Category: Blog

Cha-cha-changes

Featured
Home—Photo: Grace Youhas

Last night was a very still, quiet night at our house. We share a driveway with our neighbors. Often we see their headlights shine into our kitchen as they return from eating out or a Hokie football game. Sometimes we hear them calling their cat Pippi to come home. All comforting sounds verifying that our world was continuing as it should. Routines soothe, calm, reassure the soul, erase anxiety.

Summer nights could bring their laughter spilling into the yard. “Hey come view the Northern Lights—quickly before they fade away.” “Join us for drinks on our new patio.”

A crisp fall afternoon brought a frantic call from our neighbor. A skunk with an orange stripe down its back was chasing him from his mailbox to his front door. Quite a distance for an afternoon jog.  As he passed our front yard, I beckoned him to run inside our house to safety. But he, the neighbor, made it to his front door without being sprayed. The skunk disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Even animal control couldn’t find it. Order returned to our world. The neighbor was safe, no idea about the skunk, but the disruption was welcomed. A little chaos makes you appreciate order.

But last night was different—no headlights beaming onto our yard and sifting through our windows; no laughter drifting over to us; no anxious calls for Pippi.  Often she would be at our house stretched out on our deck that the sun’s eastern rays had warmed as they traveled westward.

Pipi headed for our deck—Photo: Grace Youhas

The neighbors are traveling, too. Not west but east to North Carolina, away from us. Ciao my dear neighbors.

Cha-cha-changes have broken the circle, disrupted the routine, prepared us for a new circle, a new order.

Welcome new neighbors!

A different circle is forming, another order is in the works until the inevitable cha-cha-changes sweep over Glade Road once again.

Illustration: Unsplash–alona-savchuk-mkpSV2-_-Es-unsplash.jpg

To read or not to read

Do I want to read my mother’s diary? Mother recorded the days of her life from the time she was 13 in 1944 until 1948. That was a year before she married my father, Ray Arrington.

The relationship between my mother and me was never awful but not ideal. More a Wabi Sabi relationship. What would I discover about my mother when she was young? Would I learn embarrassing information? Embarrassing to whom?

Should I just leave what I know about my mother be? Or should I explore that diary for more? Maybe it’s just a record of what she ate, did in school—day to day accounts. Or perhaps, I can harvest more about Helen Louise Espey. Were there traumatic incidents that shaped her life? That helped shape mine, my sister’s? A family member whom she never mentioned but who influenced her perspective on life?

Once she handed me the book, Irregular People. She told me this book would explain who she was. I started the book, but I didn’t finish it. I didn’t see my mother in Joyce Landorf Heaterly’s words. Maybe I should read the book filled with Mother’s own words?

After my parents died, my husband and I found bags and bags of photos squirreled away in their attic. Most photos had no identifying information about the people, the places, the occasions the pictures had captured. Those photos reluctantly hit the trash. Photos that identified people went home with me.

One photo that I vividly remember was of Mother’s eighth-grade graduation. One classmate’s face is missing. Clearly Mother had neatly, precisely cut it out. It looks so funny—this black and white photo with a square hole on top of some boy’s body. A square you can push your finger through—an empty, meaningless void. An omen about the diary?

Who was this headless person to her? Why did she cut him out of the picture, maybe out of her life at age 13? Would her diary solve this mystery? Do I want to know? Was it just a teenage whim or a glimpse of who she was to become?

Help me out here readers, if there are any readers. How much do we want to know about our parents? Are some things better left cut out of our lives, like the face of that boy? Is it a violation of my mother’s privacy for me to read her words, though she no longer lives? Or maybe she does live out there in the ether world. Mother always could read my mind. Is it time for me to read hers? Will she know? Will she care?