June 30 – Born On a Summer Wind

by Nancilynn Saylor

My first child was born on the last day of June in 1968. If not for my excitement, he may not have arrived until well into July. I remembered my paternal Aunts and my Mother and Granny telling stories about childbearing, hearing “Castor oil would coax a reluctant baby from the womb.”

It was hot that summer, in Abilene, Texas. Actually saying it was hot does grave injustice to the weather that June. Temperatures were in excess of 100 for weeks on end. Hot and dry just as I was in the full bloom of my pregnancy. Many things gnawed at my sanity as I lumbered up and down the sidewalks stained with droppings from the canopy of Mulberry trees. I could not get cool or comfortable; for distraction I was reading Rosemary’s baby.

I purchased Castor oil; if there were instructions given in the conversation overheard long years before, I’d forgotten them. Mixed half and half with Welch’s grape juice, I swallowed it. I busied myself in the baby’s room waiting for”the potion” to do its magic. Awakening the next morning with no baby, I immediately drank the other half.

Another hot day of walking miles down the purple stained sidewalks. My feet were swollen beyond description, and my neighbor’s everyday lunch of liver and onions had landed unpleasantly on my last nerve. The frown on my face was getting comfortable there when at last-a cramp (or maybe not a cramp followed by what I knew then had to be, contractions. “Glory be!” There really was going to be a baby!

Dusk dimmed the long summer afternoon. I walked. About midnight, I woke the lucky father; we got word it was “time.” I thought 10 minutes apart meant imminent birth.Alas, this was not the end but the beginning. The excitement I felt when I arrived melted as the minutes slowly passed followed by hours that passed as slowly. I have a sense that the frown came back and stayed throughout the day.

They discovered the baby was breach; they flipped him and he flipped back…multiple times. I remember losing my charm with the nurse when she reported the Dad was asleep in the waiting room. I meanwhile was groaning and imagining I had slipped into Rosemary’s Baby as a secondary story-line.

After 12 hours the Dr. decided to break my water to “hurry things along.” The air-conditioner in the hospital also decided to break;it was 118 degrees outside. The day was melting slowly; in early evening they announced it was time. I let everyone within earshot know it had been time long before that!

One last flip of the boy-who-wanted-to-be-breach and he was here! Many years later he told me he was not ready to face this world.He really loved the heat of summer; his favorite time of year.

He arrived here on a smoldering hot day in June. Oddly, he left the world on almost the same kind of day, 36 Junes later.

Nancilynn resides in Austin,Texas with her Romeo and two needy dogs! After taking Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a gift to her after the death of her oldest child, she joined Story Circle. She writes in E Circles 4, 5 and 6. 

June 29 — My Mother’s Gift

by Andrea Savee

WHEN I DIE by Beulah Irene Hagedorn

When I die
close my eyes.
I will have
gone away.
Keep the news
quiet.
My departure will be
unnoticed,
except to you
who hear me
and watch.

Be quiet yourselves.
Hold no public services.
Sing a song
you like,
and deal with loss
your way.
I will watch.

Let no one look
at my empty body.
Give it back
to the earth,
quickly, quietly
and move on.
God watches.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

1921 by Beulah Irene Hagedorn

No one
came
to the
chamber
where
I waited
inviting
me
to be born.

I slid
down
the corridor
and entered
this side
of life
in a small
square room,
out
of a
nineteen
year old girl
to a
twenty year old
boy
who held
me and
whispered
“welcome”.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My mother wrote these poems in June of her seventy-ninth year. My mother, Beulah Irene Hagedorn, died June twenty third, two thousand four, six days before her eighty-third birthday. She left me all the words she’d ever written.

A flat rectangular dress-box bulges with hundreds of pieces of yellowing paper of various sizes. She began writing at age sixty following the end of her thirty year marriage. She wrote to save her life and her sanity, always in her usual elegant and steady script.

In the last decade of her life, she spent many months assembling a photo album in the large upstairs bonus room of her house. Pressed between the plastic sheets aren’t photos, but typed pages of poems, thoughts, remembrances filled with sorrow and grief, rantings and regrets. Eventually, reconciliations, revelations, and peace:

“I stayed and faced my demons where I had created them, where I found them–in the bedroom, at the dining table, in my children’s eyes, my ex-father-in-law’s groans, my ex-mother-in-law’s strained struggle to cope, and the dark accusing hours when my inner voices badgered me into hell and back. Finally, I walked through the night into the day repeating a litany of God’s promises of love and forgiveness, forgiving everyone in memory until I came to myself.”

I grew up hearing a fairy tale that turned out to be the story of my own beginning. She recorded this on one of her pages:

“My fourth child was conceived on August twenty seven, nineteen hundred and fifty nine because I knew from an unknown source deep within me that there was a child who would be a special gift to me.”

I grew up hearing my mother’s story from its beginning and living it with her to its end. In my hands now is her life in her own words de-constructed and re-constructed on the page. Words no one else has ever read. Until now.

Andrea Savee lives in Lakewood, California with her husband, Mike, and their cat, Chico. Retired from a career in business, Andrea enjoys traveling and writing. Her work has appeared in SCN journals and anthologies.

June 23 — A Distant Death

The day before my whole family was due to board a plane to Florida for my husband’s family reunion cruise, I got a call from my uncle Phil, who was a complete stranger to me.

My father left at my birth and we didn’t meet until I was fifteen.  I was apprised of his life by phone calls from his mother, as he went through six wives and became a Navy retiree.  However, Paul and I had not spoken personally for ages.  Grandma said he had a contract job in Saudi Arabia for the previous few years, and consequently I thought nothing of the lack of communication.

Ours was always a distant relationship.  He was a ghost who drifted in and out through the stories of others or the pangs I got when watching my husband being a fabulous father to our girls.

Paul showed no interest in me, and only once appeared in person when he mistakenly thought my mother was signing my custody away.  I realized even at fifteen, that though he was the sperm donor and a source of my genealogy, he was no father to me.  He never even expressed any interest in his granddaughters as they joined our lives, and I suppose that is when I finally truly wrote him off as a loss.

They say little girls grow up to marry their fathers, but I must say that was not my experience.  Instead, I had the freedom to make up the “wish list” for the man I would one day marry, and I think it worked out much better that way.  My father was the most emotionally remote person I have ever met, and I think I would have spent my life trying to please someone who could not be pleased.  It would have made me a far different person than I am today.

So, back to the call and that unusual day; Uncle Phil was calling to say that my father had committed suicide in prison.  I was shocked and actually thought for a moment that he was pulling some kind of cruel joke, but no, it was true.  Paul had not been in Saudi Arabia for two years…he had been in prison and met his end there that day.  I don’t know if this was the result of many years of mental illness or whether he was just tired of being alone.  Based on the crime that sent him to prison, I would assume the former, but I will never know.  It is mildly ironic that my work now is in mentoring programs for children of the incarcerated, for I never dreamed I would eventually be one.

He will never know me or what I have done in my life.  He will never know his beautiful, intelligent granddaughters who are achieving so much in theirs, and of course, they will never know him.

Not even in my stories, for I have none that would cause them to care.

I am a wife, mother, performer, businesswoman, philanthropist, genealogist and lover of life and a fan of the free will which God has given me to choose what I will do and just how happy I will be doing it!  http://kalipr.wordpress.com

Then Came the Rain

by Khadijah

This morning we were sent the gift of rain. Month after month of dry, hot, humid weather, the sky an unforgiving blue so light it was almost white…and then this morning, rain.

Khalil and I sat by sea, watching the village fishing fleet heading out at sunrise, the sound of their motors swallowed by the great heartbeat of the sea. A few dark clouds were scattered across the sky, glowering slightly at the dry earth below but if I have learned one thing here on the coast of the Arabian Sea, it is that clouds like that rarely fulfill their promise of rain. So we perched on a pile of rocks (probably sharing them with several crabs, but I try not to think about that), holding hands and enjoying being, and being together. Then Khalil said, “Lift up your veil.” I did, and I felt the tiny kisses of the softly falling rain, and I remembered.

A few months after coming to Yemen, we moved to a lovely little village in the mountains north of Sana’a. We had heard there was a rainy season, but after a couple of months of living there had yet to experience it. It seems like it was late in coming, as they began doing the rain prayer at the masjid. I was going through a tough time then; my sister was dying out of reach on the other side of the world, and I was feeling alone and out of control. For a recovering anorexic, feeling out of control is one of the things that can set one back to destructive habits, and I was fighting that as well.

The email came on a sunny, bright morning – my brother writing to tell me that Patty had finally passed in the night. My husband was at work, it was just the children and me at home. I gave the baby to my oldest son and went to hang the laundry up on the roof. As I walked up the steps, he called up to tell me that they had held another rain prayer. In the numbness of my soul, I dismissed this as being fruitless, meaningless. I pushed open the metal door and stepped out into the morning air, and breathed a breath of…rain?

And it fell. The rain fell, first gently, caressing, and I turned my face up to receive its grace. I dropped the basket of clothes and walked to the edge of the roof, and leaned over just as the rain began to come down in sheets. As I watched the dry earth soak up the blessed water, I felt a little knot inside of me loosen, and with the release of the rain from a sky that had held its breath for months, I allowed myself to mourn Patty’s death, and celebrate her life, and to be reminded of the beauty and order and greater wisdom that is always there, even when my eyes are closed, if I simply open my heart.

Khadijah grew up in the Kickapoo Valley in Wisconsin and now lives in Yemin with her husband and eight children where she teaches Arabic and Islaamic studies to women and helps them recognize their importance and the need for their stories to be heard. Khadijah was the winner of the 2010 Story Circle Network Lifewriting Competition.

June 7 – Sprung

by Andrea Savee

Like many people, I spent much of my childhood playing outdoors and my adulthood working indoors. As a kid, I lived close to the ground–on sidewalks, dirt lots, and green lawns–skipping, cart-wheeling, and hop-scotching my way through the seasons toward summer.

Once there, I wanted to stay forever: climbing trees and hanging across their broad branches until the sun-heated sidewalk looked like the place to sprawl or the cool green lawn the spot to stretch out on our bellies in search of lady bugs and buttercups; bare foot on balmy nights; licking crèamsicles, playing softball, riding bikes; visiting Aunt Ramona Mae and Uncle Delbert’s Iowa hog farm.

The delicate and lively watercolor wash of spring didn’t stand a chance against the thick oily spread of summer in capturing and holding my attention. I took the full but subtle splendor of that sophisticated season for granted in the innocent way children can.

I continued to do so as an adult. In fact, for twenty some-odd years, I watched all the changing seasons through the windows of my coffee houses and celebrated them only commercially: Spring/ Easter; Summer/Independence Day; Fall/ Thanksgiving; Winter/Christmas. These were the years for production and acquisition; I didn’t mind what I was missing.

Career building behind us, my husband and I are now less doers than observers. No longer tethered to time schedules, we’re rediscovering the childhood freedom of unfettered days. We’re settling down and sinking into our patio chairs, regarding the world around us instead of being distracted from it. As such, this spring, my 51st, has been a months-long meditation on that heretofore under-appreciated season.

We’re in the robust years of retirement–we still have our original hips–and could be RV-ing. Instead, we’re journeying to our back patio for morning coffee and our front porch for evening cocktails. We spend much of a typical spring day in two green plastic chairs that we shimmy around the lawn in search of shade when we’re too warm and sun when we’re too cool. From these mobile virtual desks, we sort mail, chat on the phone, and visit with neighbors.

In between, I take Mary Oliver’s counsel and “keep my mind on what matters…which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished:” by the wind through the Golden Rain trees thick with shimmering leaves, kids laughing, and kitchen dishes clinking; the aroma of onions frying, burgers barbecuing, and freshly mown grass; Red Trumpet Vine and budding agapanthus standing ready to announce summer’s arrival; stately Chrysler Imperial roses and erupting Birds of Paradise; purple Sweet Peas, pink Mophead hydrangeas, and yellow irises; lavender and amaryllis; grasshoppers and mud wasps; and a second brood of Phoebes nesting in the eaves.

I cross the half century mark enriched by the company of my old new friend–spring–and reminded of the paraphrased wisdom of George Santayana: to be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with summer.

Andrea Savee lives in Lakewood, California with her husband, Mike, and their cat, Chico. Retired from a career in business, Andrea enjoys traveling and writing. Her work has appeared in SCN journals and anthologies.