keep in mind that Mema and Mom didn’t practice babyproofing. They also tolerated Mrs. Winstead’s episodes of kidnapping me when I was a new toddler1. ‘Too many sketchy tenants’ is probably the best answer.
After cleaning up the mess left by the last renter, Mom tried to persuade my aunt to move back to their hometown and take over the house. Tried. Failed. I took notes. I was then at the age when I was becoming aware that “you need to earn a full scholarship and go to college” and “there’s nothing here for you” were truths Mom felt she needed to tell me but that she didn’t necessarily want to keep believing were true. I wanted to be prepared for when she changed her mind.
Mom was able to rent the place right away to a lady who needed somewhere to stay while another house was being renovated for her. That worked out well, but only for a few months, and after a series of tenants who turned out to be just a more outwardly presentable variety of sketchy, Mom gave up on the idea of being a landlord. The house sat empty until she got tired of keeping it livable and defended against would-be squatters; selling it would have likely seen it turned back into a rental home, one she had no control over.
She “didn’t know why” neither of her girls wanted it.
As I anticipated, she had changed her mind.
As I hadn’t imagined, my sister had also prepared for that.
Mom tore the house down and had the workshop built, which is still visible in the picture behind the mowed strip of lawn. I don’t know when this picture was taken, but it appears that whoever owned the property at the time was still using the workshop, despite having let Mema’s house go.
I’m doing something similar, I suppose: using the notes I took and the tools I was given back then and letting go of the rest. At least as much as the penguins will let me!
I’ve gone back to close third for the project. Writing it in first was exhausting, and switching between different characters in first person made me gibber enough to alarm the dog, who has started napping or near my feet when I’m writing, possibly because he hasn’t been lulled into a false sense of security about my being here all the time and he wants to be sure I don’t slip out when he’s not looking.
This doesn’t stop me, but maybe he feels better.
- I don’t remember the kidnappings, but I did grow up being told that the patch in the front door was there because Mrs. Winstead cut through the screen from the outside so she could unhook the door and get me without waking up Mom. The first episode was intertwined with the story of the day I decided to wax the living room parquet while Mom was passed out on the couch. She and Mema used paste wax in those days: the kind that required getting down on hands and knees to apply with a cloth. Mom left cloth diapers and an open jar of Vaseline on the coffee table beside the couch, and I … had already learned how to climb out of my playpen. Whoops. She woke up, realized I was no longer in my baby cage, got up, slid across the living room, crashed into the wall, then noticed the screen door had been cut and unhooked.
I had mental notes related to this story filed under “Why I’m Not Going To Have a Kid When I’m 19”. Being thirty-six didn’t prevent me from passing out on the couch one afternoon when my son was a toddler (in my defense: he was in my arms napping, and I was fighting a cold). We still don’t know how he was able to sneak off and color on the ceiling of the home office my husband had set up in the loft, a la maybe supplementing Baby Michelangelo with content about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel was a bad idea, Shai. ↩︎
Modus Dementi 