Tales From the Burning Prairie

The sun sets so late now that I am hardly ever out after dark. All of us are usually home by 7 or 8, so we can get the kids into bed by 9. Right now when I put my daughter to bed there is still the barest hint of day in the Western sky and her room is dim instead of dark. That transitional time between sunset and night, The Blue Hour as it is often called, is my favorite time of day. It is the gloaming. Gloaming creeps out like a cat, to soften the dying light and lend an air of unreality where even the harsh and ugly is rendered kindly.

When I am stuck indoors at the gloaming, I pine to be outside and when I am outside, I ache for those few magic minutes to stretch into hours. So it was that I found myself out and about at my favorite time of day/night. It was just a short trip to the grocery store for the mundane things of life, but it is always thus. For me, it is the ordinary tasks of life that lead to extraordinary insights.

As I drove I could see houses lighting up from the inside. Do the people inside wait until nearly dark to pop on the lights or do they leave them on all day, only to become visible in the dark? And I happened to see an architectural feature I’ve noticed before. Picture windows.

Exactly who is supposed to see the picture? Is it for the people inside; do they look out their picture windows only to see the house across the street, with its own picture window? Or is the picture for those outside; pictures of what goes in inside? They do frequently allow us to see vignettes of other lives.

My House doesn’t have one of these curious things. The parts of our House that face the street are bedrooms and are very closed-in and private. The entire back of the House is a glass wall, completely open, but only to the back yard. We would have to work pretty hard to let passers-by see into our lives. A lot of other houses in our neighborhood were built at the height of the picture window-era. And we often see glimpses inside, as we are driving or walking by.

Maybe we get to see bustling scenes of people going about their daily lives: having dinner, watching television, playing, fighting. Often we see curtains open to show off a static room, quiet and still as if it were frozen in amber. Humans rarely grace these rooms, except to dust the plastic plants or fluff pillows that have no need of fluffing. Children are never allowed in these rooms, and really, there is nothing for children to do there. The only reason children would even go in there is to see Mom turn just that exact shade of purple.

It is the stuffiest, dullest room in the house, one that only adult guests are subjected to, possibly as a form of veiled hostility. Mom says it is a room for a company, but it isn’t. She resents their presence as well, this is a room in which the only acceptable “guests” are those outside of it. You are to admire it from afar, to gaze in wonder at its lifeless perfection. These often tiny rooms have nothing to do with the way people live, they are disconnected from family life. And I feel a shiver of delicate horror whenever I see these dead spaces.

This striving for perfection is understandable, and impossible. I, too, would love to have one room stay clean for longer than a few hours. But I just don’t have the space to spare to say, “Look, the rest of my life may be chaos, but this room always stays perfect.” If I did have an extra room it would be a playroom, an office, a sewing and ironing room, a workout room. It would not be a dead space.

What kind of picture would I want people to see? A moving picture, a snapshot of daily life, or time-lapse pictures in which to see my children grow up. But I think I will skip the still-life, with its cut flowers, rotting fruit, and ever-present death.

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Wednesday night we celebrated our 10th Halloween in the House of The Burning Prairie and it was the best one to date. When I was a young girl in this very city, the streets were just thick with kids on Halloween. One parent took trick-or-treat duty, while the other passed out candy at home. We were so into it-decorations on every front window, a new costume every year. Those costumes ranged from the cheap plastic kind with the masks that had the thin elastic strings and the deadly edges to elaborate home-made get-ups. Princess, pirate, gypsy, punk, black cat, vampire, and my all-time favorite: hobo. That was awesome, I raided Dad’s closet and rubbed a charcoal briquette on my face. My best friend did the same; we were about 11 years old and I didn’t trick-or-treat again until high school.

That last year, the one time in high school, was probably a last grasp at a rapidly disappearing childhood. A realization that soon college, then real life would follow with its responsibilities and demands and new kinds of more grown-up fun. That year we waited until dark to get started and stayed out past our bed-times. Despite all the houses sporting decorations, the scariest thing we saw was at a darkened house. There was something eerie about an upstairs window, it was completely open-no screen-and the curtains flapped in the wind outside the house. We never found out why. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t been so monumentally naive; the house bore the hallmarks of a breaking-and-entering. But we didn’t think to tell anyone. Maybe it was just the world’s creepiest Halloween treatment, no one ever mentioned a robbery that night.

You know, I love the big elaborate decorations-the graveyards in flower gardens, the witches and headless horsemen by the front doors, the bats, the skulls, the dismembered body parts decorating trees, the gauzy spectres floating from the eaves. But that open window will always be the creepiest Halloween memory for me.

The first year we lived in our house, we got maybe 5 trick-or-treaters come to the door, even with all my effort. It was such a dismal time for Halloween, the pearl-clutching church ladies had managed to convince nearly everyone of the evils of All Hallows Eve, but you can’t deny kids their desire to dress up, pretend, and score giant hauls of teeth-rotting candy. So the churches had Harvest Festivals, Fall Family Fun Fests, Bible character-themed costume parties. Pathetic. Kids know the real deal when they see it and won’t be satisfied with generic, sanitized rip-offs. In the past couple of years, even my Dad’s church has begun to see the light. While they still sponsor a despicable “Hell House”-type travesty, they began having a Trunk-or-Treat.

For those not in the know, church members park their cars in church or shopping center parking lots, and open the trunks of their cars-filled with candy. It’s a step in the right direction, but still has some overtly religious over-tones. Now, I am not comfortable with taking my small children out to Trick-or-Treat in the neighborhood yet, so we took them to the Farm Shopping Center to celebrate. It was great, there were lots of kids (especially small ones) there and the merchants even dressed up in costume. Then we came home, watched “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”, and passed out candy to the dozens and dozens of kids that came to the door. Monkey enjoyed passing out candy even more than getting it for himself, what a sweetie!

I loved that so many of our neighbors are into Halloween again. And special thanks to the guys across the street who put up a giant graveyard, complete with Grim Reaper and blood-red lights! It would be nice to think that Harvest Festivals and Hell Houses are on their way to the trash heap of trends, but I fear not. But luckily, Halloween is back, at least in my neighborhood.

There are no stairs in my house, this is by design. Not that we designed a house with no stairs, but we ruled out houses that had more than a single level. Even a couple of steps can lead to trouble, you see, I am a faller. I fall with great frequency and panache. If falling was an Olympic event, I’d win the gold medal.

You could call it many things: clumsiness, lack of coordination, accident-prone, two left feet, fumble-fingered, all thumbs. But I prefer to call myself gracefulness-challenged. I was diagnosed early, at about the second time I fell and split my head open. I don’t remember them, but apparently I fell in ways that no one ever had before and that would be impossible to recreate in the future. I like to think of it as style.

My parents and teachers tried their best to help me. Mom and Dad got me a big chalkboard so I could practice holding chalk and drawing circles without injuring myself and others. Dad built a balance beam in the backyard so I could learn to put one foot in front of the other instead of getting them tangled up all the time. At school, I was enrolled in something called “High Challenge”, which was like remedial walking. They tried their best, really they did, bless their hearts. But all their efforts were for nothing, I remain an accident waiting to happen.

To catalog all my many falls would be impossible, or at least unbelievable, but here are some highlights. Childhood-fell out of tree (broken arm), fell out of bunk bed (broken collar bone). Adulthood-falling down stairs at apartment (twisted ankle), falling down stairs of next apartment (more embarrassed than anything, as our downstairs neighbor, Underpants Man, opened his door just as I reached the bottom), falling backward down front steps of next apartment (nearly die of humiliation when horrified neighbors rush to help me).

The next apartment seemed to usher in a time of relative peace. I began to believe that maybe, just maybe, I was growing out of that phase. Some minor things cropped up, like the time I slammed my thumb in the vault door at the bank or the time my left hand swelled up like a puffer fish and my wedding ring had to be cut off in the E.R. But I wasn’t falling anymore. I shouldn’t have gotten smug.

The next several years passed quietly as we brought our first baby into our family and prepared for our second one. Then, the falling started again. While hugely pregnant with our second, I fell off the single step in our house (the one in the garage by the washing machine) and out of my shoes. I managed to break the fall, the baby never felt a thing, but I ripped a ligament in my foot.

Then potty training for the oldest began and I found myself sprinting to public restrooms, toddler in tow. One such time in the grocery store, Mr. I-need-to-go-to-the-potty-RIGHT-NOW! decided he wasn’t going to be doing any of that walking nonsense and wrapped himself around my legs. I didn’t even have time to yell “timber!” before I was felled. I tried to grab him to break his fall and forgot about breaking my own. That was O.K., the right side of my body and head broke my fall (bursitis, lower back pain, fierce headache, and bent glasses). I spent six weeks in physical therapy. About two weeks after that, Mr. I-don’t-want-to-walk-to-the-potty! pulled the same stunt again! This time I remembered to break my fall with my hands and not my head. But my right hip is not my friend anymore, and my lower back is mad at me.

My most recent feat of unrivaled gracelessness was painfully public as well as just painful. I walk my oldest to Pre-K every day, pushing the youngest in her stroller. The school is on a small hill, there is no ramp and I haul the stroller up the stairs, backwards. If you think this sounds like a recipe for disaster, you’d be right. One day, after hauling the stroller up the stairs, I tried to turn it around to roll it forward. And stepped off the walk and almost tumbled right down the hill. I broke the fall this time with my right knee and would’ve wailed with the pain but dozens of other parents and children had witnessed my shame. Well, I managed to get the oldest into class and limp my way home with the youngest in the stroller who, to judge by her giggling, was having the time of her life. So now my knee is not too happy with me, either.

My poor husband, he has been the primary witness for most of my mishaps; and he has to wonder what kind of klutz he married. He’s seen so many of these humiliating incidents, but they still alarm him, far more than me. When I fell in the garage he made me throw away the shoes I fell off of, but it didn’t help. You see, I know the truth, it’s not the shoes, it’s the little traitors stuffed into them. My feet, I think they’re cursed. Not that I believe in curses or anything.

Addendum: My two-year old daughter has just won the gold medal in Olympic Falling. Friday afternoon, Pumpkin (who has an in-toeing problem) tripped over her own foot, struck Monkey’s chair with her head, and had to get three stitches. She is fine and healing nicely; my nerves are shot.

Somewhere, somewhen she had lost herself. Maybe her self was swimming around with the junk at the bottom of the diaper bag, maybe it floated away on the echo of one of the many times she yelled at her children, maybe it could be found again someday, maybe not. She loved them, she really did, with a fierce love that she feared would burn a hole right through her chest. So where did this smoldering pit of anger come from? Everyday she tried to douse it, and everyday fresh, dry kindling was thrown on top.

She had waited so long for them, had gone through all the tests, the procedures, the drugs. She hadn’t even minded all the usual miseries of pregnancy. But.
But she hadn’t been exactly a young mother when they were born. She had 36 years all to herself, well, a decade of that with her husband. They were both quiet people, homebodies by nature. It was a comfortable life, with little conflict. They had worked out their differences years ago; all the rough edges had been worn clean. As with all long-marrieds, they had a short-hand of conversation, a repertoire of very inside jokes. A look or a raised eyebrow applied at the right moment could trigger fits of laughter. They were so content, wouldn’t a child fit seamlessly into their lives?
But no one had been there to tell her that her dreamy, foggy visions of motherhood were setting her up for failure. But if someone had told her that reality could never live up to her expectations, would she have even listened? Maybe she would have dismissed their warnings with an imperious wave of her hand, arrogant and confident that life would magically shape itself to her plans.
But she had no idea how very much she would miss her previous quiet life. It wasn’t so much child-noise that bothered her, it was talking all day, answering the same questions over and over, guiding and correcting constantly, reaching her limit and shreiking like a mad-woman. For a time, she and he lived somewhere else; she didn’t know anyone, not even their new neighbors. There were days when she would say ‘goodbye’ to her husband at the train in the morning and ‘hello’ to him when she picked him up in the evening and not utter one word in between. Not even to herself, not even to the cat. It was this blessed silence she missed, her own silence, the lack of her own voice, the prominence of her thoughts in such stillness.
But now there were new conflicts between them. There were no smooth, seamless transitions. Maybe the rough edges had always been there, only lying dormant. Tectonic plates in the stillness between quakes, pushed into renewed activity with the expansion of their family.
But she knew she suffered through some kind of post-partum something after each baby. What good could that information do her now, where was she supposed to go with that? They were far too old for anything post-partum to be tearing her to pieces right now.
The anger was there, it was a fact to be dealt with, a struggle to surmount. Maybe the largest portion of the problem should be laid properly at her own feet. She craved silence like a drug, but needed to talk with another adult. When he came home in the evenings, she couldn’t stop herself from peppering him with all that had been on her mind all day. And as deeply and painfully as she loved her children, sometimes she thought she would cry if she heard her name one more time. Maybe it was because her name was no longer her own, it had been replaced by Mama.
Or maybe it was because she was just one bad mother.

When I was little I had an invisible friend. I hesitate to call her imaginary, because she was very real to me even if nobody else could see her. Her name was Foxy, and she was a shape-shifter. She looked, by turns, like a 10-foot tall Chinese lady (I came up with that one at about age 5 or so), a kid, or a big fox walking on her hind legs. She got blamed for many of the stunts that I pulled, she frequently pushed me out of bed, and she spent an inordinate amount of her time in the attic (mostly when I wasn’t around to play). Foxy was a friend when I needed one and a source of amusement for my parents. In fact, my mother has long threatened to write a book called “Life With Foxy”, but since she’s been threatening for the better part of four decades she can’t mind if I do it first.

As I grew older and made other friends, I no longer had to rely on the friend that I had made with my mind. She gradually faded but I always had the feeling that she was there just beneath the surface. My mother would talk about Foxy and the book she would write, telling me her favorite stories of my friend. Eventually even my memories of her faded into the background. I grew up and left home, married and had children of my own, and completely forgot about Foxy. Until.

Until one afternoon when my son was just a baby. We had been to visit my parents in Claremore and were on our way home to Tulsa. This was when I was still driving my favorite back way, Keetonville Road, too fast as usual. The road curves and climbs and dips, following the land. It veers close to the Verdigris River and then away again. Houses, humble and not-so-humble, hug the bases and sides of the rolling, green hills. And there are houses nestled so deep in the trees that they can’t be seen from the road; no indication if they are trailers or mansions, with only mailboxes to mark their places. We had just taken the curve in front of the soccer fields (they were empty that day) when something crossed the road ahead of me. At first I thought it was a dog, then I spotted the tail and the markings on its little red face and knew I was looking at a fox. I had seen her in time to slow down and stop safely, luckily no one else was on the road that day. I knew the fox was a female, probably trying to care for her young. She was stopped right in the middle of the road, just as I was, staring back at me as I stared at her. It was no illusion, she looked directly into my eyes and spoke to me.

As clearly as if she had opened her mouth to speak, I heard with my mind or with my heart: Slow down, pay attention. Such sage advice from a lowly creature (and to a lowly creature), and how timely. Had I not slowed down or paid attention, the mother fox might never have returned to her babies. And with my baby snug and secure in the backseat, I realized that should I not heed her common sense advice I, too, might someday never return to my babies.

Even now, when I am frenzied and flustered, I try to remember the words of the fox: Slow Down, Pay Attention. What might I miss if I don’t pay heed to what the fox said. What might you miss?