Memoir

Litany

/ Fran Haley / 8 Comments

Did you cry, people asked me.

I didn’t.

I am not sure it will make sense: I rested.

In the deep, wordless way of culmination.

My boy walked me down the aisle and seated me at the second pew, in the same spot where I sit each Sunday while his father preaches. In the same spot where I sat while I was expecting him and felt him stop moving whenever the piano was played, where I knew he was listening to the music before he was ever born. In the same spot where I sat with him in my arms for the first time during worship, when he was four days old.

I rested in the remembering.

I rested in the preparations being complete, and the long-awaited moment at hand.

I rested in the expression on my boy’s face, making his vows to his bride. I have never seen a groom with so tender a countenance. I marveled, and rested.

I rested, and rejoiced, that his father lived to officiate after suffering such serious health setbacks in recent years.

His father began to cry during the ceremony.

I rested in that love. In the overcoming. In the triumph.

I rested in the presence of my husband’s sister, that she traveled to be here, that she reminded my boy of his grandmother who loved him so. Ma-Ma is here, you know, she told my boy just before the wedding. She cried, too, over how much he looks like her mother.

I rested in the knowledge that my sister-in-law remembers her mother every time she sees a cardinal, her mother’s favorite bird. A symbolic bird, representing Christ. I remembered that my sister-in-law and my boy were holding Ma-Ma’s hands when she died. I rested in the serendipity of my boy’s bride choosing her wedding gown before she knew it was named “The Cardinal.” It happens to be her own grandmother’s favorite bird.

I rested in the significance of my boy’s precious bride wearing her grandmother’s pearls and my earrings, the third bride in the family to do so, after my first daughter-in-law and my youngest niece, who came with her new baby to see her cousin married. I recalled buying those earring for my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

I rested in that.

I rested in the timing, in late September marking the births of my grandfather and my husband as well as the loss of my father, and that it now marks new joy.

I rested in the day, in the glorious cusp-of-autumn sunshine, in this season of scuppernongs and piercing calls of red-shouldered hawks. I rested in the symbolism of wildflowers that my new daughter-in-law loves so well; although delicate and fragile, they are incredibly adaptable and resilient. They represent delight of the soul. She carried wildflowers; they were the pattern of my boy’s tie. Her dress and their wedding rings also bear vines—a symbol of deep spiritual significance.

I rested in the Scripture my husband read, from the second chapter of the Song of Solomon, the first time he’s ever used it in a wedding:

My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

I rest in the fact that my boy and his bride reside just four minutes away from me.

And I rest in the vows that they wrote and spoke to each other, and in the invisible thread that pulled them together, drawn by the hand of God.

Yes.

I rest in the litany of it all.

My boy and me in front of the church after the ceremony.
Behind us is the parsonage where we lived when he was born.

Photos by Kailey B. Photograhy

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the wonderful sharing-place
known as the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

A girl and her grandpa

/ Fran Haley / 8 Comments

She’s almost three now. When he leaves the room, she asks: “Where’s my grandpa?”

She’s not afraid of his eyepatch or his closed eye beneath it. She commands him: “Open your eye. It’s laying down.” He can’t keep it open, even with the prosthesis. One day he’ll tell her how he lost that eye, that beautiful brown eye, so like her own. But not yet.

She knows he takes heart medication. She sees the bottles and pats her own chest: “That’s Grandpa’s medicine. For his heart. From the doctor.”

She knows he’s wearing a heart monitor. She crawls in his lap, tugs on his shirt, and says, “I want to see your heart.” He pulls the fabric over to reveal the monitor. She studies it. Her little brows knit.

She knows he sometimes walks with a cane. She finds it leaning against the wall and carries it to him. She doesn’t appear to recall his recuperation from spine surgery last fall, or that it was months before he could pick her up again. He started doing it before he should have. He couldn’t resist those little outstretched arms and the request, “Hold you.”

She wants me to play hide-and-seek in the house with her so he can find us. She hides in the same place every single time: behind a chair in the living room. She wriggles with anticipation and puts her fingers to her lips with a loud, stage whisper directed at me: “SHHHHHH!” She doesn’t know how obvious we are in our so-called hiding place. He plays along, walking through the house: “Where’s Micah? Where’s Franna? Are they in the closet? Are they in the bathroom?” She answers him with a high-pitched, drawn-out “Noooooo!” When he peers over our chair, she shrieks with delight.

She demands: “Grandpa, upside down!” He takes her little legs, swings her upside down like a pendulum. Her brown hair flies and her face radiates with glee. “Again!” she cries. “Again!” He will keep doing it until his back makes him stop.

She came to the recent wedding shower for her Dada’s younger brother. She crawled under the church fellowship hall table to play. Grandpa, the pastor, crawled under with her.

My first thought: They really are on the same level.

Second thought: Look how that back surgery paid off!

At dinner this week, he told her: “You are Grandpa’s little angel, Micah.”

She looked at him a moment, those dark eyes shining. She replied, “You are Micah’s angel.”

He always will be, my little love.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

Green comfort

/ Fran Haley / 8 Comments

Written 7/9/2024

Today I type my thoughts while sitting by the green-gray Atlantic. Ancient undulations roll on and on like Time itself, cascading into new foam as brief and bright as this new morning.

The older I become (this is the last year of my fifties) the more I contemplate the brevity of things. Suddenly—it seems—the kids are grown with lives of their own. The granddaughters are older and smarter every day. Micah, age two-and-three-quarters, carries on a conversation like an adult. She knows what “be brave” means. She will need that attribute in life more than she can know.

I have.

My husband walks out into the waters for a moment. He’s not much of a beachgoer anymore, after all his medical crises in recent years. He’s here because I want to be. Because I need a little salt, a little sun, probably a lot of Vitamin D, and the comfort of this vast continuum. We loved the beach when we were young. Almost thirty-nine years into the marriage, the ocean is personal metaphor, a living promise, ceaseless.

Ever how grounded I may be in my faith, I am not immune to lapses. Today, as I logged on to write this post, WordPress offered a prompt:

What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?

And in my email inbox, a devotion from Our Daily Verse on increasing perseverance.

For me, the key to increasing comfort and perseverance in daily life begins with remembering that God is still God. No matter what. Not merely the limb on which I perch when I’m tired and despairing, but the whole of existence. The true eternal. Generations of our whole human history rise and fall like the ocean waves, and God holds it all.

The sun grows hot. My husband can’t take it for long, and, truth be told, neither can I. Our morning by the sea is brief. We must seek a respite. Somewhere shadowy and green.

I can’t help thinking of forgiveness as a green thing…well-watered with tears, surely, but under its lush canopy, comfort. Rest. Freedom. Peace. As we prepare to leave the shore, my husband and I watch parasailors. How peaceful it must be, so high above it all. I wonder what they hear up there. Here on the ground I hear the ocean’s roar, a strain of cicadas in the scrubby brush, and a baby laughing nearby, playing in the sand.

Some of my favorite sounds on Earth.

Along with the house finch singing as soon as we arrived at the beach this morning. I heard it as soon as I opened the car door. Instantly recognizable. It’s the beautiful song I hear on my front porch every spring and summer. In itself, the sound of perseverance. Of home. It seems to follow me everywhere I go. “Hello, Finch,” I called back to him, perched there in his crape myrtle tree, his little head and breast as red as sunset.

At a recent gathering, my neighbor joked that we’ve reached the time of life in which we just want to watch birds.

There’s comfort in it.

Yesterday while walking through the beach community I saw a green heron. I don’t recall ever having seen one before. A week ago I responded to a fellow blogger, wishing I could have seen the green heron she wrote of, so lyrically.

And one came to me.

The heron and I watched each other for a long awed moment, before she (?) flew to the other side of the pond and I walked on, to let her be.

I contemplate the symbolism of the green heron.

From a biblical perspective, my first go-to, it’s not great. Herons are “unclean” per the Law, i.e., not suitable for consumption, although one resource states that “The very poor of our western and southeastern coast states eat them”(in 1915, that is to say, per the ISB Encyclopedia, written just before the birds were protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act). I wasn’t expecting this, the act or the desperation. It’s been illegal to hunt and kill herons for over a hundred years. Furthermore, the green heron is known to be an irritable, angry bird.

Sounds like some people l know. I don’t want to be one of them.

There are a number of other spiritual meanings associated with the green heron, among them humility, patience, adaptability, wisdom, the ability to focus intently (heaven knows I need this; I used to be better at it than I am now)… and perseverance.

What it really comes down to, however, is how I felt when I encountered this bird. I’d desired to see it, and it came. We were maybe ten feet apart. The heron fixed its bright golden eye intently on me and I was awed. Encouraged. Curious.

It didn’t say anything but I imagine if we spoke the same language, it might have said Be watchful. Be brave. You will persevere. What you need will be provided.

All this in a space of a held breath, in a flutter of green wings, beside the still waters…

I believe. I walk lighter, a wordless green song in my heart.

My green heron

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

Ghosted

/ Fran Haley / 18 Comments

A slice of memoir for my writing friends, who requested the story of my mail-order ghost…

******

The 1970s were steeped in tabloids, monsters, horror, psychics, UFOs, and ghosts.

Weird times.

And I was a weird little kid.

I thought I could see a lady sitting high atop a tree across the street from my house. Every day, year after year, she sat there, a regal bark-colored woman, never moving, just looking out over the world from her tall branchy throne.

I thought I saw feet in a pair of bedroom slippers left in my Grannie’s hallway…where was the rest of the person? None of the adults could make sense of my sudden hysteria.

Speaking of hysteria: My young parents, for some inexplicable, out-of-character reason, carried me through a haunted house before I was two. Just as they were exiting, a witch popped out from a secret chamber and her long hair swept over me. I have no memory of this. My father told me the story; he said I screamed and screamed, like I’d been burned. I figure it marked me permanently. Like a smallpox vaccination. I wonder what kind of immunity witch hair carries…

I recall being really being burned. I was afraid of cigarettes, of their red-hot circular tips, because some grown-up or other at a family gathering hadn’t thought to move his indolent hand out of the way when my preschool self went running through the living room. Maybe this is why I also feared flames shooting up from backyard charcoal grills (smell that lighter fluid?), from the flattop grill behind the counter of the local diner, and the whoosh of brilliant blue whenever someone turned the burner knob on a gas stove.

I was afraid of big smells. Like collards cooking. I’d gag and run out of the house (love to eat ’em now, though, with plenty of hot pepper vinegar).

My weirdest childhood fear (perhaps): Black toilet seats. Utterly terrifying. Why did anyone ever think these were a great idea? I wouldn’t even enter the bathroom at the doctor’s office, let alone “go,” because of that ominous seat. I sobbed and tried to get away from my mother. Not understanding, she became angry.

And I was afraid of ghosts.

So much so that I didn’t want to go to sleep the first night I stayed with my grandparents after Granddaddy retired and they moved back home to the countryside. Their cozy little house sat amid whispering woods, strange canals, and a tiny dappled cemetery situated diagonally to the left of their front yard, across the dirt road.

I took one look at those weathering old tombstones gleaming white in the dusk and thought Ghosts.

Grandma, I’m scared of that place.

Oh, honey. Don’t ever fear the dead. Fear the living.

It didn’t help.

Oddly enough, TV shows about monsters and ghosts did.

The Addams Family: How did Morticia move at all in that skinny black dress, drawn so tight ’round her ankles? How could a disembodied hand called Thing materialize from random tabletop boxes throughout the psuedo-gothic house to deliver mail or light cigars? My parents’ then-childless friends got a black Lab puppy and named it Thing. I loved that dog. She dug a big hole in our backyard; in the years to follow, I’d expand Thing’s hole many times over, along with my imagination.

The Munsters: Who could be afraid of Herman, with his goofy laugh?

Casper the Friendly Ghost: I quickly grew to love him and all the dark gray haunted-house scenery on the Viewmaster reels Grandma bought me. Casper wasn’t remotely scary. He was cute. And comforting. Somehow.

And so it was, one summer when I was nine or ten, I happened upon the little ad in the back pages of a magazine (or maybe it was in a novelty catalog, another 1970s staple):

Order Your Own Ghost!

I didn’t bother to read the rest of the details. The creepy illustration sold me.

I went in search of Grandma.

I would have it. My own ghost.

My land. What do you want this for?

I just do… please, Grandma?

She sighed, clipped out the form, addressed the envelope, enclosed the couple of dollars (?), and mailed it.

When the package arrived she helped me open it. One doesn’t want to slit a ghost by accident.

I’m not sure what I expected. I knew the ghost couldn’t be “real,” yet the ad had conjured a misty apparition in my mind, a filmy thing that would do my bidding. Could it be the allure of supernatural power? The need to overcome a fear by mastering it? Sheer curiosity? All of the above?

Would the the thing rise before me as soon as the package was opened?

Um.

No.

Opening the package the rest of the way, I found a folded white plastic sheet, deeply creased when I shook it out, a white balloon to blow up and place under the thin plastic, white thread for tying under the balloon “head” and to be taped to the top of the plastic so that the ghost could then be hung from a door or hook, etc., where it might move a little whenever we passed by (or if I decided to turn Grandma’s floor fan on it).

Oh, and helpful directions to locate a marker for drawing draw eyes and a mouth, if desired.

I felt like throwing the worthless stuff straight in the trash. When I eventually learned the term rip-off, this mail-order ghost would drift to mind.

Grandma, who’d tried to discourage the purchase in the first place, now tried to placate me: Here, I’ll blow up the balloon…

We assembled the sorry specter and strung it on the old bedroom doorknob where it dangled in front of the metal keyhole. I hated the sight of it hanging there, grinning at me.

I didn’t know it then, but Lessons were afoot…

Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

It may not be at all what you thought.

Fears are exhausting.

Fears can be overcome by recognizing the inherent ridiculous (look up Harry Potter boggart).

Things and people will sometimes (oftentimes) turn out to be something other than they seem.

Above all: Life is a carnival, a strange journey of compelling facades and disappointing realities, a house of shattered mirrors with perpetual distortions and misperceptions obscuring truth, of false narratives and unseen, lingering harm lurking in the darkest corners, where occasionally flares a red-hot tip held in an indolent hand…

Ghosts are, in the end, about loss; what do we fear more than that?

I’d had enough. I balled up my ghost and smushed it into the trashcan where it belonged.

It was a beginning.

Ghost. David Ludwig. CC BY-SA

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

The letter

/ Fran Haley / 23 Comments

I found it in one of my old Bibles when I was preparing to speak at a women’s conference.

A letter from my grandmother.

Postmarked September 29, 2001…not long after 9-11. In the wake of what seemed the end of the world.

She wanted to surprise me with a letter. She’d written dozens to me throughout all the years we lived in two different states, since I was six. In her eighties, however, her fine penmanship had begun to look shaky on the page. She had taken to making phone calls more and more.

She writes of the beautiful day: sunny and bright, the sky so blue. I’m planning to walk a short distance when I finish and feel good…

She writes of family, that she talks to my daddy every night, and tomorrow she will see him. She writes that my mother seems to be doing good, better than we even thought! I no longer remember the context of this statement; my mother was frequently in poor health, in body and in mind.

She writes of my Aunt Pat’s moonflower, presently blooming, and asks if I remember her moonflower growing around the stump of Granddaddy’s pecan tree by the old dirt road and that she once had another by the pump house…its runners grew on the pump house, shrubs nearby, and the fence.

For a minute, I am there, walking in long ago, seeing the profusion of white blooms, breathing their perfume…

Then she tells me not to worry about her. She had given up her house and had come to live with my aunt; at 85, unsteady on her feet and occasionally falling, she could no longer live alone. She writes: I have accepted it, like a death. You have to carry on.

She admits to crying a lot at first. Then: I’m not going to complain. I still have so much to be thankful for. I read recently that to be happy, you should act happy, so I’m trying to think happy thoughts and smile more…I think of you often because you have always been a big part of my happiness as well as Grand-daddy’s!

She read books; she played tapes of gospel music; she prayed for God to see fit to take care of our world problems. She writes of violence and violent people not knowing what being happy is.

She misses her piano, her most-prized possession. She says that since she couldn’t take it with her when she gave up the house, she’s glad I wanted it: I hope it will bring much happiness to you and the boys.

She would never know that my youngest would learn to play on that piano, that he would become a phenomenal musician, that he would learn to sing all the harmonies in gospel songs, that he would eventually obtain a college degree in this, that he would lead choirs.

She writes that she hopes to see me and the children soon, even if for a little while, knowing I’d go visit my parents, too. She so wanted to spend time with my children…

She closes with her love and prayers too.

Two tiny notes are included also, one for each of my children, then ages twelve and four. In the note to the youngest she mentions hummingbirds…they will soon be flying to a warmer climate but will come back at Easter.

As I hold these written treasures in my hands, savoring every word, a little shadow flickers at the kitchen window. A hummingbird, coming to my freshly-refilled feeder.

A year to the day after Grandma wrote this letter, my father would die suddenly. The flood of grief would overwhelm her; dementia would soon settle in, and she would be in a nursing home for four years until her death at age 90.

I reread of the beautiful day, sunny and bright, the sky so blue, that she’s talking to my father every night, that my mother’s doing better than anyone ever expected… I reread her words of acceptance and carrying on, of her great love and prayers for me. I think about how these buoyed me through every day of my life…even now.

I fold the letter back into its old envelope. I finish my lesson for the women’s conference, on learning the unforced rhythms of grace.

I carry Grandma’s letter with me.

I carry on.

*******

with thanks to Two Writing Teachers for the Tuesday Slice of Life Story Challenge

Easter echoes

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

Easter morning. I am six. My little sister is four. We’ve torn apart our Easter baskets. The green plastic grass is strewn all over and we’ve eaten the heads off our hollow chocolate bunnies. We didn’t go to church because Mama isn’t feeling well. She has trouble with her back and sits in traction for a while every day, in a chair by the bedroom with her chin in a sling that hangs from the top of the door. I am in the kitchen when the phone rings and she comes to answer it.

Oh no, she says. Oh, no. She starts to cry. Tears stream down her cheeks.

Listening to her side of the conversation with her friend from church, I learn that our pastor died this morning. At church. Standing at the pulpit to give his sermon when he sank to the floor. People thought at first he was kneeling to pray, strange for a Baptist, but…it is Easter…

In the days to come, the church people will comfort each another by saying this is exactly how he’d have wanted to go.

*******

Easter morning. I am eighteen. I’m not in church. I quit going a few years ago. I have been cutting my college classes more and more to run with my colorful theater crowd. I’ve decided to make my living perfoming on stage. It’s all I care about. My aunt, Mama’s sister who never married nor had children, says I’m “caught between the moon and New York City.” Deep down I know this is not the best that I can do: I don’t want to be at home anymore, I’m not getting along with my father, my grandmother is worried about me. I know she prays, because…

I have lost my way.

*******

Easter morning. I am nineteen. I am not in church, but I’m looking at a card that arrived at the end of the week. A beautiful Easter card from Miss Margaret. I didn’t know she had my address. I met her during my recent hospital stay, when I ran a high fever with a virus and needed an IV. Miss Margaret was my roommate. A large Black lady with a beautiful smile and a voice as warm as as a blanket. She was in for a mastectomy. She’d asked me, just before I left and before she went for surgery: Do you go to church?

No, ma’am, not like I should…(I didn’t say not at all).

Hmm, she replied. That young man who’s come to see you. Brought you those flowers. Have you been going out with him for long?

No, ma’am. I haven’t been out with him at all yet, actually. I got sick on the day of our first date and ended up here instead…it was also opening night of the play we were both in and I missed that, too.

What I didn’t tell Miss Margaret is that I was afraid the guy would give up on me…but he hadn’t, yet.

She nodded. Listen to me, Child. You are young. Watch out for yourself, hear? He seems a nice young man. You ought to get yourself back to church.

So here I am on Easter morning, not in church, looking at this card she mailed me… an Easter prayer signed Love and Blessings Always from Miss Margaret, P.S. I’m doing fine.

II wonder: Is it too late to get to church today?

I call my boyfriend.

*******

Easter morning. I am twenty-one. I’ve come back to my childhood church with my husband…the guy who didn’t give up on me when I got sick and missed our first date as well as opening night of the community theater production we were both performing in…a play entitled “Whose Life Is It Anyway?” We’ve been married for a year and a half, we’re both working, we just left our one-bedroom apartment for a new townhouse, first time homeowners. Up until these last months, we thought we would move to New York and pursue acting careers. I’ve been accepted to The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and they have allowed me a grace period to come….if we can figure out how we are going to afford to live there.

But my husband has recently told me: Honey…we need to talk.

And then he just says it: I know God’s calling me to preach.

His beautiful face is so earnest. I tell him the only thing I know to say: If He’s really calling you, then you have to try.

The huge sanctuary is packed today. Hundreds of people. The pastor has been here for fifteen years, the successor of the one who died here on that long-ago Easter morning. Today he preaches from Acts 17, Paul addressing the Areopagus on the resurrection of Christ; Paul is mocked, but one man and one woman are called out here in the passage by name for joining him in belief: Dionysious and Damaris.

When the pastor offers the invitation, I grab my husband’s hand: We are rededicating our lives today.

We walk the aisle. In all that crowd, we are the only ones who do: One man, one woman.

I tell my pastor that my husband is called to preach.

He will take him under his wing, the fifty-third and final young man he ordains to the ministry.

He will tell us later: It won’t be easy; I had to step into the pulpit of a man who died there. But the Lord will provide. He always comes through…sometimes at last minute when you are thinking all is lost, but He always comes through.

Then he’ll look at me: You were in my teen Bible School class, I recall. It’s been a while. I remember you coming to church with your mother when you were a child. Your dad didn’t attend and your mother didn’t drive.

Yes, sir. That’s right. My dad works most Sundays. Mama didn’t drive. She’s just recently gotten her license.

He will nod: You walked to church until we got our bus ministry started. Your mother was the first person to sign up for it.

I didn’t know that.

*******

Easter morning. I am twenty-five. Life is a blur with a baby boy to care for. I meant to change the old wreath hanging on the front of the parsonage, over by the wide porch swing. When the weather is warmer I will sit here and sing to him, but right now it’s still a little chilly, with the beach breezes blowing up from the bay. Before we go to church, I will put up the Easter wreath. Better late than never.

When I reach for the tattered old wreath, a bird flies out, startling me. There’s a nest in it, with babies cheeping… I had no idea.

Awed by the discovery of brand-new life on this particular morning, I let it be.

I save the new Easter wreath for next year.

*****

Easter afternoon. I am thirty. My family is gathered at the Baptist church in Daddy’s hometown for the funeral of his sister, my aunt. She was fifty-four, spent the last years of her short life in a nursing home, bedridden with mutliple sclerosis. For all of these years my grandmother drove a sixty-mile round trip each week to visit, taking her daughter’s soiled laundry home and returning it fresh and clean, and trimming her nails because the nursing staff said they weren’t allowed to.

Beside her in the pew, Daddy is pale. He’s recovering from a heart attack and four bypasses.

When my husband and I followed the limo to the church, I could see Daddy and Grandaddy in the back of it, side by side…two silver heads, exactly alike.

Grandma is broken but her faith is not. She says, I’m truly glad she isn’t suffering any more but oh, it hurts. It hurts.

She died on Good Friday, Grandma, I tell her. Like Jesus.

Grandma looks at me a long moment, her watery blue eyes gleaming: I can’t belive I haven’t thought of that.

The service begins. On Grandma’s other side, Granddaddy bows his head. Tears are trickling down his cheeks.

This is the only time I’ve ever seen him cry.

*******

Easter morning. I am thirty-seven. My husband and our boys have only been in our new house for a month and I’m still scrambling to get organized. I love the house, not that I wasn’t grateful for parsonages having been provided all these years, it’s just that eventually we will retire and you can’t do that in a parsonage. Plus…I can’t say exactly why, but this place somehow reminds me of my grandparents’ home. The great irony being that they’ll never see it. None of my childhood family will. Granddaddy’s been gone four years. Grandma’s in the nursing home; she’ll never travel again. Daddy died suddenly seven months ago and I’m still trying to process it, especially since everything fell apart with my mother afterward and there will be no repairing the ripping apart of our family…I think about how she took me and my sister to church…how she was the first person to sign up for the bus ministry…I have to remember the good, I must choose to remember the good, for it was there and real and even though a person may be destructive with those wheels already in motion long before she brings you onto the planet, there were always good things.

I cannot dwell on this anymore, I have two children of my own to get ready for church now and Easter is our biggest day…it really won’t do for the preacher’s wife to be late. Again.

*****

Easter morning. Today. Let’s just say my fifties will soon be coming to a close. Depending on when you read this, I will either be headed to church or having returned home. My husband is still preaching. Our oldest is in his fifth year of pastoring a church nearby, close enough that our two granddaughters come over often, including these past couple of days, to play with their Franna. Our daughter-in-law is an extraordinary pastor’s wife and mother as well as an incredible artist. So many gifts. Our youngest is playing piano for today’s worship service and he’ll sing the solo for the choir on “Rise Again” in his beautiful, beautiful voice… his fiancee is deeply compassionate, loving, always smiling. They are happy. Yesterday I wrote of digging the past and mining your memories for the stories that matter…today I write, my heart overflowing with abundance of life, for now, now, now. Today I write of the peace that passes understanding, for with God, the story does not end. The message of Easter that echoes through the ages is not one of death, but of life; not of lost causes, but of new purpose; not of despair, but of overcoming…it is a message of redemption, sacrificial love, forgiving, being set free. I think of those words, rise again, as I drive out of my neighborhood to see a hawk take flight, the morning sun flashing on its white belly, and discovering, that same day, the house finches have, indeed, built a new nest in the front door wreath, despite last year’s tragedy of all five babies dying suddenly. The mother began laying eggs during Holy Week.

Five of them.

The father sang a beautiful song after each egg was laid.

A song of new life, hope, and joy.

I know it so, so well.

The echoes of Easter.

*******

Composed for the 31st and last day of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

—thank you all for being such a loving, supportive community;
please keep writing ❤

Dig the past

/ Fran Haley / 20 Comments

Way back on Day 10 of this current Slice of Life Story Challenge, I had a lot of fun playing around with a prompt asking what the first line of my autobiography would be. I really prefer the idea of memoir…my definition: Mining one’s memories for the stories that matter most, digging in the storied strata of one’s past.

I came up with this “opening line” for it:

My father named me for his mother, and that was the beginning of everything.

Truth.

From the moment I entered this world, my grandmother and I were bound together by blood, love, and namesakery. Long after she’s left it, our bond remains unbreakable.

Were I ever to write an extended memoir, her stories would be layered throughout. I am part of them; they are part of me.

She would say, You were named for me like I was named for my Papa. I loved him so. He was very religious, sang in the choir every Sunday. He had a beautiful bass voice…he used to keep bees when I was young and I’d help him get the honey.

She was sixteen in March of 1932 when her Papa, Francis, died by suicide. On his sixtieth birthday. I don’t know the whole story but what little I do know, I shall keep for now. Grandma told me they brought him home in a wooden casket lined with black oilcloth and that she sat up with him all night before the burial.

The point is that my grandmother’s stories made me hungry to know as much as I could about her childhood, daily life long ago, how people endured such hard times. Many didn’t. The old cemeteries tell stories of their own.

I asked her about the 1919 influenza epidemic: I don’t remember it. I was little. I do remember people talking about “hemorrhagic fever” and Mama saying she made big pots of soup for the neighbors who were sick. Papa carried it to them and left it on their porches. He wouldn’t go in because he didn’t want to bring the sickness home.

I asked her about meeting my grandfather: Oh, we always knew each other. He’s nine years older than I am and he and Mama used to pick cotton together…

Granddaddy would say: We’d all see who could pick the most cotton and it was always Lula [Grandma’s mother] or me. That was before the boll weevil came along and people started planting tobacco.

Grandma said: When tobacco came along, I was a looper…you had to be careful. That juice was sticky and would stain your clothes; it was hard to get out…using a wringer washing machine or washboard, I might add.

The setting of all this is a tiny community called Campbell’s Creek, established around 1700, way down east in the far reaches of Beaufort County, North Carolina. It’s part of Aurora although the actual town is five miles away. Most of the town is now in serious disrepair and the place is so remote that when I happen to encounter people who’ve been there, they typically say something like “I thought I was going to the end of the world.”

It is one of the places I love best on this Earth. The beginning of everything…Aurora is Latin for “dawn,” you know.

My grandparents, Columbus St. Patrick and Ruby Frances, were born here in 1906 and 1915, respectively. They married during the Great Depression. Their first home was a tenant house; their first child, my father, was born there. Granddaddy was a sharecropper. He plowed fields with mules. He was skilled with farm tools that people seldom use now, like an adze. This would give him a unique advantage when he “couldn’t make a go” of farming and went to Virginia to find a job as a shipwright, just as war broke out and ship production went into overdrive. When the war was over, he tried his hand at a number of things, but he had two more children to provide for; he went back to the shipyard until he retired.

All of his life, Granddaddy was a farmer at heart: I can remember when we ordered chickens by mail and they’d be delivered in cages by horse and buggy. I was three or four when I saw my first automobile…

That would have been around 1910. A Model T.

Time was, he’d say, in his country dialect bearing faint traces of Elizabethan English, that the whole family could go off for a week to visit somebody and you didn’t have to lock your house or barns because nobody would bother them. People looked out for each other. There won’t no nursing homes. When somebody was sick we all took turns helping out.

Grandma said: I was sitting with a friend’s mother. She’d been sick awhile and we all knew her time was near. She hadn’t spoken a word in days, hadn’t moved or responded to anyone. She was just lying there in the bed when all of a sudden she sat up and opened her eyes. She started laughing: “Can you hear them? Can you hear them?” Her face just glowed...it had to be angels. A little while after, she was gone.

I grew up on these stories and so many more.

My summers were spent learning things that I wasn’t even aware I was learning, things that will drive my interests for the remainder of my days: story, history, culture, nature.

Faith.

And science.

I’ve written much about the little dirt road that ran past Granddaddy and Grandma’s house. It’s one of my life’s greatest metaphors. I can recall, in the 1970s, when it was covered with gravelly “rejects” from phosphate mining, Aurora’s biggest industry since 1964. Granddaddy and Grandma were so excited for their grandchildren to come digging in the road to find sharks’ teeth—some were quite large — coral skeleton, and various fossilized bones of sea creatures. Someone of official status must have soon realized the value of these rejects and they weren’t scattered on the old dirt road anymore. Instead, they were taken to a newly-created fossil museum in town. Today, children from all over come to dig for fossils they can keep, and they can learn about the history in the little museum. There’s even an annual fossil festival at the end of May; last year I went for the first time with my seven-year-old granddaughter.

This excerpt is from an article in the April 2023 edition of the magazine Our State: Celebrating North Carolina:

Beneath our state’s soil and waves is a lost world waiting to be discovered—a geologic trove we claim as our own…about 50 years ago, coral specimens were found in drilling samples near present-day Aurora. They were sent to the Smithsonian Institution, whose scientists soon visited—and identified the area as one that proclaims the most prolific fossil record of the Miocene (2.3 million to 5.3 million years ago) and Pliocene (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago) marine life on the Atlantic coast.

About fifty years ago… I’d have been a child playing in the gravel on the old dirt road, collecting shark’s teeth, unware of the true treasures of my life.

The Aurora Fossil Museum, writes the author, “continues to keep the past alive.”

It’s analogous to to me: Scientists finding bits of ancient creatures, trying to piece them together to understand stories of this “lost world,” and how I hold to bits of story from this same place, the lost world of my grandparents.

Generations rise and fall…layer upon layer of story strata settling in their wake.

I am a remnant of their world. From early childhood Grandma infused me with story, unknowingly turning me into amateur oral history exacavator, archivist, curator…the stories still live in me.

My father named me for his mother, and that was the beginning of everything.

Imagine my delight when I learned last year that the Aurora Fossil Museum had been approved for an official historical site license plate with the NCDMV. I applied for one right away….it finally came, a couple of months ago. I’m among the first to have it:

I imagine Granddaddy’s beaming face. I hear Grandma’s typical expression of surprise: My land!

Dig the Past! the license plate reads.

I do it every day that I live. I go on mining my memories for stories, working their meanings out bit by bit, trying to preserve them for the priceless treasures they are.

Keeping the past alive. For the future. For right now.

That’s what memoir is for.

*******

Composed for Day 30 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Cluttered recollection

/ Fran Haley / 14 Comments

During the March Open Write over at Ethical ELA, host Rex Muston invited participants to craft “Junk Drawer Affirmations” because, writes Rex: The most urgent motivations to fix something or do something purposeful are tied to the things often gathered there.  The eventual rummaging through the drawer lends to varied levels of reminiscence…Pick your favorite junk drawer and explore it with a search that settles on something that carries deeper meaning.

I could have chosen one of several drawers, truth be told. But this one called to me. I’d already gone to rummage in it recently, and…well, it takes writing a poem to get to deeper meanings.

Cluttered Recollection

I forgot
what brought me
to the old rolltop desk

and what I was looking for
in this drawer

it isn’t the box 
of sheet protectors
left behind by my youngest
marking his time
in high school band

not the psychedelic folders
I bought to hold
copies of songs for
kids at church to practice
the neon-swirl flower-covers 
peeking out from under
the folded map of
the British Isles
this juxtaposition
conjuring a sense
of the 1960s 
and The Beatles…
can’t buy me love, oh
no no no no…

not the bag
of unsharpened pencils
I won at a staff PD session
(why haven’t I used them?)

or the phone chargers,
wires twisting and coiling
over and around
five clear marbles
I hid here last year
to keep them away
from my toddler granddaughter

or the tag she tore off
my Princess Diana
Beanie Baby bear
(ripped away,
just like
the Princess)

or the flat little Ziploc
lying so unobtrusively
in the midst of it all
like an untold secret
carried within

—don’t know why I saved it,
this tiny snakeskin
pale as sand
fragile as a minute,
an exhaled breath

I found it
in the garage last spring
just a remnant
of a shy earth snake
that was once here
then gone
leaving only this papery bit
of itself behind

I remember putting it
in this baggie

I think I meant
to show it
to the granddaughters

but I forgot
just like I forgot
what brought me
to this old rolltop desk
that I’d given to their dad
when he was still a boy.

*******

Composed for Day 29 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Dream-double

/ Fran Haley / 22 Comments

Have you ever seen yourself in a dream?

I have. Long ago.

I remembered it last Saturday during Ethical ELA’s Open Write when the host, James Coats, invited participants to write a poem that’s “ultimately a reflective piece – a moment to examine who we were, who we are, and who we might want to be.” He called this “Looking Back to Look Forward.”

Something in this language sparked the memory…as vivid as if it happened yesterday…

Me Seeing Me in a Dream

When I was nine
I dreamed
that I was watching myself
sitting at a desk
in the classroom

I could see myself
so clearly

writing something
on paper

then looking up
in contemplation

I knew there was some
urgent message
I needed to tell myself

but I couldn’t get
my attention

I couldn’t get me
to look my way

The me in my dream
sat completely unaware
that I stood before me,
invisible,
unable to break through
some forbidding
force field

I stood before me
as if I were
my own ghost

Five decades later
I remember this dream
and the despair
of being unable to
communicate with me

and I wonder:

What could that message
of such urgency even be
from child-me
to child-me?

Other than
dear me
pay attention
please save yourself
so much trouble

in life

keep learning
keep dreaming
keep writing

these will
navigate you through
all the unseen things
ahead

including
you.

“Reflection“. toddwendy .CC BY 2.0.

*******

Composed for Day 23 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers

Eagles

/ Fran Haley / 10 Comments

I grew up in the city, a child of sidewalks, stoplights, bridges, and clattering trains. I could walk to church, to the 7-Eleven for Slurpees or candy, to Woolco buy the latest hit song on a 45 RPM record, and to all three public schools I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

The memories of nature from my neighborhood, other than the maple tree which dropped its leaves in the front yard every fall, are the gray roly-polies I played with on the concrete steps at the back door, the slugs I salted to watch them dissolve (sorry, slugs), ants, and eastern tent caterpillars with their beautiful rainbow patterning. I caught them put and them into recycled butter tubs with lids, to be disappointed when they turned into such plain moths. Oh, and the random mouse that got in the house to startle my mother, who screamed. And the ditch rat that got into my bedroom… another story for another day, that.

I know there were birds. There had to be birds.

I can’t remember them.

I longed to live in the country, with my grandparents. Even though the mosquitoes, yellow flies, and ticks might eat me alive, I could find tiny gray toads the size of my thumbnail. I would marvel at the dazzling colors of dragonflies, once I got over my terror of them. Hummingbirds zoomed past me for my grandmother’s flowers, never minding my presence, their emerald and ruby feathers gleaming like jewel-fire. Cicadas rattled the earth and my heart with their rhythms. There were deer, rabbits, snakes (alas!), and birds, always birds, chattering and singing incessantly in the dense woods…

The longing never left me, so when my husband and I settled in the countryside, I knew I was home. I rejoiced that our boys would grow up treasuring a closeness to nature…

So I thought.

The oldest always wanted to live in the city (is this always the way? Wishing for the exact opposite of what we have?).

He grew up. He went to the city.

He was miserable.

He came back…got married, became a father…

He texted me a photo recently, with tremendous excitement: Look what I just saw!

A barren field along a deserted country road…

Where stood two bald eagles.

His eyes sparkled when he saw me later: They were huge! So beautiful…

It is better than I ever dreamed, this life, here in the country.

Isn’t it, Son.

*******

Composed for Day 22 of the Slice of Life Story Challenge with Two Writing Teachers