My Mother is 76 years old. She is the last of any of my family, save my Father from whom I am estranged. Mom's mother died at 99 2/3 yrs. All of the ladies in my family, on both sides, lived to similarly long ages.
But I was far too young when most of them were in good health to understand or appreciate their memories and their lives.
Mother periodically pipes up with an anecdote that I have never heard. I beg her to write them down. Every day to sit with her notebook and let the memories come, let them prompt other memories, and to record them for me.
She never does and I despair. I know that so much of my maternal familial history will die with her. My youngest brother is mentally retarded and my other brother strives to distance himself from every aspect of my family.
My father's family, equally as long-lived, and as multi-facted and intriguing, all died long ago.
My great, great, great Aunt Maude, whom I met at the age of 100 (when I was five), died at 103 in 1963. She had lived during the Civil War and I had sat on her lap. I own one of the paintings she did and I bemoan the loss of all of her belongings and paintings, even her ivory hair pins which, with floor-length hair, she was in dire need of. I knew an elderly, fragile woman in a wheel chair, which she was forced into after her second fall down the stairs and double broken hips.
My great aunt Gertrude - too "nervous" to hold a job though she was trained as a teacher, lived in a rambling house in Vermont, watching the Yankees play, making fairly dreadful food, reading Mickey Spillane novels while smoking Camels and sipping Jack Daniels. I remember her long, thin, greying hair, her braying laugh, and twinkling eyes. And the sweet smell of her as she snuggled me into bed with her when I was a child and staying with her in Poultney.
Her sister, with whom she had a classic love hate relationship was my Great Aunt Mildred. Mimi, as we called her, was a broad woman with tight, curling hair (the opposite of her sister's straight long locks), fluttery hands, plenty of money and a weird thing about cats. Her home in Whitehall, NY reeked of cat urine, great old dark dramatic paintings of boar hunts, and huge chests with mysterious contents and scary snake skins hanging in the attic. Her back yard, a myriad of flowers and herbs and an abandoned feeling was filled with feral cats. Whenever she could catch a pregnant female cat she would keep it until it had its kittens and then have all the animals put to sleep so they wouldn't suffer a "wild" existence. She had a friend, Helen, whom I later (much later) realized was the euphemistic "companion" and the two ladies lived for decades together in a connected house. I still recall the musty smell and the deserted view of the house with its empty porch and hollow, vacant looking windows.
My great aunts, Stella and Ruth, were my Grandmother Horton's sisters. Stella had been engaged when her fiance drowned and Ruth had been married to a young gay man. Both ladies were single, solitary and set in their ways when I knew them.
I was told of their deaths far after the fact. Estranged families are like that.
Homes were sold, belongings destroyed or thrown away, and I still lament the fact that these odd, fun, curious and loving women are gone from my life, and their memories gone as well. They live only in my memory and I wish I could have known more of what they thought, felt, hoped and dreamed.
I beg my Mother to record her memories. All those elusive ones that pop into her conciousness and will, in all likelihood, never reappear, though others no doubt will.
As a writer I crave these memories. To tell me what the world before my time was like. How women were, how they loved, lived ... and how they died. I love to pull from my life for my work. Whether I am writing fiction, or whether I am preparing my own memoir (under the various titles, "My Granfather's Hands" or "Wonder Bread Dreams" - my current favorite), there is nothing that so invests my writing as the knowledge of what those who have gone before me have been like.
Mom? Do me a favor ... pick up that pen and WRITE!
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
I Am My Brother's Keeper - Always Have Been, Always Will Be
My brother is visiting for the weekend.
Siblings are curious creatures. You fight, mostly you love one another, sometimes the differences are harsh, bitter things and they lead to insurmountable chasms that end in distrust, dislike or even hatred. But most siblings grow up, leave home, as you do, and when you want to maintain a loving relationship, or avoid the unpleasant one, those ties are easy to either maintain or sever, as you desire.
Sometimes the sibling relationship is not so easy. Sometimes you end up in a sibling relationship that cannot be conformed to your desires. Sometimes fate determines how that relationship will have to be maintained.
I was the first child and six years old when my baby brother Jimmy was born. Both I and the second child, my other brother, were small babies and skinny, bony kids. Jimmy was a round little child with big, startled eyes. I don't remember the day, but I have seen pictures of me holding him in my arms as we came home from the hospital.
The years of my childhood are as snapshots that flash across the screen of my memory, sometimes jolting me, sometimes like a mere whisper of recollection. I do not remember the first years of Jimmy's life and I have no memory of the dire, momentous events that began when he was nearly two and a half.
My mother, a trained nurse, was practical with her kids. I was a smart baby and fast learner and I progressed ahead of the 'schedule' mothers were given for their kids, as did my other brother, though he was eerily quiet and introspective. (Mother says that he didn't speak for three years but suddenly began talking then - in complete sentences.)
When Jimmy failed to move as quickly along the proscribed success-o-meter of baby prowess, she didn't sweat it. He was a happy baby and he was the baby of the family and that was just fine.
Then one day he had an epileptic seizure. My mother has never spoken of how she reacted to what must have been a terrifying episode (if you have never witnessed a grand mal seizure in all its ugly fright, you cannot know how impotent you feel). Immediate medical attention was sought, no doubt from my paternal Grandfather, a doctor and a general family practitioner and the man who had delivered all three of her children. But serious specialists were subsequently consulted and the diagnosis was epilepsy, a bad enough sentence, but they further determined that Jimmy was brain damaged. It was causing the seizures and, far worse, they proclaimed him mentally retarded. He would never be normal. He would always have the mind of a child, no matter the size of his body. No one could say how much he might progress, or how little.
To me as a child, Jimmy was just Jimmy. It was not until I was older and in junior high school that the true enormity of his condition was made evident, particular as how it would impact my life, especially in light of the next upheaval that was thrust upon our family.
In 1968 my Father left the family and demanded a divorce. The months that followed were horrific, emotional, devastating and his family's behavior created a rift that never healed and left me with a deep well of bitterness, resentment and, as so many children of divorce or abandonment, an abiding certainty that I was unworthy and unloveable.
My Mother came through the divorce, as she would say, bloody but unbowed. She learned to drive, learned to type and take dictation, and got a job (her first ever) and went to work every day at a doctor's office, a job she would hold for the next twenty years.
Jimmy was attending a special school run by the AHRC, the Association for Help of Retarded Children. It was an excellent, non-profit operation, with fabulous people all the way around. But when he came home from school, someone needed to be there. So I began to come home from school immediately, every day, to take over the care. My other brother was drafted into this responsibility as well, but he suffered worse reactions and emotional scarring to the divorce and was not good with Jimmy. His bitterness was boundless and it often overflowed onto Jimmy.
I suffered teenage embarrassment when my friends would come over and be awkward around Jimmy, who was outoing, social and quite friendly. But I began to judge my friends and boyfriends based on their reaction to and treatment of Jimmy. It is not surprising that the few who were diffident never reigned long in my heart.
From time to time there were babysitters, as finances allowed. I was able to take part eventually in after-school sports and drama and chorus activities. Jimmy got older, skinny, continued having seizures and learned and we all adapted.
Babysitters began de rigeur when I went away to college in 1973. I'd spent the summer after my senior year of HS as a camp counsel at the summer program Jimmy attended at the AHRC, working with all manner of retarded kids, many of whom had far more serious handicaps than Jimmy, and obviously posed a tougher row to hoe for many families. It put things in perspective that Jimmy could dress himself, feed himself, and make himself understood, if only to us. During these years he achieved the momentous feat of teaching himself to ride a bike. My mother remains chagrined over this fact. She can't ride a bike.
After I graduated from college, when my Mother had difficulty coping with being the breadwinner, and the caretaker, with my other brother's relationship with Jimmy difficult, I came home. The mother/daughter burden we shared with Jimmy was a natural one and it deepened. We both worked, but there were social worker-provided after-school caretakers. When he was older he came home alone, a mentally-challenged latch-key kid, only he couldn't work the key so he came home to an open door and a couple of hours of solitary time until my Mother could arrive home.
At the age of 30, I moved out for 10 years. I pursued an acting career and lived in Manhattan, making frequent trips home, both to visit as well as to assist and support. but then my Grandmother, 95+, moved in, broke her hip, Mother had a couple of falls and broken bones and when I discovered that her 40 years of smoking had left her with emphysema, which had eroded her lungs to the point where she was now going to be medicated, I packed up my greaspaint and sheet music and moved back home.
That was in 1995. October, to be precise.
Today is May 3, 2009. I've been home for 13 1/2 years. The first ten years that passed after I got home were, oddly a blend of the great and the horrific. There were fun times, and there were traumas. My grandmother's mini-strokes eventually put her into a nursing home where she died on April 21, 1999, at the age of 99 and 9 months. Jimmy had been on a regimen of medication for a number of years that had proven disastrous, leading to violent outbursts of temper and three visits from police for intervention. They once removed him and took him to the locked ward at the local hospital. My mother called me and I left work, came home, and we drove and picked him up, signing him out and taking the trembling, sobbing man home. Mother had retired by that time and was in the throes of a deep depression. The burdens of the daily care of Jimmy and her mother left her bitter and unhappy that her retirement was not the stuff of relaxation and the reaping of the rewards of one's years of hard work.
Then came the day that we were notified that, after decades of being on the waiting list, Jimmy had been accepted for a place in an adult group home, one of many sponsored by the AHRC. In a mere two months he was packed and gone. He was, by turns, excited and terrified. The speed with which it happened was beneficial since it was a nightmare of emotion for my Mother. Her baby, at the age of 45, the man for whom she'd cared nearly all her adult life (she was 27 when he was born) was being given over to the care of strangers. While cerebrally she understood how important an opportunity it was, emotionally she was, in short, a wreck.
He's been there for over three years now. But the responsibility for my brother didn't end when he moved out. The house is 5 minutes away. He comes home often (every couple of weeks). We visit him, making special trips on holidays and for the house parties that they throw every so often, as well as parents' meeting nights. In the spring I go over with vegetables, seeds and planting acoutrement and we make a little garden in the house's backyard so Jimmy can have his very own tomatoe plant, beans, lettuce and herbs. He proudly reports on the progress of "his garden" to his sister, the gardener. There are problems in which we are involved, both in the discussions about the problem and the resolution.
Jimmy sometimes calls, crying, the heart-wrenching sound of a man approaching fifty, sobbing unabashedly, about something that has upset him. Or he'll call us to tell us about the basketball game he saw, or the Radio City Music Hall Christmas event or a dance he attened. He comes home with tales of his girlfriend, his teacher, his workshop day program chores or the trials and tribulations of some of his roommates.
I call him, send cards, bring him home for holidays and birthday celebrations and I still buy him the same gifts as always. Fun t-shirts, sports trading cards, action figures and coloring books and crayons. We watch Grease together several times a year. It is his favorite movie and we've been watching it since it's release in 1977. He still hugs me, calls me his "family", gets mad at me, gets stubborn and grumpy when he doesn't get his way. But even as he has adapted to his new home, he never fails to tell me "I love you" and "I miss you". And he always asks, "Do you miss me?" I do.
And I still worry about him, care for him, nurture him, and make my life decisions based on his needs. He's my sibling. My baby brother. He's a good-hearted man with a great sense of humor and a generosity of spirit with those less able than himself.
I have spent my life caring for Jimmy. Fighting battles on his behalf. Seeing to his needs and doing my best to provide for his happiness. I will spend the rest of my life - or his - doing exactly as I have since he was born. How can I do anything else? My mother held him in her arms first. I held him second. No matter our own difficulties we have always been united because of Jimmy. It's been hard. It's been joyous. It has, in large part made my life what it is. But while it might have been difficult, it was never a burden.
Hey, he ain't heavy. He is - and always will be - my brother.
Siblings are curious creatures. You fight, mostly you love one another, sometimes the differences are harsh, bitter things and they lead to insurmountable chasms that end in distrust, dislike or even hatred. But most siblings grow up, leave home, as you do, and when you want to maintain a loving relationship, or avoid the unpleasant one, those ties are easy to either maintain or sever, as you desire.
Sometimes the sibling relationship is not so easy. Sometimes you end up in a sibling relationship that cannot be conformed to your desires. Sometimes fate determines how that relationship will have to be maintained.
I was the first child and six years old when my baby brother Jimmy was born. Both I and the second child, my other brother, were small babies and skinny, bony kids. Jimmy was a round little child with big, startled eyes. I don't remember the day, but I have seen pictures of me holding him in my arms as we came home from the hospital.
The years of my childhood are as snapshots that flash across the screen of my memory, sometimes jolting me, sometimes like a mere whisper of recollection. I do not remember the first years of Jimmy's life and I have no memory of the dire, momentous events that began when he was nearly two and a half.
My mother, a trained nurse, was practical with her kids. I was a smart baby and fast learner and I progressed ahead of the 'schedule' mothers were given for their kids, as did my other brother, though he was eerily quiet and introspective. (Mother says that he didn't speak for three years but suddenly began talking then - in complete sentences.)
When Jimmy failed to move as quickly along the proscribed success-o-meter of baby prowess, she didn't sweat it. He was a happy baby and he was the baby of the family and that was just fine.
Then one day he had an epileptic seizure. My mother has never spoken of how she reacted to what must have been a terrifying episode (if you have never witnessed a grand mal seizure in all its ugly fright, you cannot know how impotent you feel). Immediate medical attention was sought, no doubt from my paternal Grandfather, a doctor and a general family practitioner and the man who had delivered all three of her children. But serious specialists were subsequently consulted and the diagnosis was epilepsy, a bad enough sentence, but they further determined that Jimmy was brain damaged. It was causing the seizures and, far worse, they proclaimed him mentally retarded. He would never be normal. He would always have the mind of a child, no matter the size of his body. No one could say how much he might progress, or how little.
To me as a child, Jimmy was just Jimmy. It was not until I was older and in junior high school that the true enormity of his condition was made evident, particular as how it would impact my life, especially in light of the next upheaval that was thrust upon our family.
In 1968 my Father left the family and demanded a divorce. The months that followed were horrific, emotional, devastating and his family's behavior created a rift that never healed and left me with a deep well of bitterness, resentment and, as so many children of divorce or abandonment, an abiding certainty that I was unworthy and unloveable.
My Mother came through the divorce, as she would say, bloody but unbowed. She learned to drive, learned to type and take dictation, and got a job (her first ever) and went to work every day at a doctor's office, a job she would hold for the next twenty years.
Jimmy was attending a special school run by the AHRC, the Association for Help of Retarded Children. It was an excellent, non-profit operation, with fabulous people all the way around. But when he came home from school, someone needed to be there. So I began to come home from school immediately, every day, to take over the care. My other brother was drafted into this responsibility as well, but he suffered worse reactions and emotional scarring to the divorce and was not good with Jimmy. His bitterness was boundless and it often overflowed onto Jimmy.
I suffered teenage embarrassment when my friends would come over and be awkward around Jimmy, who was outoing, social and quite friendly. But I began to judge my friends and boyfriends based on their reaction to and treatment of Jimmy. It is not surprising that the few who were diffident never reigned long in my heart.
From time to time there were babysitters, as finances allowed. I was able to take part eventually in after-school sports and drama and chorus activities. Jimmy got older, skinny, continued having seizures and learned and we all adapted.
Babysitters began de rigeur when I went away to college in 1973. I'd spent the summer after my senior year of HS as a camp counsel at the summer program Jimmy attended at the AHRC, working with all manner of retarded kids, many of whom had far more serious handicaps than Jimmy, and obviously posed a tougher row to hoe for many families. It put things in perspective that Jimmy could dress himself, feed himself, and make himself understood, if only to us. During these years he achieved the momentous feat of teaching himself to ride a bike. My mother remains chagrined over this fact. She can't ride a bike.
After I graduated from college, when my Mother had difficulty coping with being the breadwinner, and the caretaker, with my other brother's relationship with Jimmy difficult, I came home. The mother/daughter burden we shared with Jimmy was a natural one and it deepened. We both worked, but there were social worker-provided after-school caretakers. When he was older he came home alone, a mentally-challenged latch-key kid, only he couldn't work the key so he came home to an open door and a couple of hours of solitary time until my Mother could arrive home.
At the age of 30, I moved out for 10 years. I pursued an acting career and lived in Manhattan, making frequent trips home, both to visit as well as to assist and support. but then my Grandmother, 95+, moved in, broke her hip, Mother had a couple of falls and broken bones and when I discovered that her 40 years of smoking had left her with emphysema, which had eroded her lungs to the point where she was now going to be medicated, I packed up my greaspaint and sheet music and moved back home.
That was in 1995. October, to be precise.
Today is May 3, 2009. I've been home for 13 1/2 years. The first ten years that passed after I got home were, oddly a blend of the great and the horrific. There were fun times, and there were traumas. My grandmother's mini-strokes eventually put her into a nursing home where she died on April 21, 1999, at the age of 99 and 9 months. Jimmy had been on a regimen of medication for a number of years that had proven disastrous, leading to violent outbursts of temper and three visits from police for intervention. They once removed him and took him to the locked ward at the local hospital. My mother called me and I left work, came home, and we drove and picked him up, signing him out and taking the trembling, sobbing man home. Mother had retired by that time and was in the throes of a deep depression. The burdens of the daily care of Jimmy and her mother left her bitter and unhappy that her retirement was not the stuff of relaxation and the reaping of the rewards of one's years of hard work.
Then came the day that we were notified that, after decades of being on the waiting list, Jimmy had been accepted for a place in an adult group home, one of many sponsored by the AHRC. In a mere two months he was packed and gone. He was, by turns, excited and terrified. The speed with which it happened was beneficial since it was a nightmare of emotion for my Mother. Her baby, at the age of 45, the man for whom she'd cared nearly all her adult life (she was 27 when he was born) was being given over to the care of strangers. While cerebrally she understood how important an opportunity it was, emotionally she was, in short, a wreck.
He's been there for over three years now. But the responsibility for my brother didn't end when he moved out. The house is 5 minutes away. He comes home often (every couple of weeks). We visit him, making special trips on holidays and for the house parties that they throw every so often, as well as parents' meeting nights. In the spring I go over with vegetables, seeds and planting acoutrement and we make a little garden in the house's backyard so Jimmy can have his very own tomatoe plant, beans, lettuce and herbs. He proudly reports on the progress of "his garden" to his sister, the gardener. There are problems in which we are involved, both in the discussions about the problem and the resolution.
Jimmy sometimes calls, crying, the heart-wrenching sound of a man approaching fifty, sobbing unabashedly, about something that has upset him. Or he'll call us to tell us about the basketball game he saw, or the Radio City Music Hall Christmas event or a dance he attened. He comes home with tales of his girlfriend, his teacher, his workshop day program chores or the trials and tribulations of some of his roommates.
I call him, send cards, bring him home for holidays and birthday celebrations and I still buy him the same gifts as always. Fun t-shirts, sports trading cards, action figures and coloring books and crayons. We watch Grease together several times a year. It is his favorite movie and we've been watching it since it's release in 1977. He still hugs me, calls me his "family", gets mad at me, gets stubborn and grumpy when he doesn't get his way. But even as he has adapted to his new home, he never fails to tell me "I love you" and "I miss you". And he always asks, "Do you miss me?" I do.
And I still worry about him, care for him, nurture him, and make my life decisions based on his needs. He's my sibling. My baby brother. He's a good-hearted man with a great sense of humor and a generosity of spirit with those less able than himself.
I have spent my life caring for Jimmy. Fighting battles on his behalf. Seeing to his needs and doing my best to provide for his happiness. I will spend the rest of my life - or his - doing exactly as I have since he was born. How can I do anything else? My mother held him in her arms first. I held him second. No matter our own difficulties we have always been united because of Jimmy. It's been hard. It's been joyous. It has, in large part made my life what it is. But while it might have been difficult, it was never a burden.
Hey, he ain't heavy. He is - and always will be - my brother.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Memories In The Strangest Places
There are so many things that can trigger a memory. A snippet of a song, a photograph, a scent - even a long-absent voice on a telephone, or an old television show or movie. Certainly places hold memories for us all. But when I think of my memories, I would never have thought that so many poignant memories could be aroused by a hedge.
For as long as I have lived in my house - the home my parents purchased and moved into when I was a mere year old, and where I reside today along with my mother - there was a tall, everygreen hedge along the western border of our property and our neighbors. As I grew up, this hedge was the demarkation line between ourselves and our neighbors, the Parsells. Linda was my good friend for a while and we spent summers in her pool beneath a maple tree. The Parsells moved on decades ago, and several families came and went in the house. The hedge grew a bit taller, the maple did too, and time passed.
I moved out of my house and lived in Manhattan for ten years while pursuing my career as a singer and actress. I visited often and things changed very little in our yard.
When I returned home in 1995 to aid my Mother whose health was deteriorating and who also was caring for my elderly grandmother and my mentally handicapped brother, I began to make changes to the yard. Grass slowly disappeared as I appropriated the property for garden patches. I planted trees, and bushes and, because the neighbors who were living in the corner house at the time were unpleasant, inconsiderate and possessed of children who roamed at will, I planted some Leyland Cypress, extending the long hedge that kept the kids out and kept my privacy.
Then the people living there chopped down the maple tree. The majestic old tree that had shaded my home was gone and in its place an ugly view of the little no-neck monster children and their garbage riddled backyard, including a blue plastic child's pool that was tossed on the roof of the garage and remained there.
But the hedge remained. Dark green, with a few other weed bushes nestled within, such as the mock orange tree that peeked out, it was a great living wall that hid the rest of the neighbors and their property from my site. In October 2001 I built a 90 square foot rock walled raised garden bed with Pennsylvania fieldstone. More bushes, trees, everygreens were planted there, and alongside the picket fence that ran parralel to the wall I planted Souvenier de la Malmaison roses (descendants of the vines planted by Josephine Bonapart at Malmaison in France). I added some asymmetrical slates for a small path and, as is my wont, I allowed violets, creeping vines and other plants to grow along the path which led straight to the shade of the hedge and where, at the end of the path, I put a cement bird bath which, when the branches were laden and the flowers blooming, could just be seen at the end of this fairytale like section of my garden.
I sat in chairs beneath the shade of those trees and I hid from the ugliness of my neighbors and their domestic disputes - which the hedge assisted as well in hiding the screaming and sounds of police intervention.
When the family was evicted and the houes went into foreclosure it was bought at auction. I crossed my fingers that for once, please, no crazy people with hideous children would move in.
Momentarily it seemed my wishes were answered. Until the new owners stripped the backyard to lay an entire cement patio from the street to the property's edge.
And then they ripped out the hedge.
After more than fifty years, I was left staring into a cement yard.
It took them months but they finally replaced the hedge with a pristine, six-foot tall plastic fence. Which is hideous. Blatant, baldly boring and just plain ugly.
I am stuck with trying to find options to now plant some things that can be grown along the fence without being invasive, while still hiding the sight. But while I have been contemplating that chore, I have found myself remembering my life and the hedge.
As a young girl with only one other girl playmate (who had a kidney condition and was sickly often), I played with all the neighborhood boys. My brother, David, Tony, Philip, Dinky and others. We played American soldiers and Nazis (which dates me, I know!), hiding beneath the shadow of the looming hedge, firing our stick rifles and singing the odd, lewd little ditty that ended with "And Goebbels had no balls at all". Heaven help me if I can remember the rest.
The hedge was where my brother lost the tip of his finger when he stuck his hand in the clippers as my father trimmed the hedge (which was not ours but we always took care of trimming our side of it). He and David hunted for the little bit of flesh and, when found, it could not be re-attached so he took it in to school (probably first or second grade) for show-and-tell.
I remember many summers lazying beneath the cool shade of the hedge, lying on freshly mown grass, reading my books, like Johnny Tremayne and Maida. Sundays were especially lazy and I would lie around reading - oblivious to bugs or ants - until called in to watch The Wonderful World of Disney.
My one girlfriend Debby and I would make our escape beneath the hedge and the attendant spirea bushes which for years made an L-shaped wall. The tiny little flowerly snowflakes would fall around us as we would dress our Barbie dolls or divide up our candy purchases (back in the day when a penny really did buy you penny candy).
Years later, at age twenty, when there was a tree branch that had fallen right beside the hedge I chopped it up while 5 months pregnant - a pregnancy that would end through fate's unkind (but perhaps sage) hand a few weeks later.
Shooting forward decades, I hid out there from heat, my Mother, arguments in the house, and the suffocation of burdens that I had voluntarily taken on but which were painful for me as an adult with no other support network.
In recent years I had concoted special places to sit and regroup. Beneath the hedge where the prying eyes of far too many nosy neighbors couldn't find me, where the clamor of the traffic was muffled, and where I could, briefly, forget the worries and woes of financial difficulties, tough family decisions, and the realization that I was a caretaker - am a caretaker - and that the dreams I may have dreamed have not come to pass.
And now I am struck anew by the stark, unfamiliarity of that stretch of property. While there are new vistas - trees for blocks that I was never able to see, more sunshine than the area previously received -- I still feel a sense of forlorn abandonment. My green habitat, my earth-bound friend, is gone. Memories of childhood laughter, remembered books, the sting of tears and the sound of loss - all bound up in a plain green hedge that grew up with me and is now, like other friends and family, gone from my life forever.
For as long as I have lived in my house - the home my parents purchased and moved into when I was a mere year old, and where I reside today along with my mother - there was a tall, everygreen hedge along the western border of our property and our neighbors. As I grew up, this hedge was the demarkation line between ourselves and our neighbors, the Parsells. Linda was my good friend for a while and we spent summers in her pool beneath a maple tree. The Parsells moved on decades ago, and several families came and went in the house. The hedge grew a bit taller, the maple did too, and time passed.
I moved out of my house and lived in Manhattan for ten years while pursuing my career as a singer and actress. I visited often and things changed very little in our yard.
When I returned home in 1995 to aid my Mother whose health was deteriorating and who also was caring for my elderly grandmother and my mentally handicapped brother, I began to make changes to the yard. Grass slowly disappeared as I appropriated the property for garden patches. I planted trees, and bushes and, because the neighbors who were living in the corner house at the time were unpleasant, inconsiderate and possessed of children who roamed at will, I planted some Leyland Cypress, extending the long hedge that kept the kids out and kept my privacy.
Then the people living there chopped down the maple tree. The majestic old tree that had shaded my home was gone and in its place an ugly view of the little no-neck monster children and their garbage riddled backyard, including a blue plastic child's pool that was tossed on the roof of the garage and remained there.
But the hedge remained. Dark green, with a few other weed bushes nestled within, such as the mock orange tree that peeked out, it was a great living wall that hid the rest of the neighbors and their property from my site. In October 2001 I built a 90 square foot rock walled raised garden bed with Pennsylvania fieldstone. More bushes, trees, everygreens were planted there, and alongside the picket fence that ran parralel to the wall I planted Souvenier de la Malmaison roses (descendants of the vines planted by Josephine Bonapart at Malmaison in France). I added some asymmetrical slates for a small path and, as is my wont, I allowed violets, creeping vines and other plants to grow along the path which led straight to the shade of the hedge and where, at the end of the path, I put a cement bird bath which, when the branches were laden and the flowers blooming, could just be seen at the end of this fairytale like section of my garden.
I sat in chairs beneath the shade of those trees and I hid from the ugliness of my neighbors and their domestic disputes - which the hedge assisted as well in hiding the screaming and sounds of police intervention.
When the family was evicted and the houes went into foreclosure it was bought at auction. I crossed my fingers that for once, please, no crazy people with hideous children would move in.
Momentarily it seemed my wishes were answered. Until the new owners stripped the backyard to lay an entire cement patio from the street to the property's edge.
And then they ripped out the hedge.
After more than fifty years, I was left staring into a cement yard.
It took them months but they finally replaced the hedge with a pristine, six-foot tall plastic fence. Which is hideous. Blatant, baldly boring and just plain ugly.
I am stuck with trying to find options to now plant some things that can be grown along the fence without being invasive, while still hiding the sight. But while I have been contemplating that chore, I have found myself remembering my life and the hedge.
As a young girl with only one other girl playmate (who had a kidney condition and was sickly often), I played with all the neighborhood boys. My brother, David, Tony, Philip, Dinky and others. We played American soldiers and Nazis (which dates me, I know!), hiding beneath the shadow of the looming hedge, firing our stick rifles and singing the odd, lewd little ditty that ended with "And Goebbels had no balls at all". Heaven help me if I can remember the rest.
The hedge was where my brother lost the tip of his finger when he stuck his hand in the clippers as my father trimmed the hedge (which was not ours but we always took care of trimming our side of it). He and David hunted for the little bit of flesh and, when found, it could not be re-attached so he took it in to school (probably first or second grade) for show-and-tell.
I remember many summers lazying beneath the cool shade of the hedge, lying on freshly mown grass, reading my books, like Johnny Tremayne and Maida. Sundays were especially lazy and I would lie around reading - oblivious to bugs or ants - until called in to watch The Wonderful World of Disney.
My one girlfriend Debby and I would make our escape beneath the hedge and the attendant spirea bushes which for years made an L-shaped wall. The tiny little flowerly snowflakes would fall around us as we would dress our Barbie dolls or divide up our candy purchases (back in the day when a penny really did buy you penny candy).
Years later, at age twenty, when there was a tree branch that had fallen right beside the hedge I chopped it up while 5 months pregnant - a pregnancy that would end through fate's unkind (but perhaps sage) hand a few weeks later.
Shooting forward decades, I hid out there from heat, my Mother, arguments in the house, and the suffocation of burdens that I had voluntarily taken on but which were painful for me as an adult with no other support network.
In recent years I had concoted special places to sit and regroup. Beneath the hedge where the prying eyes of far too many nosy neighbors couldn't find me, where the clamor of the traffic was muffled, and where I could, briefly, forget the worries and woes of financial difficulties, tough family decisions, and the realization that I was a caretaker - am a caretaker - and that the dreams I may have dreamed have not come to pass.
And now I am struck anew by the stark, unfamiliarity of that stretch of property. While there are new vistas - trees for blocks that I was never able to see, more sunshine than the area previously received -- I still feel a sense of forlorn abandonment. My green habitat, my earth-bound friend, is gone. Memories of childhood laughter, remembered books, the sting of tears and the sound of loss - all bound up in a plain green hedge that grew up with me and is now, like other friends and family, gone from my life forever.
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