Day 37: Picture Frames

Before she passed away, my grandmother kept a table by the north-facing window in her second floor apartment. She lined the table with family photographs and crouched over it in her old wooden chair with a flower embossed red plastic backing.  She held her rosary beads in her soft, white, wrinkled hands, praying for all of us. She was deeply religious her entire life and as she sat in her hospital bed she said she could see Mother Mary, come to lead her to heaven. My father bent down and searched beyond the window, but couldn't see the visions that were so clear to her. She died twice in the hospital. My mother received a phone call from the doctor to say she'd passed. Ten minutes later we got a second call saying she was alive and fully coherent. She hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to her grandchildren, she said, so she'd returned. We went up to the hospital that night. I waited in the antiseptic hallway, afraid to go in and say goodbye. Eventually, I went into the room. She was pale and and worn, but content, at ease. She passed away a few days later and this time we buried her by her husband who had gone to an early grave 40 years prior.

My parents have a few framed pictures hanging in their living room. Above the fireplace, a photograph of them in their wedding wear, but, strangely, not from their wedding day. The picture is so faded the white of my mother's plain dress blends with her skin and my father's pale blue suit. Her dark curly hair and glasses are all that stand out. To the left, a photograph of my brother and me from when I was an infant and he was four. He's holding me in his lap, both of us are looking at the camera and smiling wide. To the right, a family photograph taken at the same time as the picture of my brother and I. It's the mid-eighties, but my parents are still dressed as if it's the 70s. My father has more hair and longer sideburns, he looks younger, happier. My mother is wearing a form-fitting dress, her hair cropped short on the sides and fuller on top. My brother is helping to hold me as I shine a toothless grin from my mother's lap.  Our yearbook photos hang on another wall on either side of a window. Neither of us looks much different than we did then. On another wall, a photograph of me from a dance recital wearing too much make-up and a long black ballet costume. A final picture of my husband and I at our wedding hangs on the third wall. We look young, naive.

While my husband was in Germany and Iraq, I kept framed pictures of him on my bureau. In the green wooden frame with the shamrock pattern I kept a photograph of him sitting in my passenger seat. We spent most of the first year of our relationship in my car, sitting for hours and talking or listening to music. He was wearing a green shirt, Fighting Irish baseball hat, and a sly smile. He'd lose the cushioning in his cheeks a few months later in basic training. In the second frame pictured above, I kept a picture that I took of us, also in my car, when he was home for leave on his nineteenth birthday. I bought a new dress for the occasion and he wore his Class As to a restaurant where we were ridiculously out of place. We pressed our foreheads together to take the picture. When you only see someone two or four weeks a year it's hard not to be in a state of bliss when you're together.

When he got out of the army I framed several pictures of him and his friends from Iraq. They lined our mantle above our non-functioning fireplace. When he left, he took the pictures out and left the frames exactly where they'd been. I found pictures for a few of them, but the two frames pictured above remind me too much of him.

Maybe someday I'll muster up the nerve to ask my parents if they plan to take my wedding picture down or if they think it will fade forever on the wall until even our smiles have disappeared into the bright white wear of light.

Day 36: Cookie Cutters

Baking Christmas cookies has been the only holiday tradition that I have gladly taken part in each year from the time I was old enough to mix the batter with my mother's wooden spoon.  We made pizzelles, cinnamon twirls, anise balls, chocolate chip (with and without chocolate, with and without nuts), sugar cookies, and in my teens I began making my signature gingerbread cookies that have become a staple at every holiday. My mother's pans were blackened with age, long thin sheets that we placed in the oven two at a time. I have memories of standing up on a step stool over the single yellow kitchen counter, stirring away at endless bowls of batter. My mother always complained that I was scooping out too much for each cookie. I'd leave plenty of batter in the white plastic bowl and run my fingers around to lick the stickiness until my stomach hurt. The whole house would smell of sugar and spice. My father would sneak the cookies as they cooled on wire racks spread across the kitchen table. We'd pack them in Danish butter cookie tins from the 70s.

The year my then-boyfriend was stationed in Germany, I baked close to 300 cookies to box up and ship to him and his unit. My parents tried to discourage my efforts. "What are you doing that for?" my mother snapped. My father was too eager to take them to the post office for me. I walked them there myself, wanting to be sure they were sent with the correct postage and that they would arrive in time for Christmas. Several weeks later he came home on leave, a surprise that everyone else knew about. He proposed to me that New Year's, just weeks before he deployed to Iraq. I danced in the snow beneath the street lights that night on a quiet road by his best-friend's house.

He would spend the following Christmas in Iraq and I sent hundreds of cookies again. They took months to arrive, but I had vacuum sealed them in plastic wrapping and cushioned them between layers of plastic bubbles. The heat kept them soft, he said.

I still enjoy baking cookies at Christmas, although I don't make as many and I give most away to friends and co-workers. I bought the cookie cutter presses pictured above when I first moved back to Massachusetts. They seemed much larger, much more functional in the magazine catalog I ordered them from. I already had a set of cookie cutters for the sugar cookie recipe I'd perfected over the years, so this purchase was senseless. I think I might have tried to use them once, and the batter stuck to them despite how much flour I patted on.

For the first 24 days of the challenge, I followed Marylee's suggestion to make a list of the things I wanted to buy and to set it aside until day 25. I decided not to write a list, but to just keep one in my memory. I only had a few things I planned to purchase, but by day 25 I decided I didn't need them after all. Letting go of so much has changed the way I shop and think about shopping. Before, I never brought lists-- not even to the supermarket. There's this strange phenomena that happens as soon as I cross the automatic door threshold and step into the sensory over-load of any store-- I completely forget what I have come for. Before, I would wander around for hours, trying to recall the single item that prompted the trip. In my meandering, I would inevitably find more things to buy and sometimes forget the first thing completely, which prompted a second trip to the store and more needless purchasing. Today, I stopped by a store on my way home from work with the intention of buying a lamp for my new meditation room and a blue cardigan to match my blue summer skirts. I came out with both items and nothing else. It's refreshing to have regained control over my apartment, my past, and my buying.

Day 35: Scrapbook

While my then-boyfriend was away at basic training I purchased this scrapbook from a local craft store. Green leather emblazoned with the army's official seal, I decided I would chronicle his time in the military and give it to him as a gift when his eight year contract had expired. There was one small problem, however. With him half-way around the world for the first four years, I had no way of getting the pictures and mementos that I'd planned to include. Still, I held onto it figuring when we moved in together eventually I'd discreetly dig through his things to find what I needed.

I would end up going through his things three months after we'd gotten married and moved in together, but for a different reason. One Sunday morning I woke before him and crept into the kitchen to make him bacon and eggs. He'd been awake long after I'd gone to sleep. I noticed a few beer bottles on the mini stand I'd purchased for his laptop. The raised screen was the first indication that something was different since he always shut it when he was finished. I went over to close it and saw that he'd left an instant message conversation on the screen. The last thing he'd said to "Hollywood Girl" was "love ya." At the sight of the words my heart started pounding. "It's probably just one of his sisters," I reasoned with myself. He was constantly discovering another sibling of his, offspring of his father who was known for sleeping around before he'd been put in prison. I scrolled to the beginning of the conversation and began reading. There was no rationalizing anymore, it was clear he was having an affair.

He was the only person I'd ever trusted. In the four years we'd maintained a long-distance relationship I never suspected him of cheating. He would feed me stories of his faithfulness, saying he was the only one of his friends who didn't sleep around as their girlfriends waited back home. When he disappeared one weekend and called me on Monday to say he'd been to Amsterdam I was hurt, but believed him when he said he had remained faithful while his friends went off to strip clubs and brothels. In the time he was gone, I hardly even talked to other men, determined not to be like "all the other" military wives who couldn't handle the time apart and looked for comfort in someone else.

I remember that morning like a dream, as if I am floating outside of my body, looking down on everything that followed the realization that he had broken my trust. I pulled myself up from the living room floor, my legs felt as if they were made of lead. It was like in reoccurring nightmares when I desperately needed to run, but my feet were frozen to floor. I stumbled down the hallway and into the bedroom. He woke up as soon as I approached the bed and knew something was wrong. I literally collapsed in tears on the ground. He followed me, asking "What's wrong." "Who were you talking to last night," I asked. He lied. "You want to fuck her," I said screaming and clawing at the rug beneath me. "I waited for you," I said again and again. In shock, he couldn't put the pieces together. "What are you talking about?" he asked. I told him he'd left his conversation up on the computer and I'd read it. He begged me to calm down. "Stop screaming," he said, "someone's going to call the MPs."

In an attempt to calm me down he told me the truth about who she was. He'd met her in seventh grade, he said. She moved away, but they had kept in contact. It had never been a physical relationship he claimed. I asked why he would do it, "Because I could," he said.

I had moved miles away from my family, my friends, my job, left everything behind to be with him. I was reasonably devastated to find out that he had lied to me for years. "I only started talking to her again recently," he said. He told me they would talk while I was making him dinner as if that was going to make me feel better.

I spent the entire day in bed crying. The annual book sale that I had been looking forward to for weeks was the following day and I no longer cared to go. He begged me to go, to snap out of my funk, to "be happy." We went, but I wasn't happy. I could barely meet his gaze over the rows of books.

When he went to work the following morning I came home determined to find her on myspace-- it was back before facebook was popular. I found her immediately. Her profile was filled with pictures of her in scantily clad outfits with drinks in her hands or her infant son who was named after my husband. I sent her a threatening message. She wrote back immediately. We went back and forth for an hour. Although she said the child was not his I never believed her. They looked too much alike, they had the same name. I hated myself for empathizing with her, for seeing her as a person and not a monster after our conversation and I hated myself for staying with my remorseless husband. Maybe if I wasn't living so far from home, or if he weren't in the military, or if I had had more self-respect it would have been easier to walk away. When one of my closest friends called me the day after the myspace conversation I couldn't even bring myself to tell her.  I lied and said things were going really well.

I went digging through the box closest to the door in his spare room. I found letters from family and friends, but none from her. I stopped looking because, really, if she had sent him letters I didn't want to see them.

I hadn't been able to find a job in the three months since we'd moved to Georgia so I had the entire day to sit at home and sulk. Sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon I saw a school bus dropping children off outside and decided I was going to go back to school to become an English teacher. I had little desire to teach, but needed to find a way to support myself.

We stayed together five years after I found out about that first affair. I tried to regain trust in him, but he continued to break it over the years. I blamed myself for not being able to forgive and let go. For somehow not being a good enough wife to lead him to do the things he did.

When we moved in together in Massachusetts I showed him the photo album I'd bought almost eight years before and never even taken out of the plastic and cardboard. He pulled out a pile of pictures for me to add in, but I had lost the desire to scrapbook about something we both wanted to forget. He celebrated the end of his eight year contract alone last summer after he moved out. There's no need for me to hold onto this gift that will never be given.

Day 34: Children's Beach Chair

In September I began a  yoga teacher training program at a local studio. The first night we were warned that some days we'd be sitting for hours and were welcome to bring a chair or cushion. The following day just about everyone in the group had a stylish beach chair while I propped myself up on a blue yoga block. I scanned my memory for something I could bring the next day that might be lying low around my house. I had a lawn chair, but that would seem too tall and out of place. I could bring my meditation cushion, but that wouldn't provide me with back support. I decided to take a trip to the Christmas Tree Shop certain they would have something.

There was an entire display of beach chairs still left over from summer on sale for $8. They came in a neat drawstring bag that resembled a yoga mat bag. I unfastened one to set up beside the display and discovered the chairs were meant for children. Still, I sat in it, drawing sideways looks from other shoppers. The arms went out far enough to accommodate my hips that had widened at some point in my early twenties in preparation for childbirth. I decided the chair was perfect and purchased it.

The next day I squeezed myself in for several hours. It didn't take long for the metal bars beneath the fabric to begin cutting into my thighs. Still I sat, determined to make the chair work. "At least it has a hole for my water bottle," I thought until I realized the base of my bottle was too big for the mesh opening. With my father's stubbornness, I sat in it the remainder of the day. Training was one weekend a month so it stayed in my trunk in the drawstring bag beside my yoga mat for four weeks. The following weekend I didn't bother to take it out. I brought my meditation cushion instead, which was hours more accommodating than the too-small chair and the studio wall provided all the back support I needed.

Although I had no intentions of ever using the chair again, it remained in my trunk until just recently. I open my trunk daily to reach for my yoga mat and couldn't help but be reminded of this illogical purchase each time. Thankfully 24(+) things allowed me to finally take it out. I brought it to my three-year old niece and propped it up on the giant deck that my brother and I built alone in nine days one summer when we were both unemployed. We dug holes for the foundation, poured cement, carted thousands of pounds of wood, and pounded in nails the hottest week of the year when the temperatures reached close to 100 and shade didn't reach the workspace until late afternoon. It was one of the single most rewarding experiences of my life and makes barbeques on his deck all the more enjoyable. My niece made several jumbled expressions of surprise and wonder at the new chair. After admiring it from a safe distance and with some encouragement from my brother and I she sat down, her feet reaching the floor perfectly. "Thank you Auntie," she said and jumped up to wrap her arms around me.

Years ago, my sister-in-law's grandfather built a cottage on a private beach somewhere near Cape Cod. The family shares the cottage, each claiming their own week of the summer to sit and relax and watch the waves. I know this chair will go with them to the beach this year and my niece will sit in it, swinging her feet back and fourth in the sand by the ocean.

Day 33: Remote Control Car

It's funny how many of my mother-in-law's misguided gifts are still sitting around my home. Getting rid of gifts is always especially hard because of the guilt attached to removing something that was meant especially for you. The whole custom of gift-giving in America dictates that you must feign happiness or excitement even when the gift is not something you would have wanted. Holidays are always a source of stress for me, and I'm sure for others too. I think about what to buy for others weeks before the holiday.  Getting older makes gift giving all the more complicated. I could easily buy what I want, but really, there is nothing I need. If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm in the business of letting go, not acquiring.

The remote control car pictured above was given to my husband for Christmas one year. My mother-in-law gave matching cars to him and his brother so they could race them around the house. A great idea for children under ten, but for adults in their twenties and thirties the idea was laughable. They both just gave each other looks at the suggestion and placed the cars beside the piles of clothes and house-hold items they'd already unwrapped. Unfazed, my mother-in-law touted how they were indestructible and could crash into anything.  She nearly begged them to open the boxes and begin the races.

The car traveled home with us, never opened, and found a place on top of one of the cabinets that came with our apartment. It remained there until the yard sale I had a few weeks ago. An overprotective grandmother dragging two young children, a boy and a girl, inspected it for much too long before saying she'd buy it. "I need to talk to their mother first," she said and disappeared again.  She returned a short while later.  She asked the little boy if he'd use it. He didn't speak, but just looked as wide-eyed and scared as his sister who was clutching the bunched up fabric of her dress, looking close to tears. "It doesn't say what age on it," she said. I decided not to point out the giant 3+ on the front in case the boy was 2 1/2. "I'm sure he won't hurt himself with it," I reasoned. "It's indestructible," I said, intoning my mother-in-law, laughing silently to myself at a joke she didn't understand. She gave me three dollars for it, even though I'd asked for five, but I was so grateful to let it go I would have given it away for free. "Let grandma hold it," she said tucking it under her arm so she could take the tiny hand of each child in her own. "Let's go get you your carriage," she said to the girl, leading the way up the small hill beside my driveway.

Day 32: Puzzle

From an early age, I enjoyed building puzzles. The first puzzle I ever put together was a giant floor board that took up several feet of space and depicted the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was only 25 pieces, each bigger than two of my petite pre-school hands. For days straight, I spread the pieces out over the living room floor. When I'd finally pieced it together I covered it in a black silky cape that was left over from Halloween one year and reused for daily dress-up. I called to my brother and mother to see what I'd done and they pretended to be thrilled when I whisked the cape away like a magician.

After the giant puzzle, I graduated to a 100 piece puzzle of normal size, also of the Ninja Turtles riding in a van with Master Splinter looking on as they shoved slices of pizza into their mouths. The pepperonis and sausages danced in the air as the van went airborne over a bump.

When I was seven or close to it, my brother received a Ghostbusters puzzle for Christmas one year. It was 1,000 pieces and painted with the anti-ghost logo on a black background. The hundreds of black pieces were enough to make my brother abandon the project before he'd begun.  I pieced the entire thing together, then, after seeing someone on one of my favorite Nickelodeon shows, Salute Your Shorts, piece together a puzzle upside down, I turned the Ghostbusters puzzle face down and rebuilt it a second time.

The following Christmas, my parents gave me a 500 piece puzzle with Earl, Fran, Robbie, Charlene, Grandma, and the baby from Dinosaurs, a Jim Henson creation from the early nineties. I built and rebuilt that puzzle more times than I can recall. By then, I'd created a system for building puzzles-- I'd start with the border, then break the remaining pieces into piles by color, then piece the puzzle together in chunks until the sections interlocked. Just after my father broke his back, he spent the majority of his days in bed, barely able to roll over to get up for the bathroom. One afternoon, my mother left me home alone with my father to take my brother back-to-school shopping. I sat at the dining room table trying to piece together the Dinosaurs puzzle for the dozenth time to take my mind away from every whisper of the wind which I imagined to be an intruder coming to attack me and cart my ten-year-old body to a dark basement across town.

At 16, I spent time in a mental health center where we weren't allowed anything that could be a detriment to our physical or mental health (except of course cafeteria food).  They removed my hood-strings and belt, provided plastic utensils for eating, locked my personal belongings in an off-limits storage area, wouldn't allow me to read the books I'd brought about Edgar Allan Poe or Sylvia Plath (okay, so maybe they weren't the best choices), and would only allow us to create crafts under strict supervision. I spent hours sitting on the window seat in my room, staring out at the gravely ledge, wondering how an orange peel had made it among the rocks on the other side of the double-paned glass. I was told that to escape this miserable institution I'd have to show progress in social interactions with the other residents. The facility for teenagers had been too over-crowded, so I'd been put with adults. My floor mates were mostly elderly, a few were in their forties.

I ventured to the "game room" one night in an attempt to appease the nurses that patrolled the rooms every fifteen minutes. The common area was completely empty. At the far end someone had stacked a pile of games. At the bottom of the pile was a 1,000 piece puzzle of people in a restaurant with a black background. A nurse tried to discourage me from building it, "There's pieces missing," she said, but I ignored her and set myself up at the long table outside of the game room. The table was at the end of a long corridor, past rows of closed doors to patients' rooms.

I began, as usual, by mapping out the large border. Then, rather than separating the pieces into piles, I would pick up a single piece, match it up with the picture on the box and place it down within the border where it belonged. Every nurse came by to say, "Wow, I've never seen someone build a puzzle like that." I ignored them completely.

A few hours in, the fire alarm for the building went off. The nurses began running from one end of the unit to the other while the patients wandered confused out of their rooms. We were on tight security-- only level threes were allowed day passes or time out to smoke on the ground floor just beyond the exit door and even then they had to be back within a certain time frame.  I was a level one (the lowest level one could be) for keeping my belt in my bedside drawer over night. I woke up to find the belt missing in the morning. When I asked about it, the nurses refused to give me a straight answer.

Not knowing what to do when the fire alarm went off, the nurses herded all of the patients toward the fire exit door, which happened to be directly behind the table I was building my puzzle on. Maybe they thought being close to the exit, somewhere near the eighth floor of a hospital, would be enough to save us in the event of a real fire. Patients wearing hospital gowns that didn't close, evening dresses, and sweat pants crowded around the table, fascinated by my project. I continued piecing the puzzle together, ignoring the alarm, the gathering crowd, the comments, the staring. Eventually, the fire alarm was shut off and everyone slowly wandered back to their rooms or the TV area for evening snack time. An older woman in a wheelchair who went by Babs stayed behind to tell me that I needed to get out, that I was too beautiful to be in such an ugly place. I hoped the nurses were taking note of the fact that someone was talking to me, surely that would count for being social.

I built the entire puzzle in just a few hours that night. The nurse had been right, it was missing a few pieces, but a surprisingly small fraction of the 1,000 total. When I'd finished, I folded it neatly and replaced it in the box and returned it to the bottom of the pile beneath the outdated board games.

I didn't work on a puzzle again until I was in graduate school. The library on the college campus had set up a puzzle with hot air balloons floating in a blue sky on one of the long common tables. They propped up a sign that said, "Take a study break and de-stress with a puzzle." The simple sign was all the invitation I needed to begin working on the blue sky that everyone before me had left aside.

One of the biggest adjustments to being single was having so much free time. Without having to be a taxi driver, personal chef, or fair-weather companion to my husband, and on vacation from work, I searched for ways to fill the time. I went to a local craft store (some things never change) to look for a project and walked by a display of puzzles. I chose the one pictured above and emptied the pieces on my kitchen table. I quickly remembered how addictive puzzle-building is for me and built the entire 1,000 piece puzzle in two days.  I left it on my table for a week (eating alone every night had freed up plenty of extra space) then finally took it apart and boxed it back up. Now, I can afford another puzzle and will not need to rebuild the same one repeatedly as I did for years as a child. I will always find another when the need to study these jigsaw pieces of cardboard for the sake of temporarily shutting down my restless thoughts arises.

Day 31: Air Purifier

One would think that after my husband spent thirteen months in a war zone in the middle of the desert without running water, electricity, or any of the other amenities we take for granted that he would be accustomed to dust. When he returned home he was suddenly hyper-sensitive to the almost invisible particles. He wouldn't drink from a glass of water that had been left out too long because it was "too dusty."  The South in the summertime was not the place to be for avoiding airborne particles.

We bought a black car while we lived in Georgia. Throughout the summer, which lasted from March until October, my car would be covered in a thick film of yellow pollen that would cling to my fingers and clothes each time I reached for the car door.  The housing we lived in was probably built when the base first opened during World War I. He was convinced that mold was seeping out of our central air system and spent just about every waking moment blowing his nose. The sound of his nose being blown resembled a trumpet or an elephant.

In an attempt to eliminate the safari sounds, I purchased the small air purifier pictured above. We kept it running in the bedroom. The constant whir helped to block out the ringing in my ears that started a few months after I moved to Georgia and never stopped. The recycled air was also cooler, which kept my husband happy. It seemed to make a difference in the air quality, even if it was just psychological. 

The air purifier made the move back to Massachusetts, but has since just taken up space in the corner of the room where all the weights formerly reigned. It's time to purify my home of this unnecessary object.