And Then There Was One... Redux

And Then There Was One…Redux

Since April 2011 I have lost my brother, my father and now my mother.

Thea Wentz Riebsomer passed away on February 26, 2012 at 12:35 a.m., just shy of her ninety-second birthday. She died as she lived, chaotically, until the very end. I had not seen her for almost eight years. She had disowned me, having told me I ruined her life for reasons that I won’t go into here, except to say that Mother tried so hard to be loved her whole life, but the love she sought had to be on her terms and it was never quite good enough. I had made my own personal peace with our estrangement long ago.

All I ever wanted was for her to find some peace and I felt in my heart that she would never find it here on this earth. I returned to Connersville just six weeks after my dad’s death because my niece, Aimee, needed me and to help ease my mother in her passing. She had said that she was ready to go, but she was afraid. Mother had what is called terminal restlessness the last two days of her life and only calmed down with the help of morphine and, strangely, my presence. Aimee told her I was on my way and she nodded.  Mother had been staying with my niece for two weeks, since she was diagnosed as terminal, due to congestive heart failure.

I wish that she had had a happier life, that she had made better choices for herself. She was smart, funny and beautiful. I don’t think she believed those things about herself. In the end she was surrounded by people who cared about her. The great fear she had of dying alone did not come to pass. Her youngest granddaughter Beth, who lives in Michigan, was on her shoulder via cell phone until the very end, her nurse, her oldest granddaughter Aimee, her former daughter-in-law, Pam, her estranged daughter, and her pastor and his wife surrounded Mother with love and light. This odd mix of people took such good care of her and in that she was very fortunate.

 I talked to my mother for nine straight hours as I tried to get her to let go. It’s hard work to convince someone who has never been known as cooperative into floating away. She was unable to respond, but I know she heard me. I told her I knew that she loved me and she squeezed my hand. When I started talking to her about her beloved Panama City Beach, Florida, where she wintered for twenty years, and the beautiful sunsets she had taken thousands of pictures of, we could see her relaxing. I told her she would never be alone again, she would never be in pain again, and she would never have to reveal her age again. Her breathing slowed, her jaw relaxed and at long last she let go.

Rebekah for Poplar Grove Muse

THE LEAVING

The Leaving

It is finally moving day and August has gifted us with a gloriously cool morning. The Fates and fortune that took us to Ohio twenty-seven years ago are now taking us back home, to Indiana.

The last fifteen of those twenty-seven years have been lived here, in this house. Built among an acre of spruce and pines, it was once our dream home, but now our dreams have changed. Now our hearts tell us we need to return to our hometown and the comforting circle of family and friends there.

Soon the last box will be stowed and this day will pass but for now the memories run deep and they roll through my mind in ceaseless vignettes. The days, the seasons, the years slipping past in the quick/slow tempo of recollection, the day is bittersweet.

The crew of movers is a friendly noisy group, experienced in handing not only the furniture but anxious homeowners as well. They chat as they move through the house assessing, wrapping and stacking our possessions.

The benches that Jay refinished when we first moved to Ohio are cocooned in layers of blankets, upended and carted off. Rocky, the jokester of the moving crew, points out that the big dresser I have had since I was twenty should never be moved because of its weight. It is the same comment we hear every time it is moved and that makes me smile. The elaborately scrolled wooden secretary, handed down from Jay’s mother is admired as they discuss the best way to protect its glass front. The bright yellow, numbered stickers placed on every box, crate and piece of furniture is that item’s ticket to board the truck to Indiana.

Retreating from the rush I find a seat on the screened in porch and John, the lead mover, seems to understand that I am having a difficult day and tells me he will leave the table and chair on the porch until the last. Knowing that I need my little spot of refuge until they have finished. How nice it is to sit here, where I have sat so many times before, reading, writing, and watching the birds.

More quickly than I can imagine each stickered box, each piece of furniture finds its way into the cavernous maw of the truck. All of our possessions fitting together inside like a giant 3-D jigsaw puzzle. Every trip they make in and out of the house depletes the rooms until we are left standing in the large empty space that was our family room. Making sure nothing remains, we gather even these last memories and walk out the door.

At the closing, excitement is bursting from the young couple buying our house but we are stuck in this moment of transition, not in either place. We still have the three and a half hour drive to Indy to make tonight, so we get in the cars to head west. It is a familiar trip, one taken many times over the years, yet this one feels different. As I drive, I think about the bonds that tie us to the place we are leaving and those we are traveling toward. Life changes and we are changing with it. We look forward to being home.

As our cars pull into my sister’s driveway, family surrounds us and I know that this moving day is finally over, this first step in the journey of returning. There will be other difficult parts I know, but perhaps this was the hardest, the leaving.

Diana for Poplar Grove Muse

A year in the life...

Dear Readers,

It has been not quite a year since we launched The Poplar Grove Muse, but we have had a recent change in our writing team, and we wanted to give readers a quick update, take our blog temperature, so to speak.

When we launched back in August of 2009 our intent was to:

"present a community blog....to profile the writing life and the poetics of daily living especially as it pertains to Bloomington, southern Indiana and the WWf(a)C community."

We had a team of 4 regular writers and invited anyone who was part of our community to participate by joining the team, guest blogging, or offering writing suggestions. We will even take poetry submissions.

We managed to post at least once a week, and we heard from a number of you, either on the blog, on facebook or in person about various posts and ideas. We feel the blog has been a positive addition to our writing community and would like to continue to urge fellow women writing for (a) change community members to contact us about ideas or post responses to our blog or to facebook. We welcome the conversation.

We would especially like to urge you to become a part of the team. We will make room for your regular contribution OR if you would prefer, we can put you in a pool of guest bloggers and you would be asked to contribute on the occaision that a regular blogger cannot post. We really value the diversity of writing and ideas in our community. Please email amy@womenwritingbloomington.com to volunteer to write or suggest ideas.

We would like to pause here to say farewell to regular Poplar Grove Muse blogger and fellow writer Steph who has moved to Portland, Oregon. You can continue to follow her adventures on her regular blog. Thanks for the gift of your words, and we'll look forward to hearing about WWf(a)C happenings in Portland.

Rebekah has kindly agreed to step in and begin regular blogging for us. She posted just last week on the PGM, and you can also catch her at her wee blog about Scotland, a place that has captured her heart.

So let me say again, this blog is for our community, and we would like you to take part. It is meant to be an ongoing gift of words and writing and is open to anyone who is familiar with the ethos of presuming good will.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Amy, for the PGM

Packing Up

My house is a mess. Newspaper shreds flutter about and I can’t find anything. Three things I’ve already packed away (at the bottom of the box) are things I want today. Moving is tough stuff.

This move was not self-initiated. The mother ship decided I needed to be a West-coast girl. I decided I needed my job. And so the hubby and I uproot ourselves again. We’ll test the soil, water and light in a new habitat. It’s hard to yank myself out of ground I thought I would never leave.

Not all about the move is sad or unwelcome. We’ll be close to oceans and mountains and great mass transit. We dream new adventures. We let stuff go. We begin again.

I’d like to say that I balance this tension of excitement and loss. Some days I do. Some days I cry privately in 30-second bursts. I resist slipping away quietly and choose, instead, to say goodbye to friends. That hurts.

To get through, I do what I can. I’m more patient with the hubby (and myself). I tie up a few newspaper-wrapped teacups with ribbon. It will make me smile in a few weeks when I unpack the box and think about the people who drank tea with me.

~Stephanie W, for the Poplar Grove Muse

Plum Hat

I knitted this hat last week. It’s for a baby due in February, already much beloved by an entire congregation devoted to the eager parents.

I have had various periods of knitting, and non-knitting, in my life.

When I was 9 or 10, my wonderful widowed maternal grandmother and her unmarried sister, who lived and worked (hard) together, took my sister and me to pick out yarns and start afghans. I, alas, picked an electric turquoise that quickly transformed from my favorite color to a color I couldn’t bear to look at, much less knit with. My beloved, industrious great aunt knit that one, and presented it finished to me. But I did learn to knit.

In high school, I mastered knitting the two-needle mitten, creating them for everyone I could think of. I loved how you knitted this abstract formula, then sandwiched it together, sewed it up, and a human hand, or the ghost of one, magically appeared from two dimensions. One of my life mantras at the time was that everyone should have hand-knitted red wool mittens made for and presented to them at least once in a lifetime, and I distributed them in all sizes to everyone I thought might actually wear them.

Living in England after college, I was re-inspired by the most creative knitter I have ever known (a true textile artist who can knit in the dark and while multi-tasking and design her own garments on the fly), as well as by the fabulous array of yarns and patterns not yet trendy or available on this side of the Atlantic. Knitting was a lovely social pastime, best enjoyed over multiple cups of strong tea in a chilly four-storey Victorian on the edge of Port Meadow outside Oxford.

This knitting industry carried over into graduate school, for a while, when I specialized in sweaters, and then into the child-bearing years of those around me, resulting in adorable fruit hats of every hue, and afghans, and woolen cabled fisherman baby sweaters that I didn’t realize weren’t practical until I had my own babies and tried to put them into one.

But for some years, now, the knitting has been sporadic at best. I watch little television, the perfect accompaniment to knitting, and don’t spend much time sitting down, except behind a steering wheel or computer. Besides, my vision is not what it once was.

So I was truly taken aback at how destructive the disruptions of my multitasking mother-mid-life are to knitting. I was knitting the hat on four short double-pointed needles, and THREE times picked up the hat and began knitting backwards, counterclockwise, knitting on the purl side, so that I had to backtrack and tear out and pick up and carry on, chastened by my diminished knitting powers. It was hard to stay on task, and still feel like I was attending to the expectations I have created around me. I miss the days where I could focus on one thing at one time and create something beautiful or adorable in a straight line and not feel compromised by it.

Something to aspire to, again, in time.

Mary for the Poplar Grove Muse