A Big, Great Heart, Gone

Cyn, my wild tomboy friend, died at 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Her body gave out. The body that made so many childhood journeys with mine. The ones I was fortunate to have and knew it even then.

Slipping from our houses into the glowing summer nights of the deep south. Sinking, knees first, into grass and mud to launch burning shoebox boats from the creek bank, watching them float in flames into tree-lined blackness, with only stars to light the way. All for the simple joy of it (August entry, Wild Gratitude).

Later, we were spirited young teenagers who had the idea that we were the physical equals of our athletic older brothers. So we played pickup football and baseball with them. Then we fished and played tennis nearly everyday in the summer. In our minds, we were excellent natural athletes in no need of lessons. Or tennis shoes even. An old Polaroid shows Cyn in loafers on the tennis court. All we needed, we felt, were old rackets. And cute outfits.

We knew we would live forever.

Which is why I did not write in August about Cyn being sick. My husband says we knew this was coming. But I didn't, really I didn't, despite everything.

At Christmas two years ago, Cyn came to my son's birthday dinner in Alabama. We were hosting it there during a holiday visit. Already thin, Cyn was losing weight and doctors couldn't say why. "Stress," they suggested. A few months later we caught up at my niece's Alabama wedding, where Cyn, a self-employed florist, had done the flowers. No expense was spared on this wedding. My sister-in-law wanted Cyn and nobody else would do. As usual, the arrangements were the most striking thing in the rooms. Cyn, who taught herself to play the piano by ear as a child, was, simply put, an artist.

At the reception, we sat outside on a wall ledge and Cyn talked. She was still losing weight and exhausted, drawn. Doctors still said they couldn't find anything wrong. "I just feel there is something wrong. I know it somehow." But then she put on her usual cheerful facade. She would not fret for very long in front of others.

A short time later, she had a medical crisis. She was diagnosed in the E.R. as having this, then that. After a series of unnecessary treatments they removed her gallbladder. Then they decided none of that was the matter. That she had a faulty heart valve and COPD -- inherited. The same thing that killed her father before he was 40 and her older brother, my brother's friend. They sent her home with portable oxygen tanks.

Even more horrifying was the fact she did not have health insurance. Pre-existing health issues, a husband who left her, etc. The lung doctor kept telling her she was the heart doctor's problem and the heart doctor repeatedly shuffled her off to the lung man, saying surgery was impossible with her lungs in such poor shape. Cyn wasn't supposed to live this long. But the last time I saw her she looked so good I was amazed. She sounded good. She stuck around, defying the odds. She even went several times to Tunica, Miss., to gamble with friends and family. I thought she was going to make it.

But the past few weeks, she went downhill. Something happened during the weekend. Another crisis, then a seizure. And her body gave out.

She was a fighter. Although she would give away her last quarter if someone asked.
And although her life seemed straight out of Jerry Springer at times, with two marriages and some nightmarish betrayals, she stayed one of the most optimistic people I've ever known. That's what people loved most about her.

Which is why I cried on and off most of the day. And why my oldest friend J., who unfortunately got the call at school where she teaches, broke down too. J. is an Auburn graduate who has pulled for Alabama for two years because the Crimson Tide's bid for a national championship was giving Cyn such joy during her bad times. If you know anything at all about Auburn-Alabama football rivalry, you will understand this sacrifice J. made out of love.

Because Cyn turned her sadness into laughter, even after being told repeatedly by doctors that they couldn't help her. "You won't believe what happened next..." and then she would laugh a deep-throated laugh and start the tale. What others cried about, Cyn turned into material to laugh at.

She was one of a kind.

So I'm distraught. And I'm angry. I'm wondering what could have been done to change this outcome even though that is futile now. I can't focus on that right now.

I'm thinking instead about something an Irish musician/artist/poet told me a few months ago, Lucy, www.myspace.com/the2train. Lucy has a knack for words that take the heart and flood them with light. So it wasn't a surprise when she suggested a radio program that talked about an experiment by a Massachusetts area doctor who sought to measure the mass purportedly lost by a human body when the soul departed the body upon death (Radiolab, Sept. 18, 2009).

In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall weighed six patients while they were in the process of dying. The entire bed was placed on an industrial-sized scale. And when the patients died, MacDougall found that the bodies lost on average of 21 grams within a short time. He suggested this was the weight of the soul.

So I am sitting here, not 24 hours after Cyn's soul left her body, and I'm looking out the window at the cold, dark, rainy night. And I keep wondering, "Where is she?" Because a soul that big, that generous, someone that expansive and full of life cannot just be gone.

I really do want to know. Cyn and I were friends for half a century -- little girls who were already friends when her father died much too early, partners in a foursome of girls who sang in talent shows. We refused to enroll in home economics in high school, taking science instead with a classroom of boys. After I graduated from college and took a newspaper job in a new town, Cyn showed up at my empty apartment on move-in day with my mother, having filled the truck bed with second-hand furnishings and the like from her home and shop. She knew I wouldn't bother.

And now I can't accept that she's gone. I need more time. There are journeys ahead and where is she? We thought we'd live forever. I need a little more time. With my bare feet in the mud of that creek bank beside Cyn's house. Little wild girls streaked with mud, twirling and dancing by the water under the moon, cheering the fire we had set in makeshift boats and in our hearts.

I want her back. I need a little more time. Please. I need her back.

What I See in His Blue Eyes

No lectures, please, about going overboard during the holidays. I won't listen. I'm not going on a spending binge. But there are times to live large. And this is one of them.

Growing up, the moods brightened at my house perceptibly around Thanksgiving. My father, initials JC, took off work at least a month at the end of the year to spend time with family and to go quail hunting. Except for Sundays, he would be gone by the time we got up.

I remember hovering near the back door, watching for a glimpse of his green-clad figure as the shadows grew from gray to black in the woods behind the house. Then profound relief, as warm as the sun, would claim me when I heard his pointers rustling and barking. JC had whistled and waved them home. And in a few minutes he was there too, game bags full of Christmas quail.

JC was happiest out in the wilds. He was born on a large farm in a remote section of Tennessee, part of a big extended family living along a river bend that still bears our last name.

The parents lived in the "big house," the grown children and their families in smaller homes scattered nearby. They were prosperous farmers who celebrated holidays together, gathered for a main meal around a large table. On these days, the matriarch, Miss Becky they called her, brought out a bottle of whiskey and poured shots for her sons to enjoy, a reward for their hard work. This horrified my grandmother, a hard-line Methodist not used to these ways.

Then, tragedy struck. A horse threw my grandfather, a handsome man with thick, coal black hair and big, luminous blue eyes. He started being plagued by seizures. One day, at home alone with his little blue-eyed middle child, my father, he began to seize. It was over quickly. My grandfather, W., was dead. He left three little boys and a wife, who quickly packed up and whisked her boys away from the river to live with her own family.

These were kind people, stalwarts, profoundly religious. They were also poor and fiercely proud. The large, festive holiday celebrations were over. Holidays, in fact, were very simple. The boys were loved and taken care of, JC had nothing but good things to say about this side of his family. But I know now his days faded from bright to gray after his father died.

Yet, life goes on. He grew up and went to war in Europe, where he survived terrible things. He married and became a father. His wife was a teetotaller, too, so the holiday toasts he had revived for a short time as a grownup ended again. But still, with JC, holidays were times of celebrations.

On the Saturday before Easter, for example, he would disappear for hours. Then he would return, proud of himself, producing a box from the car with a flourish. Inside were exquisite corsages. I remember perfectly formed, quivering orchids for Mother. For my sister and me, tiny red roses clustered in dainty, artistic nests of greenery, secured by long pearled hat pins.

We tried to imagine the florist who made such inspired treasures in the middle of the Alabama sticks where we lived. These were not ordinary corsages. JC was mysterious. "Oh, a friend of mine makes these," he would say, mentioning a community by the river near my hometown. Mother's Day yielded similar surprises.

JC cared little for furnishings, accessories, trappings, embellishments. He wanted to be gardening if he couldn't be out hunting, trudging through woods and fields with those sleek bird dogs he raised and trained with chickens bartered from farmers with promises of quail.

But as Christmas approached, he rummaged through boxes in storage and pulled out lights, stringing them over bushes in front of our house back when they were costly and easily broken, before decorating in this way was popular.

Then, on Christmas Eve, he would vanish again. Through dinner and the opening of presents, JC was the happiest person at the table, especially when the grandchildren started arriving. Then, with the evening over, JC would finish the boiled custard he asked Mother to make every year, his mother's recipe. And this normally tight-fisted man would fish out a bank envelope and distribute $100 bills. To everyone, little children included. Even Mother got one.

One Christmas Eve something even more amazing happened. I was quite small. I heard sleigh bells ringing outside my bedroom window. I got up and looked, but couldn't see anything. I wasn't asleep, I had just gone to bed. No one heard the bells but me, or claimed them, which was unusual. Mother didn't believe in "telling lies" to children, Santa and the tooth fairy included. So anything along the lines had to originate with JC.

I can see him now. Hidden behind the bushes, dressed in hunting camouflage after a long day in the wilds with the dogs, crouched low, knees brushing the browning grass, shaking a rack of sleigh bells borrowed from a farmer over by the river.

Ringing sleigh bells, steaming dishes of Christmas quail, colored lights gleaming on a dark night. Trembling orchids and roses that left us speechless. Golden custard from an old recipe and $100 bills, all of it, held in hands that bequeathed not just material goods but layers of wonder, mystery, peals of laughter.

Because in the giving JC opened an airway for life's breath, which flowed into cold, dark shadows that had been still and silent around a large table for nearly half a century.

So don't pity me the tangled lights, the cinnamon roll baking, the wrapping and mailings, the long drive I insist we make through Virginia and Tennessee into Alabama, which is still home to me after 30 years of living elsewhere. The endless details that exhaust me to the point that sometimes I have to take a nap halfway through the Christmas Eve celebration.

And when I rouse myself long enough to hand over a $100 bill to my son, after all the gifts have been opened and put away, I see more than just his luminous blue eyes.

Because the holidays give us permission to celebrate life with all the surprise and wonder it deserves. We should throw everything we have at it, energy-wise anyway. Because I am not just doing this for myself, for presents, or for my immediate family. I am recovering what was lost, long ago. Filling those blue eyes with light again. I am living for the many, around that big table, JC right in the middle of them.

This one's for you, especially, all month long. Merry Christmas, Daddy.

Just Living

(For S.B. -- "cat hoarder")

Some of the posts about my childhood have been called gothic. B. at www.playalittleguitar.com is mainly the one who says that. But the tall Texan loves a scary story no matter how much he pretends otherwise.

However, nothing in this blog is as gothic as the first weeks of life endured by an odd, fascinating creature I still know in Alabama. And I often think about the lesson he brought to me.

I'm not an animal person, really. I admire them from afar. Too many early heartaches with the cats in my life and then with dogs a mixed bag of that and the toddler experience of being dragged by a collie who did not understand that its leash had gotten caught around my neck and that is why people were chasing and screaming at him. Then there was the cocker that bit me in the face when I bent down to say hello.

But this story is about Buddy the cat.



We had made the long drive from northern Virginia to Alabama for Christmas. The stress of urban life falls from me in distinct layers with every 25 miles or so covered. Once we cross the border of Tennessee into Alabama, I am always struck by the utter darkness, penetrated only by distant Christmas lights, that time of year.

And then finally I'm home.

Within minutes my sister generally comes through my mother's back door. And that year she held something in her arms. It was Buddy. My son went straight for him. Then my husband started arguing for a "turn" holding the cat. They bickered. I was in my cat ignoring mode as usual, trying to best him at his game.

This was Buddy's story.

Buddy and several siblings had been owned by a woman who had a dog, a Jack Russell terrier. Maybe several dogs. But pretty quickly the Jack Russell killed a couple of her cat's new kittens. The owner had the animals separated, the cats in the fenced back yard and the dogs inside the house. But the Jack Russell was determined. He was, after all, a terrier. He kept getting out. Eventually, he had killed the mother and most of the kittens.

My niece, who was doing her medical residency at a hospital, had heard about the first killings. She was the dog owner's neighbor. She was working long hours and had a dog of her own. When she found out the back yard next door had continued to be a killing field, she had had all she could take.

She asked for the remaining kittens. She had no idea how she was going to save them, she couldn't keep them, her resident manager had made an exception for her dog and anyway he was not the kind of animal to accept tiny kittens either.

She arranged time off, swapped, cajoled, begged. She got the two kittens, put them in her car and headed for north Alabama after a long shift caring for humans. She had precious little time. She called her family, asking for mercy for these kittens. She would not take no for an answer. Two of her aunts couldn't say no either, after hearing the story.

My sister took a look at them. The little gray and white one crouched down low, staring at her. His eyes appeared to be crossed. Was he traumatized by all he had been through? Would he be difficult and hard to handle? She moved a bit closer. He jumped at her, held up a tiny paw and swatted her gently, eager to play. She picked him up and he cuddled, purred loudly and fell asleep in her arms.

This was the one. Perfect.

He behaved the same way with everyone he met. He mesmerized and charmed. He was the most curious cat I've ever seen, even for a cat. My sister's other cat would snarl and beat him up and Buddy would enjoy it, come back for more. It was as though he was happy for the attention, any attention, as long as he made it through alive.

My husband fell hard for him too:



My mother even fell for him. My mother doesn't even like animals. She would go to my sister's house "to see what Buddy is doing."

I did my best to ignore him. Someone recorded how well I succeeded.



He's all grown up now. But he acts like a wild thing, not really a domestic. He's huge. He lurks and sneaks around the house and ambushes anything that moves. But then you grab him and the purring starts and he's asleep on a lap, out cold, soft and warm.

He's one of a kind. He just got on with it. He lives life fully, hard, to the max, without as much as a glance back at those horrible times. I think about that. I remember that. He is telling us all something.

And yes, those eyes look to definitely be crossed.

There Is Still More To Say

Late at night, absorbed in writing, something wrenches me into a sharp alert. I smell smoke. I'm certain of it. But no one smokes in this house. Still, I look around, peer from the window, get up and sniff the hallways.

The smoke is only in my mind. It is attached to a decades-old memory so resolute that I not only smell smoke, but seem to catch in the corner of my eye an ephemeral outline of a tiny woman balancing a long black cigarette holder, tendrils of smoke curling into the air. Professor H. Relaxed, sweater thrown over her shoulders. With a diamond ring glittering on her smallest finger, she holds forth in the large, high-ceiling old room.

"God that's it," she would say, in a deep, distinctive, gravelled voice that gave the impression of stage more than manuscript. "You've got something there. Go deeper. Write that."

Professor H. taught expository writing. I needed a senior year elective and V. recommended her. She told us to write our non-fiction essays on subjects that moved us. Go for the simple, she said. Forget lofty, that's artificial. Comb your memories. "Give me you."

I had scribbled diaries forever, journals, I had boxes of them. I brought a few back to school from home. They were from the early years. Growing up "like a wolf in the woods." Stealing honey from the gnarled tree with bamboo sticks. Hiding in a tree under the cover of black night. All the early hurts. Watching. Listening. Taking all those notes. I was bursting with essays.

But I also loved to listen to her. She had been friends for years with Scottie Fitzgerald, the daughter of F. Scott and Zelda. She had been in the Navy and traveled the world. She loved to talk, but more than that was an excellent listener.

The Alabama she knew through Scottie's tales, channeled through the southern aristocracy of Zelda's Montgomery, was a different universe from the northern part of the state. I grew up in the Tennessee River valley, surrounded by the Appalachian foothills. Our speech patterns, mannerisms, cultures, mores, all of it, worlds apart.

And Professor H. loved that. She wanted to hear more. Always.

And I had plenty of material to work from. Faded pictures, yellowed journals, scrapbooks. Mementoes from my time working in the mental institution as a volunteer. The wooden planks patient J. drew and colored on:



So many things. Boxes my husband in years since has tried to get me to throw away. "Let's clear away the clutter," he implores. What? The clutter?

This is my life. I've winnowed and thrown away and ditched so much. I have a few small boxes, still. Precious things. I can't lose them, not yet. They still need to be remembered, written about, witnessed. These pieces of paper and wood and written word are the reasons I can conjure up the detail that brings the visions to life here. Why I still remember.

Pictures, for instance. Uncle H's farm. Where the fox hunts started out. They're gone, H., my father, and recently their younger brother died in his 90s. The dogs they raised are long gone. But here, on these pages, they are waiting for their chance to bolt into that sweet fine night, blood and hearts pumping, strong, young, free.



Because when I write their stories, those who have vanished into the ether coalesce into vibrant life one more time. For mere moments, yes. Only for moments. But in that time, their memories take on the glow of flesh and blood and life. Like the black-haired boy R.G., who a couple of years ago drove to the river where we all used to go growing up. He got out, moved around, got back into the car. He did this for several hours. And then he took a gun and killed himself. What happened? Why? I ask and no one can tell me. Because they just don't know.



So I put away the few boxes I have left. And bring them out now and then and smell smoke that isn't there and hear Professor H. who isn't really there but still she is whispering, "Yes, that's it, that is exactly it."

Because there is more to say, still. Chances for resurrection through the careful ministrations of a few who help to reconstitute them, in a manner, for a few precious moments. Through an act so simple yet spiritual when it occurs. Which snaps the lost in those moments back into the sun and wind and rain. Into the fullness like a patchwork quilt long folded and gathering dust in the shadows. Allowing them breath and the full measure of their absolute vibrance.

It is happening now. You are making it so. Because you are here, reading these words, devoting your time and your care.

These are last portraits. And sometimes, through the long missing of the lost, they are finally what they should have been all along and us with them.

Shimmering, exquisite, cherished. Loved.

And through it all, ever remembered.

In Venice, Eyes of Wonder

I arrived sleepless in Italy, greeted by long security lines and dogs sniffing for drugs and explosives. But the brilliant Venetian sun, magnified by the sea, hypnotized me the moment I stepped from the airport. It sent me reeling. I made my way to the dock where I settled into a water taxi and before I was ready the craft had dispatched me to the canal-side hotel.

I buried myself in the work. These were not happy days. The marriage was not going well, to put it mildly, and I did not know what to do about that. Divorce was out of the question, I thought. At 34, I felt old before my time, shriveled, absent from myself.

So, on the first day of the conference, I stared sulking from a window while the techs tried to make the computers work. I glanced down to see a couple of heavily armed soldiers watching. One was gesturing to me. Was I in trouble? Leaning on something forbidden? I looked closer. He was blowing kisses. The other was smiling, broadly. I blushed! I laughed. I returned the air kiss.

Venice had only begun to charm. In the mornings, I got up early and made my way to the conference site. Strains of opera drifted from alleyways. Had someone left on the stereo and a window open? Was an opera singer up early, practicing? No, I was being serenaded by the garbage collector.

And my commute. No road rage, no packed underground subways. I walked from my hotel to St. Mark’s Square, where I boarded a vaporetto that cruised on the water to the conference site on the Lido. At night, I returned the same way. The gentle rocking, the sweet mesh of waves in the lagoon washing away every last vestige of workday frustration.

By that hour, I was more than ready for the Venetian night. For enjoying the friends I was rapidly meeting. For adventures in food. The food, northern Italy’s pure flavors, unsullied by layers of sauce or other attempts to gild the lily. I will never forget this food and crave it to this day. Only once, in Chicago, in a small, quiet restaurant that a young nephew led us to, have I ever come close.

I walked and walked and walked. At home, I am known for having a terrible sense of direction, being constantly lost. But in Venice, I knew where to go, by instinct. Some streets in the city of bridges and dark, twisty passages weren't marked at all, or if they were, the signs probably were from half a century ago, I was told. Directions rarely made sense. Maps quickly became outdated.

But I felt confident there. So, people soon were stopping me in the street, asking for directions. Italians too. "Non parlo italiano," I was forced to confess. Often, they looked at me skeptically, then hustled away as I repeated "Scusi!" to their retreating backs.

All too soon, it was time to go. I was crushed by this. The work had been good, the food, the fellowship stimulating. And I never want to leave the water anyway. But Venice had revived me in such a way that I simply did not want to go back to my life. To the problems. To the marriage I knew in my heart of hearts would not survive.

But I packed up because I had to, could not delay another day. I had one last lovely breakfast on the small patio at the front of the hotel -- tapping the shell of the soft-boiled egg nestled in a flowered egg cup, spreading butter on the soft bread with chewy crust, pouring hot milk from a small white pitcher into a steaming cup of steaming, strong coffee.

My bags were brought down and I settled up with the front desk.

I stood there in dread. I worried my heart would grow heavy again with the same weight I had brought there. That I would lose the transfusion of life Venice had given me.

And then it happened.

A young man who worked at the hotel, who barely spoke English, rushed to me in the moment before I stepped into the boat holding steady in the canal at the side of the hotel.

“Signora?” he said.

“Yes?”

“You are leaving?”

"Yes."

And in that moment, he brought forward the arm he had been holding behind his back. In his hand was a bouquet of tiny pink roses. Shyly, he handed them to me.

I did not know what to say. This young man had waited on my colleagues and me a couple of days at breakfast. I practiced the few words of Italian I had learned with him, encounters that lasted minutes in all. We had barely spoken. He was quite young. I looked around, thinking he had made a mistake, that he wanted to give the flowers to someone else. But who really? I had seen people leave throughout my stay and had seen no flowers.

In the end, I could say only one thing, since I did not speak his language and he barely spoke mine. And there was no time.

I said “grazie. They are beautiful.” Over and over I said this. I held out my hand and he took it and we stood for a moment. He bowed at the waist and helped me into the vessel. And the craft sputtered and strained, slicing through the canals and the foam, into the saltwater lagoon and finally the sea.

I held onto the roses for dear life. Through the boat ride, onto the airplane. I clutched them as we hurtled through the air to Paris, on another leg of my temporary assignment abroad. I was meeting my husband there, and forgive me, but the truth is I was not looking forward to that.

The roses held me together, somehow. A floral embrace, they kept me floating in the sun, water and music of an ancient, sinking city where I took my first full breath in many years. Where I saw myself in a mirror and for a moment did not recognize myself because I was so caught up in the full flush of marvel. And where, simply and unexpectedly, for a short time but more than enough, I was looked upon again with the freeing, glorying, rejuvenating eyes of wonder.

Lies I Told Myself

I forgot most of the truth I knew by the time I graduated from college. My recovery took a long time even to begin. And it is still a work in progress.

I made up ridiculous things and believed them. For instance, during one of our heated moments, I told Mother that she was "afraid of life." I was in my early 20s and on my way to Paris on vacation, which caused a spat I won't detail. She was wrong about some things, but not others, and if I had remembered even a few truths, I could have saved myself and others a great deal of heartache down the road.

This is what I said during our heated scene: "You and Daddy don't know anything about the world. You hide from it. You are afraid of life."

They knew plenty about the world. Mother, 89 now, admits she doesn't care much for change. She's not alone in that. But the truth is her actions did not teach me or anyone else to shrink from the world.

Take the blue holes, for instance.

My siblings and I learned to swim in rivers and creeks. Mother got us acclimated to the water early, even when the water wasn't really warm. She held us aloft on outstretched arms and talked us through the stroking and kicking. After a certain amount of time, none of us yet school age, Daddy led us into the middle of golden green water rippling in sunlight that threaded through trees lining muddy banks. And he let us go.

We thrashed violently, went under, swallowed water, coughed and screamed. Then instinct and self-preservation took over. As Daddy walked backwards, eyes carefully on bobbing heads, we grasped desperately for the hands he held out just beyond our reach, then triumphantly as the instructions from Mother kicked in and our brains connected with limbs. At last, we were swimming.

Even then, in rural Alabama, there were swimming pools around. But why flail around in small concrete tubs of chemicals when so much sweet natural abundance was available. We never knew what we would find at creeks, rivers and lakes, which were alive with possibility. A heavy summer rain made the water run swift and hard, while a dry spell meant lazy drifting on inner tubes.

A day on the living water never yielded the same result. Were the little round eggs I found peeking from the side of a sandy creek bank snake eggs or turtles? And that little dark snake bobbing his way toward me over the tiny rapids -- poisonous or not? Best to run first and ponder it out later.

And the rope swings and grape vines. Think of it -- holding onto one of these, we would take a running jump and soar from a cliff or bank over the vast water many feet below and then drop. It was exhilarating, making that first jump and surviving. Then climbing up the banks to the top, swinging out over and over again, dropping endlessly into the dark, cold water below.

There were no life guards to keep us from doing senseless things. So we learned to self-police, to look out for each other, to administer first aid with what we had on hand. We kept injuries from our parents and took care to minimize bloody evidence so we could go back. I still carry scars from cuts that should have been stitched up.

So, raised on creek, lake and river swimming practically from birth, we always wanted to explore new ones when traveling. "Mother, can we find a creek today? A river maybe?" She almost always obliged.

More than once, she showed us what she was made of on these trips.

I remember scrambling from the back of a car deep in the Tennessee wilds, bent on beating everyone to the water's edge. I ran clutching a towel, long grass whipping arms and legs, bare feet slapping the cold, hard dirt path.

I heard them before I saw them. Low, coarse voices, curses, a laugh, something making a fast jittery clicking. I stopped, the sweat on my upper lip, neck, forehead running cold.

Men blocked the trail. They wore overalls and rumpled work clothes, squatted, slouched in and around the path, their faces mostly covered by straw hats, crumpled up cloth ones. Some were yelling at a pair of dice on the ground. And nearly all were holding or drinking or wiping backs of dusty hands across mouths after sipping from canning jars filled with clear liquid.

They glared at the girl who had interrupted them. Their break from harsh labor, or forgetting about none to be found, mouths to feed, of the pious and rules they never wanted and chafed under. For a few stolen hours under the cover of brush near a creek nobody bothered to go to much anymore. Until that afternoon. Until that shivering little pest of a girl.

I turned to run, calling for Mother. My voice high and breaking. But Mother, walking a brisk pace in front of her niece, who had also brought her children, did not break stride. She kept her eyes on the water. She was comfortable there and would not be intimidated. She had grown up in that countryside, roaming with older brothers and her childhood friend Bish. Bish, who asked her to marry him before going off to fight against Hitler. But he didn't come back. His plane ditched in the English Channel and he drowned.

That day, Mother brushed by me and walked straight on the path. I remember grabbing her skirt tail, something I had not done for years, probably pushing my sister away from her traditional position. My grown cousin walked behind in silence with her four little children, one of them a baby.

I should not have been surprised by Mother's nonchalance. It had been only recently that a man acting a fool menaced our car on the back roads of Tennessee. The man's car hit ours in the back. I remember being very afraid as Mother pulled over, got out and went to inspect. The man got out of his car and snarled. He was wiry thin, in jeans and cowboy boots. And I could smell the whiskey a car length away.

Then she turned to him. "Why did you hit my car?" A look of surprise on his face and the bluster dissolved. She told him there was no damage. She would not be calling the police or the insurance company. On one condition: That he go home immediately and lay off the bottle. "Yes m'am," he said over and over, "I shorely am so very sorry, m'am, just beggin' yore pardon, m'am." Then he mentioned he was grateful Jesus had spared them from injury and damage. Which was enough. And Mother drove us away.

With that same resolve, she held steady at the sun-dappled creek. She kept her eyes on the water, which was just hidden by lush green foliage in a Middle Tennessee made even more luminous by summer.

Seeing her, the men suddenly began to move away from the path, hats came off, fruit jars wordlessly whisked from sight. Several nodded to Mother as we passed, others averted their eyes. She nodded back, ever so slightly moving her head.

But she kept her eyes on the water and hustled everyone ahead of her, following along last.

Maybe someone recognized Mother. She had been gone from Tennessee only a few years at that point.

But she wasn't about to be thwarted from her day at the creek. Not because she wanted to swim. I've never seen her in the water except when she was teaching us. I think now she was intent on making sure we could swim in all conditions, even in colder weather sometimes, to make sure we could handle it. She said Bish's drowning made no sense, that he was an excellent swimmer. She may have wondered whether the cold killed him.

And it's funny, my brother built a house on a creek bank, another on a lake. I go to the water every chance I get. It breathes life into me when I've hit bottom. And when I'm happy, it is the first thing I think of, getting to the water, I breathe easier there, in every way.

When Mother goes, she sits and watches, like I do. Her eyes scan the landscape, settling on small bobbing waves, then moving down into the depths. She is drawn to the water because she has been searching all these years.

And I understand now, finally, that she is waiting. And that she is most certainly not afraid

A Cat, Crosses, And Moonlight

I wasn't going to tell this story, ever, I banished it more than 30 years ago. But last week at dinner, I told S. we had gone to a restaurant that felt haunted, which shifted the talk to ghost stories. J. tuned us out, so there it was, without warning, looming in my mind's eye. The old resistance was abruptly worn away.

So I'm sitting now with the filmy shawl I wear when I need comfort draped across my shoulders, skimming my bare arms, partly wrapped around my wrists. I rustled around searching for it before I started the telling. Even though I wasn't cold. I needed it because I was beginning to shiver just a bit, a fine, barely perceptible tremor in my very core.

This story happened in college. Sophomore year, a late fall night, but still so humid it felt like the middle of summer. I was alone in the dorm room. I hadn't seen much of my roommate for a while. We had active social lives. Plus, I didn't care for her boyfriend one bit, and she knew it.

Then she came back to the room. She was rattled. Accustomed to her dark moods, I spoke, but mostly ignored her, probably studied or pretended. It had gotten late and I remember getting ready for bed.

She didn't want me to turn out the light.

She was leaning back on the bed, chain-smoking. Her mile-long legs pulled up, clasping her knees close to her chest with her arms. We had the mattresses on the floor, as was the custom then. I sat on my bed, which was near hers. And asked her why.

"It's not good," she said, her deep voice cracking. Too many long, thin Kools. It was then I noticed. She pushed her long, thick black hair away from her face with a thumb, dark eyes glittering, her face even paler.

She told me she'd spent the day at a farm with the boyfriend who gave me the creeps. "You're not going to believe me," she said, but the stress pushed her thick drawl into a jittery pace I had to strain to understand. "I swear I met a warlock."

I took a deep breath. Okay... here we go. We'd talked about this kind of thing. Laughed about it. We both had messed around with Ouija Boards as kids, scared ourselves at sleepover seances. But she been raised in a fundamentalist household like mine. We ditched those churches the second we got to college. But still, we didn't believe in witchcraft. Did we?

Then she started to talk.

The warlock was real, she insisted. He focused on her like a laser. He lived at the farm with a woman, a witch. He kept talking to her, though. She was special. She had talent, potential. He wanted to see her, to spend time with her. She felt like he was seeing right through her. Like he was hypnotizing her. He was mesmerizing, and she couldn't turn away, from his eyes. He was charming and hypnotic and at the same time horrifying and evil.

She felt as though she was in the room with the devil himself.

Whoa, hold on, time out. She kept talking fast, dropping to a whisper, and I was having trouble keeping up. But I told her that could not be real, the warlock thing. He was making it up, having a laugh on them all, making fun of the girl from the country. He was not for real.

Then she told me something she had not shared in all our late-night dorm talks. Her dabbling had been more than sleepover fodder with girlfriends. She'd gotten in deeper, with other friends from school. She asked did I remember a murder a couple of years back, strange circumstances? Yes, of course I did. Well, she wasn't there, she had nothing to do with it. But that girl got in even deeper than all of them, died in a spell gone bad.

She was crying then. And suddenly I was cold, freezing in fact, and aware for the first time in a very long time that I was so very far from home. I could see the newspaper in my mind and remembered the story, the girl my age, her body found cold and alone in a dark shed. Candles, there were candles surrounding the body. Black candles. Her boyfriend had been arrested. Case closed.

I reminded her of that. Humans, not the supernatural, were involved there. And she had encountered the same situation out at the farm. All she had to do was not go back. Simple. Another case closed. Time for bed.

And then I heard it. A cat. Meowing loudly, yowling. Just outside the window. I could not believe what I was hearing. It just could not be. I got up and ran to the window.

And there it was. In the light of a nearly full moon, a large black cat, glowing green eyes, sitting underneath our dorm window howling at us.

"Get away!" I hissed through the screen. "You get away! Scat!" The cat didn't move. "I MEAN IT GET AWAY!" The window was open. I slammed it shut. The cat hunkered down. It was uncanny. I pulled the drapes. V. was in a panic, again she was crumpled against the wall on her bed, face in her hands.


"It's him, he's here, he's come for me," she whimpered.

"The hell he is," I said. Some words to that effect, I don't remember exactly because I was furious. I didn't really believe the cat was, well, him, the warlock, or whatever. But she believed the warlock had somehow appropriated the cat's visage for the evening. Or become one, or something, I'm a little fuzzy on that one still. But I definitely was spooked by her reaction. I also was sleep-deprived. And I was (am) superstitious enough to not want to take chances.

So I knew exactly what to do.

I had a small cross necklace in a jewelry box. I dug it out. I placed it on the windowsill. "Good trumps evil," I told her, looking grave for the first time that night. "Always. You know that." I knew K. would not be home (they didn't call her "late date K. for nothing). But she never remembered to lock her door. So I ran up the stairs and nosed around. She's Catholic, I knew she wouldn't let me down and she didn't. I found several armaments.

I placed those crosses on the windowsills too. And I dusted off the bible my mother sent me to college with and read from it: "I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety." Psalm 4:8

I didn't believe the cat was a warlock, I told V., but I was cloaking us in the Lord's armor so she could sleep. She wrapped herself in her long back cape and stretched out on her bed. I slept in my clothes, ready to throw out another layer of prophylatic spiritual fencing, if need be. But I remember sleeping hard, unaccosted by cats or warlocks or bad dreams.

My roommate and I did other some strange things as we grew up in the coming years. But we never warred against alleged witches-warlocks-cats or even talked about that night again.

Yet, to this day, I've given cats a wide berth. I don't for a second think they are evil. But now and then a certain black cat will remind me of that night. Often, the cats just hate being ignored and make a beeline for me. And I like to one up them at being, well, cats.

Thinking about that night, I watch them from the corner of my eye until I'm absolutely certain we've not made acquaintance in another time and place, under an almost full moon.

Certain we haven't, my hand moves toward my neck -- is the cross there or in my purse? No church owns me, I don't even go now, but the weapons and armor were burned into me decades ago. If something scary ever decides to show, I'm up for the fight.