Sally Gerard

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“Marlee, where are you girl?”

“Sorry dad. I was just thinking.” Setting her bowl on the bedside table, Marlee smiled into her father’s brown eyes. Eli Riverstone had been a handsome man. She could still see that in the strong bones of his face and the easy way his lips could still curve into a smile.

“The egg was delicious. I think you’re finally getting the hang of this cooking thing.” It was a joke he loved to share about every other day, because Marlee had been cooking his breakfast since he’d taught her as a little girl.

“Must not have been that good. Look at all you left, and who was it that taught me to waste not, want not?”

“Well, I did pretty good today. You can’t complain. Now, what are you thinking so hard about?”

“Nothing really, just my students.”

“Don’t you try to buffalo me. I might’a been born at night, but it wasn’t last night. Take it to the Lord, girl. Leave your burdens there and the answer will come.” Marlee got up to clear away the tray without responding. Eli put a hand on her arm, “Girl, I mean it. The Lord knows best in all things.”

Marlee smiled and nodded without meeting his eyes and left with the tray. Putting it on the kitchen counter, and taking a deep breath, she came back to the bedroom doorway, “You want some help to get into the chair, Dad?”

“Not just yet. Let me rest a while.”

“Right. I’m come check on you in a bit. Love you.”

“I love you too, kiddo.”

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Easing her dad’s bedroom door open, she set the tray on the bedside table, opened the blinds for him and helped him to ease himself up as she placed the pillows behind him for support. She leaned in to kiss his cheek, “How was your night, Dad?”

His lips moved to form a smile. “Just fine.” His voice was always gravely now, the deepness she remembered was still there, but softer and subdued.

“I want you to eat the egg and at least one piece of the toast.” She settled the tray on his lap, flipping the little stands down on either side of his legs.

“Yes M’am.”

Sitting in the rocker placed next to his bed, Marlee reached for the bowl of oatmeal she’d put on the tray. He could eat on his own, but sharing meals was something they’d always done, so she preferred to sit with him and eat her breakfast. Later she’d help him into the wheel chair so he could have some independence to move about their home.

While she ate, she tried to record the details of her father. The cancer had aged him, well, the treatment really. Finished with another round of chemo, he was slowly regaining some strength, but still needed to put more weight on. Marlee cooked all of his favorites, attempting to entice him to eat more. She’d be lucky if he finished the egg and half a piece of toast, but she’d take it.

So this is still the same story and you can read it all so far by going back to Beginnings, but what do you think of this title: Because, Love…

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She finally moved to plug in the phone and head into her bedroom to shower and let the day bring whatever it would. Dressed and with a hot cup of coffee, Marlee pushed the little toggle switch to turn on her desk lamp, opened her laptop and began to sort through the day’s work. The sun wouldn’t be up for another hour at least, if it even decided to show its face in this steely gray cold.

Checking to see how much work had been submitted over night by her middle and high school students, she decided she had time to work on her story. Setting the lap top aside, Marlee opened the soft sided journal and reread the last part she’d written:

Olivia went to college because, well, that’s just what you do, she supposed. It seemed to be expected so she went. She kept quietly to herself, got close to no one, and studied English. It was a nice quiet routine and one that she could conceal herself in very well.

But her college required a semester’s study abroad. This was to build “a more well-rounded” student, whatever that meant. Olivia went off to Scotland. She was placed with a local family and enjoyed their bustle all around her.

When spring came, they took her into the Highlands to see some of the country. Walking down a forested path, she found herself alone in the quiet as the family trounced on ahead of her. There was something different here, she felt some kind of alive in these woods.

Marlee continued to detail Olivia’s experience in those Highland woods, when she realized

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that dawn had come and the fog outside the window where her desk sat was beginning to dissipate. It cast a moon-like glow onto the pages. Stretching, she knew that would have to be enough for now and she set about fixing a bit of breakfast. Toast and an egg for her dad, and some of that instant gingerbread oatmeal for herself.

I’m searching for a title…ideas?

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Today, of all days, she wanted to believe in something. This day marked her at a quarter of a century old; she felt older. Marlee didn’t regret coming back home after college. She loved the long and empty pastures and fields. The seasons were plain to see: white snow in winter, the bright green of spring, the ripening yellow wheat of summer, and the deep brown of fall. Her own season was browning like fall, going dormant and empty and draining her a little at a time.

Her father hadn’t asked her to come home, but it’d been there in his voice when he’d told her that he was too weak to travel for her graduation. He’d said he be getting stronger soon. And she didn’t come straight away. Comfortable in the college town where she’d spent four years, she found a job teaching and hoped  to make something of her writing.

But it soon became clear that she had to come home. There was no one else. Her whole life it had been Marlee and her dad. She didn’t even really know what had happened to her mom and she rarely thought to ask her dad about it, not since she was a little girl. Oh, he’d comment now and then that her dark brown hair was the same color as her mother’s, or that he didn’t know where Marlee’s blue eyes had come from because his were brown and so were her mother’s. She had his crooked nose and long fingers but was just average height like her mother.

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Her father had never remarried. He’d never even dated anyone. But around here, there wasn’t really anyone to date. She and her dad were a team. That’s what he told her and that’s what she believed. So, there was something she believed.

She stood there, leaning on the counter. The soggy head gear hanging from her right hand while her gloved left hand held tight to the dead cell phone. Pulling in a shaky breath, Marlee stared out the kitchen window seeing nothing but cold grey fog.

Continuing from yesterday (Beginnings 28 March 2018) and hoping for more comments:

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Slowing to walk the last quarter-mile north, the ice that covered her crackled. She couldn’t see the little teardrop shaped lights, faerie lights, that hung on the bottom branches of the huge pine tree standing guard over the old dug out. Stepping off the dirt and onto the narrow sidewalk, she slid her way to the door and let herself out of the eerie frozen fog and into the relative warmth, and at least dry, of the garage.

The thin fleece face mask had iced itself to her ear-band and skull-cap. Pulling them off as one, they stood stiff on the bench where she put them while she got the little nail to dig the gravel out of the bottom of her Nike’s. Whoever thought of putting all those tiny troughs on the tread, never ran on dirt roads.

Finished and ready to walk across the dark silent floors, she picked up the stiff head-gear and quietly opened the door, going into the house. Easing the storm door closed as she stepped onto the mat, she pushed the thick door shut behind her, gently turning the brass knob to close it. The quiet was habit, born from so many days of repetition in order not to wake him.

Her father was a man of routine, and she long ago learned not to disturb his early morning sleep by letting the storm door slam shut as it invariably did if you didn’t guide it. Did it matter anymore? She didn’t think so, but all the same, she never took a chance. He rarely woke up at all anymore, the sickness having gnawed him to almost nothing.

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She froze by the tall counter of the kitchen island. Straining, the sound she’d heard was barely there, a kind of humming and soughing, like delicate wings moving against each other and emitting some kind of harmony: a chord or the tiny whisper of something. She lost it but stood as still as that cold layer of fog, longing for the warmth of that sound, that consonance.

I’d love some feedback on this beginning. What do you like? Not like? Where do you see it going? Thoughts?

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The fog settled just above the road. She could see her feet, but it was like they were disembodied from the world. It was the invisible man with feet. Cold clung in icy drops to her eyebrows and lashes. Taking off one wool mitten to see why her phone had stopped playing the novel she was listening to, she could feel the slick ice frozen to her nylon sleeves.

Leaving the house to walk in the light of the setting moon, she’d forgotten to wrap the phone in the fleece warmer and it had frozen in the cold wind. The battery didn’t enjoy cold walks in the dark, especially with a twenty mile-an-hour wind blowing through the thin nylon pocket that protected it.

Oh well, it gave her more time to think. There are those who wondered what she needed so much time to think about and why she insisted on this long journey every day, but no one could know her demons, her desires, her dreams, or her dread. The novel distracter her, but in ways that helped her too. The seer had just relayed a vision of pain and death to the small group of friends charged with restoring light to a dark world before the darkness took over completely.

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She thought she could use that, somehow, in her own story. But it was gone now and she was left to consider the real work waiting for her at home, her own dark thoughts that crept up out of the fog, chilling her calves through the exposed skin just above her short Smart Wool socks.

When certain songs begin to play on the radio, they bring my little sister, Cathy, to me. One that hits me particularly hard is Amy Grant’s “Emmanuel,” because it speaks of how things used to be and of tales told of wondrous things and times. Don’t get me wrong, we had our share and more of times that were not wondrous, but we always had each other.

Cathy had a charm. It could turn to a terrible wrath, but she had a charm that was magic. She could pull you in and bring you a contagious joy or boil you alive if you took one wrong step too many. She held a spark and that spark could lighten the load of the world, solve all the problems, protect the underdog.

Her spark could lead you on a wild adventure, leave you in peals of laughter, or frustrate you beyond all measure. But there are so many tales to be told of how we used to be. We huddled together to keep each other warm when we were made to stay outside in winter, when our daddy and our brothers and sisters were at work and school. We sang silly songs

Cathy is center in the bottom row.

at the tops of our lungs until we couldn’t force the words out through the laugh anymore.

Saturday will mark five years since her voice was violently silenced. Her crooked smile is still there in my head and heart. The emptiness I feel is there too. We always think that there will be more tomorrows, that our petty beliefs and tendencies are so important, that we have to prove to others that we are right, that we need to make more money or climb one more step up that ladder.

The truth is, we should make sure that those we love know it, we should look out for each other no matter what issue we might be on opposite sides of, we should remember that life is precious and we only get one, and we should do every tiny little piddly thing we know to do to make someone else feel valued, heard, and loved.  We miss you Cathy.

My brain was making a kind of a whirring noise as I thought about us just driving up to someone’s house and asking them about their property. I rolled down the window, splattered with dried spots of snow melt and squeaking as it descended, and the crisp air hit my face in a cold rush. “Don’t you think they’ll be a bit nervous if two strangers just pull in and start asking if they want to sell their tractor?”

I looked over at him, cowboy hat pulled low his forehead, because his voice sounded odd, like he was framing his words too carefully: “Well,” he drew out the word, “I guess if they come out, guns loaded, we’ll just go on to supper.” His lips pressed together hard, and the smell of the peppermint his was sucking on drifted over, but I saw a twitch in the left corner of his mouth.

The tires crunched on the gravel drive, the gear shift clunking into first as the chug of the diesel engine cut off. The slam of the pick-up doors led to silence and I could hear the breeze rustling the pine branches against the wood of the house. My eye was drawn to that shiny prairie gold metal, the candy apple red of the wheels muted by the bright body. Reaching out, my fingers slipped over the smooth cold surface. “Hello Beautiful,” I said to her.

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“It really is a Tiny Town,” I said. I stared through the spotty glass at each little house and squinted to see if there might be any tiny people. Piles of snow, dirty from the splash back, lay against the closed chain link which seemed all the grayer for the snow on the ground. I pushed my face up against the cold glass of the window, the hot air of the defrost blowing strands of my brown hair along my ear and making the fog of my breath disappear off the glass.

Ponderosa pines, blue-green and brown, lined the rutted two-lane road that wound up and around the lonely mountain cabins scattered here and there in little meadow openings. They were surrounded by grasses sticking up like straw through the crusted white snow. One two-story cabin, with a sloping drive that ended at the lower level garage door, stood in an opening among the Ponderosa. The fall sky was powder blue and the sun sparkled off a golden orange old tractor parked outside the four-panel white garage door. Two windows, like dark eyes, looked out just above the tractor.

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Up long before the sun getting ready for the day, she takes care of her husband’s and children’s hot breakfast and lunches for work and school. Soon the school bus’s dust trail would drift down their road, and she’d reach out to touch the weather-roughened skin of her husband’s cheek.

Stealing this one short moment each morning, prayers rise up from deep inside and silently escape with her breath as the sun crests the tree tops. Bracing for whatever this day plans to put in her path; knowing it will move them farther to ruin, to losing this land she’s loved every day of her life, still words of thanksgiving climb. She clamps her thin lips against those words, feeling the tight bun pull against the flexed muscles in her neck and chin.

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Brittle and stiff as the grasses, so long denied moisture, she knows one of these days, it will break her. But, for now, she cannot help noticing the brightening sky sliding into her vision and the shafts of sunlight playing across the waves of the now golden grasses and easing the dark of the surrounding forest.