Snakes in the Basement

Snakes in the Basement

It may have been dead, the snake in the basement by the wall behind the bed frame. Perpetually startled by these creatures, I tripped while trying to get away from it, knocking over a broom and toppling a rainbow colored garbage can. The snake did not budge.

Basement snakes, dead mice, too tight peanut butter jars, these are the times I'm grateful to have a husband.

Returning to sea level, I leave the basement lights on and the door ajar. These are signals to my husband that something below is amiss; that and the note by the coffeemaker, SNAKE IN BASEMENT!

I wait for my husband. I try to go about my business, online shopping, ignoring emails, and disregarding the bag of Cape Cod Potato Chips my stress level is begging me to devour. Eventually, my husband returns. It's not like I've been tapping my foot or anything, but in fact I have been tapping my foot.

My husband looks tired. Too bad. His foot barely crosses the threshold before I'm all over him with verbs, nouns, and expletives describing the black legless thing in our basement.

Thank God we had sex last night!

If we hadn't, he would never have agreed to so quickly address the intruder.

“Fine, let me get my gloves.” Donning his snake-bite-proof protection, my husband descends into the bowels of our home, while crouching at the top of the stairs, I watch his every move. He lifts the bed frame. No sign of life. “Get me a small box.” Cardboard Mountain is the area in our home we’ve designated for boxes to recycle from our vast online shopping. In fact, we’ve been considering whether to invest in a cardboard company as the proverbial writing is on the screen. Mom and Pop shops will soon be things of the past. Amazon.com will be the only place to buy anything, and our world will consist merely of dwellings and fulfillment centers.

Coming back with a box, I gingerly toss it downstairs to my husband. He draws close to the snake and nabs it by its head. “Poor thing,” he calls up, “it's still alive but very weak, maybe dehydrated.” Carrying the crated carnivore he walks outside in search of a new home for our unwelcome guest.

This is not the first time a snake has been in our basement. Last spring, while bringing Apples to Apples downstairs, I saw it. Just as I was about to set the box down, I watched a black computer cable slither off the shelf. Shrieking, I levitated across the basement, landing a good 15 feet away.

The snake shimmied under our ping-pong table and stopped. While backing out of the room, I heard an odd noise that sounded like someone was shushing me. Following it, I came to one of our water pipes. There, at a copper colored joint, water was spritzing out like liquid fireworks. Being a quick thinker, I ran upstairs, got a hand towel and leopard print duct tape. Returning to the faulty sprinkler, I wrapped the towel around the damaged seal, and duct taped the crap out of the pipe.

When I called our plumber he asked, “Is it an emergency?” “Well how should I know? Doesn’t water shooting out of a pipe seem like an emergency?” Half hour later, George the plumber arrives. Swiftly he finds a lever near the leak, and turns it from vertical to horizontal, cutting off the water supply. George tells me not to do laundry and that he’ll come back tomorrow with the parts he needs to finish the job. George, though not my husband, is still a man I’m grateful for, and as my husband is nowhere to be found, I flash my coyest smile and ask, “So George, are you any good with snakes?” He is up the stairs and out the door faster than my kids after they’ve raided my wallet.

Catching this reptile falls to me. I round up a pillowcase, a sponge mop, leather gloves, binoculars, and put a note by the coffee maker, SNAKE IN BASEMENT!

About three steps up from the cold concrete I set up camp. Putting on the gloves and placing the mop and pillowcase nearby, I lift the binoculars to my eyes. This must be what it's like to be on Safari, alone on the Serengeti, woman against nature. All I need is a pith helmet. Climbing back upstairs, I find the bug hat I wear while weeding, the kind with netting that drapes around your head, synching at the neck. It does make it harder to look through the binoculars, but it also helps me feel more in control. I am so not in control. Every time I imagine going over to the snake and trapping it under the mop, all I can picture next is standing there and screaming. A woman in a bug hat, binoculars around her neck, pillowcase in one hand, sponge mop in the other, standing next to a ping-pong table shrieking. I remain on the stairs.

After what feels like days, I hear my husband’s footsteps above. From where they’ve stopped, I can tell he’s reading the note by the coffee maker. Beaming, I watch my hero descend the stairs and take care of the situation. He doesn’t even flinch when he sees what I’m wearing. Just another reason I’m oh so grateful that this particular man is my husband.

Minute Memoir

Minute Memoir

I was born in my favorite season, Fall, when the earth goes to sleep in a blaze of glory. I have apples in my blood, a taste for pumpkin, and can see beauty in death.

“Like a plucked chicken,” my mother likes to say. “You looked like a plucked chicken when they placed you on my belly.” All nose, all Nancy. Nancy after Frank Sinatra's daughter Nancy, and the song he made famous, Nancy With The Laughing Face. So many Nancy's born during the fifties, I wonder if they are all still laughing.

First came the years I don't remember. The ones known only through photographs—on my mother's lap at the beach, I am facing her, looking for all those things young ones yearn for and hope to find.

Then there was school, the place where everything went wrong. Standing alongside the blackboard in second grade, we are in our bus lines waiting to go home. My bus is number Ten and my driver’s name is Tom. I love Tom. He yelled at the boy who ripped my paper butterfly and then made him move to the front seat, “I’m keepin an eye on you, Danny” Tom said, but I knew he meant both of us.

We are standing by the blackboard and I see a piece of chalk on the narrow metal shelf that runs along the board’s edge. I pick it up, no bigger than the knuckle on my seven-year-old hand. It’s smooth like a stone. I roll it between my thumb and my forefinger and then decide to write. In the tiniest of letters the word FUCK appears on the dark surface beside me. The pride I take in my accomplishment is short-lived, pulled hard by the elbow, I'm set in a chair facing the wall.

In third grade, kids get mixed up like a bag of M&Ms, my friend Jophie is now in my class. Again standing in front of my peers, the teacher is asking me questions, the year is new; we are getting to know each other. My inquisition done I get to choose who is next, “Jophie,” I say, so happy to see the friend I play with just a few feet away. “This is third grade,” I am told. “In third grade we say, Joseph.”

Then there was life, two brothers, a mom and a dad. I remember going to Carvel and getting Brown Bonnets—soft serve, vanilla ice cream on a cone, dipped in liquid chocolate that became firm within seconds. I remember the diner, the one with the stools, silver poles topped with cream colored cushions, how you could spin and spin while eating salty french fries dipped in ketchup the color of my mother's lips. I remember my brothers taking all my stuffed animals, locking themselves in our bathroom, turning on the bathtub, laughing and making drowning noises while I screamed from the hallway for them to stop.

Somehow we survived a loveless home. Despite the pit-stops of stupidity and self-hatred, I grew. I grew because a part of me remained secluded like an island, a part that waited and pretended and always believed in magic. A part that claps to help Tinkerbell ward off the effects of poison, a part that says thank you to nothing and no one in particular, but knows that something somewhere needs to be acknowledged for the grace I have known.

And now living in this age, the one where I feel one way, but look another, the one where I am still the girl leaning against a tree deep in the forest behind her home, notebook in one hand, recorder in the other, penning words while serenading the woodlands. This is the age when my husband grows dearer to me every second of every day, our time together no longer holding the endless quality of our beginning. The age when my children come and go like seasons, tending their own gardens in their own homes, leaving me behind to roll up a carpet of loss in their wake. An age in which I relentlessly attempt to make the transition from daily mom to a perennial one; like the lupine in our fields, I re-root again and again ready to mother regardless of harsh winters or dismissive words.

This is an age when I am becoming mother to my own mother. More often now her words hide and her thoughts wander, yet despite this we’re evolving together. Much like the season of my birth, my mother’s Fall teaches me the world of beauty in death—air that is crisp, colors that invade the senses, birds that wing overhead creating slipstreams of memories to warm us during the cold times ahead.

One day there will be a door to walk through same way I came in, alone, but full of potential. The spirit of magic that keeps me safe on my island will ferry me from what I know, to what I wonder. My story will end at a beginning; what this world will be like without me, and what I will be like without this world.

By the chimney with care

By the chimney with care

It has been a good many years now of stocking stuffing, and Santa and I seem finally to have our reindeer in a row.

            However, it took that jolly old elf a number of seasons to teach me just what to fill those Christmas stockings with. Growing up in a family of non-stuffers, and then marrying into a family who did, necessitated my acquiring skills I’d had only marginal involvement with. My first forays into the gathering of goodies were discouraging. Too big, too expensive, too boring. But with time, practice, and a wink and a nod, I learned how to merrily stuff a Christmas stocking. And at the same time, my husband learned how to appreciate the miracle of an oil lamp and the goodness of latkes and applesauce.

            But this year there's a new twist, a new skill to master, an expansion. This year there will be two more at our holiday table, two more in our home, two more to consider. My 20-something boys are bringing home their 20-something girls. This will be the first Christmas morning when there will be more than just our nuclear family waking up in our home. Given my want to be inclusive, I’ve already purchased a few small gifts for our guests, but now I’m wondering whether I should stuff stockings for them as well. Go so far as to screw extra cup hooks into our mantle to hang them on. . .but what if these visitors are merely passing through? I’d be stuck with gaping holes or empty cup hooks. On the other hand, what if they are “the ones?”

            Our family stockings have our names embroidered onto them but this is not because I am talented with needle and thread. Quite the contrary. Duct tape is my go-to. This stitchery is due to the mishap of '97. Our children still talk about it, the time Santa mixed up the stockings, filled the brother’s stocking with the sister’s trinkets, and vise-versa.

It is 5:30 a.m. Brother and sister, in their footsie pajamas, are already perched on the living room couch, tussled hair and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. Mother and father linger upstairs, buried beneath their warm, down quilt. The family rule is that no earlier than 5:30 a.m. can little ones gut their stockings, and no earlier than 7:30 a.m. will parents join their merriment. Patience, for young ones — a virtue difficult to manifest under the best of circumstances — can be quite tested on a Christmas morning.

            On this Christmas morning, the brown-eyed boy hastily opens his first stocking treasure, a pen. A pen with pink kitty cats on it. He digs for another bauble and unwraps a bottle of purple nail polish. Meanwhile, the girl has begun to extricate her bounty. She unwraps a Matchbox police car and then a pen decorated with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

            But it's when the boy unwraps an outfit for Barbie that suspicion slowly enters his mind. Yet does this stop him? No. Age-appropriate greed drives him to plow through goody after goody: raspberry crush Chapstick, curly-Q hair ties, a toothbrush adorned with princesses, a lavender My Little Pony, and more. All opened. All in a crumpled mass piled next to him, and sitting on the other side of the couch, his sister. She has opened only a few of the gifts in "her" stocking: a miniature Star Wars figure of Yoda, a Darth Vader toothbrush, and a plastic pocket knife, just like Daddy’s.

            These incongruities, coupled with a bit more maturity, allow her to resist tearing through the rest of the clearly mis-stuffed stocking. Feelings are hurt; expectations are dashed. Santa forgot that the stocking with the sled is the boy’s and that the one with the reindeer is the girl’s. As a result, and in order to avoid future catastrophes, Mrs. Claus found it necessary to belatedly embroider names on all the Christmas stockings.

What alterations will this Christmas bring? Should I show my acceptance for my boys’ new loves by embroidering their names on stockings? If not this Christmas, when? Living arrangements are so different these days. Partnerships can be permanent without culminating in formal marriages. Should I give my children checklists? Ask questions like “What is your level of commitment to this relationship?” “Has the L-word been spoken?” “Would you share a toothbrush with this partner?” I’m searching for ways to assess whether the current apples of my children’s eyes rate taking up needle and thread. And yet, perhaps I should just slow down, show some restraint, simply use Duct tape to tag the extra stockings. Would embroidering labels like “Plus One” or “S.O.” (Significant Other) be tolerated? Or might that impermanence elicit pouting, resulting in a stocking full of coal from the big man in red?

            Our family is growing, but there have been no wedding bells. So how do we know what is real and what is practice? And to add to that, how do we as parents manage when siblings judge siblings? Those rumblings behind the scene about whose partner counts enough, whose partner has earned a place at the holiday table, and ultimately, whose partner merits consideration for an embroidered stocking. What might our children’s checklist look like for each other? Would they have questions such as “Have you been dating for more or less than a year?” “Are you two living out of backpacks, or in the same home?” “Are you splitting the Comcast bill, or just the occasional Starbucks tab?”

            Our family is learning a new language. We are trying to decipher unfamiliar road signs to gauge how fast or how slow to go, where to turn, and when to proceed with caution. There is no denying that it is a wonderful thing to witness love and happiness in one’s children. To watch them look at another, pupils dilated, tongue hanging out, stupid in love. We wish this for all our children, that bumping-into-walls kind of love. But what happens when the tongue-hanger doesn’t seem like a good fit? When are our children too old to have their choices questioned? If only it were as easy as climbing in and out of millions of chimneys — on one night, all over the world. Sometimes I would rather be Santa’s helper on that most grueling of nights than have to navigate through the unexpected blizzard parenting adult children can summon. What would Rudolph do?

            One of my new strategies is to just smile and keep my mouth shut. It doesn’t always work. But I am trying. I’m trying to trust that all that time I spent with my children — kissing their little fingers, building their Lego spaceships, singing them lullabies — all that time modeling kindness, showing respect, reading stories about confident girls and caring boys; all that time spent supporting their inner scaffolding, shoring up their competence and compassion, their strength and creativity — I have to believe that all that time mattered, and that they will carry those lessons forward.

            “Make good decisions,” is our family’s mantra. We used to say this when our children went out for the night or drove off to college. “Make good decisions.”  But sometimes trusting our children’s decisions is tough. Keeping the faith can be difficult. Trust gets tested. Trust gets complicated. Especially when you have to add things like Christmas stockings to the mix or when you have to unexpectedly un-embroider a name from a stocking.

            What happens when your child says goodbye to a partner? Does that mean you have to say good-bye, too? What if you liked that one, really liked that one. Can you still secretly send token gifts, dental floss or Post-Its to the one that got away?

            We will have two new people sharing our holiday traditions this year. Christmas morning we will lounge about in our pajamas and jam together on the well-worn couch. We will warm ourselves by an early-morning fire, unable to deny the sweet anticipation of gifts unknown. There will be a fresh blanket of snow carpeting the fields, and a hint of cinnamon simmering through the air, hot cider steeping on the stove. There will be presents under the tree, a waffle iron at the ready, and this year, this wondrous year, there will be two extra stockings hung with care, in hopes that true partners soon will be there.     

   Real Simple – Not!

Fuck!! An explosive wail heaves from my throat. I'm standing in my grown-up daughter’s shower trying to hang a new shower curtain. My source for all things important, Real Simple Magazine, has alerted me to the horrors of off-gassing from chemical filled shower curtains. I’ve learned that these brightly colored protectors of the floor actually get lighter as their chemicals release and migrate into our lungs and cells. Oh my God! In full combat mode I marched off to my computer, did Google search after Google search, found chemical free shower curtains and procured them post haste.

I am now on a rampage to clear my home of all that is evil. I am standing in my no-longer-lives-at-home-but-comes-home-to-visit-sometimes daughter’s shower. I am attempting to hang one of my newly acquired, chemical free shower curtains. I am holding the crumpled, mostly on the floor, curtain in one hand, and this excessively sweet, ducky curtain hanger in the other. As I reach up to hook the little yellow quacker through the hole at the top of the curtain, the bottom of the curtain gets caught under my foot. This causes my reach to unexpectedly stop short, and jettisons the ducky from my hand, smashing it to the floor.

Fuck!! I moan. Ducky is on the tile floor minus its cute orange beak, I’m enraged, and my eyes are rimmed with tears. Luckily, being the insightful menopausal woman that I am, I quickly realize that my reaction to ducky's demise is obviously an overreaction. I pause a moment to examine where this fuselage of emotion might be coming from, but instead disassociate and trot off to the everything drawer in our kitchen in search of Superglue. Long story short, and after a lot more swearing, I find the glue, make my way back to my I-still-miss-her daughter’s bathroom, glue ducky’s beak back on, and hang the chemical free shower curtain. When finished, I glance at the clock. I am wondering not how long this task took, but whether 3:30 is too early for a glass of wine. 5:00 is my usual cocktail lift-off hour, but on rare occasions I’ve made allowances for a 4:45 start time.

Next, I find myself in the master bathroom throwing out all of my husband’s and my shampoos conditioners and body washes. I have learned from Real Simple Magazine that these too contain nastiness that will eat through your brain. I again engage with the mighty Google and search for chemical free bath products and order a slew of them. My goal, turn all our bathrooms into safe zones. I then send e-mails to my three children ticking off the offending bath product chemicals, and urge my progeny to eradicate these vermin from their homes as well.

Feeling momentarily satisfied with my household massacre, I innocently glance at myself in the mirror as I head back to the kitchen to check the clock. It’s only 4:30. Bummer. But on top of this too-early-to-drink hour, what I see in the mirror is startling. My hair looks like I stuck my finger in a socket, I have dark circles under my eyes, and I think I see the start of an age spot on my forehead. I’m agitated, emotionally spent, and resignedly surrender to a confrontation with the beast of my mania.

The letter in the mail said, "probably not cancerous." So does that mean I should "probably" not worry? From my actions over the past few hours, I would have to say that not worrying is not an option. My annual mammogram revealed a spot on my right breast that is suspicious, not suspicious enough for the follow-up ultrasound I had a few years back, revealing healthy, but dense breast tissue, but suspicious enough for a six month “recheck.” "It's probably nothing," the letter encourages. Probably nothing for whom?

My mind’s been like a pinball machine. It keeps ricocheting from thought to thought as I grasp at ways to keep my family and me safe. Meanwhile this troublesome termite of a notion has been burrowing its way into my psyche, wreaking havoc. I have watched a few friends survive cancer, I have driven other friends to shear their locks mid-chemo, and I have grieved over the loss of dear friends whose "probablies" became “definitelies”.

To cope I purge, when DING, another obstacle collides with my pinball. To make the mood swings and hot flashes of menopause even more fun, there is the arid drying up of the body to contend with – skin, eyeballs, crotch. At a recent gynecological appointment, I tell my doctor that sex hurts. She looks here, pokes there, confirms atrophy of my lady parts and recommends this lovely device called an Estring. Smaller than a frisbee, larger than a silver dollar, you squeeze this thingie into your special place and voilà, little bits of estrogen leach out to just where they're needed. They chemically plump up the lady walls which menopause has made as crispy as dried up rice paper. However, today it’s occurring to me that that thingie has estrogen in it, artificial estrogen in it, and isn't that the kind of stuff that encourages "probablies” to grow? And might this dawning of understanding, coupled with the threat of a “recheck,” be the impetus for my chemical purging and perseverative checking of time?

I call my gynecologist. I leave a message regarding my concern over the mix of suspicious mammogram with fake estrogen. I check the clock again, 4:45. Might this be one of those days where an early cocktail lift-off is warranted? At five o'clock the phone rings. It's the gynecologist's office. Dr. Crotch has looked over my mammogram, revisited the miniscule dosage of estrogen in my Estring and says there is no connection between boob and crotch. She confirms that this amount of estrogen does not affect breast tissue. Phew, I think as I pour myself a healthy goblet of Pinot Noir. No effect on breast tissue. But then paranoid me wakes up and wonders, why did she specify breast tissue? Might artificial estrogen affect other kinds of tissue in my body?

But it’s too late for that debate, the wine has begun to work its magic. The world is muted, my heartbeat has slowed, and I find myself being drawn to the doings of Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife. Will she run for state's attorney? Will she take a new lover? I head to the den and turn on the TV. Purging is exhausting, mania is exhausting. Tomorrow I will do more Google searches. Tomorrow I will try again to ignore my “probably”. Tomorrow I will pursue more ways to make my life real simple, and hopefully, real safe.