THESE HERE HILLS

Today is officially the first day of Spring.  Our last Breaking Point post will be tomorrow due to the volume of submissions.  There are three stories today.  I love that they don’t try to tie themselves up in a bow.  They linger in pain. I have a friend who says that everybody who comes into our lives is our teacher.  I would say the same for pain.  Here’s what Shakespeare wrote about it in As You Like It:

“Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court?

Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,

The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang

And churlish childing of the winter’s wind,

Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say

“This is not flattery:  these are counselors

That feelingly persuade me what I am.“

The first was submitted by: Nikki Di Virgilio, who blogs here.

My mom had just come to live with us. She spent her fortune and lost her home. I was unemployed. Money was low. Bills were high. My husband had an addiction. Children were children. Mom’s presence pushed me to the edge, and then I fell off.

The day was cloudy. Maybe a bit of rain. I ran out the back door to the siding and smashed my head against it. Screaming. Punching the side of the house. Someone help me. Notice me, but don’t look at me. What am I doing? My husband came out the door. I ran. Down the neighborhood street. Past the house where the “perfect” family lived. Screaming. Running. Through the children’s park. To a tree in someone’s backyard. Head against the bark. Crying. Body throbbing. My husband found me. I ran again. Back to the street, by the house where the perfect family live. The husband came out. He thought my husband hit me. Someone help me. Notice me, but don’t look at me. What am I doing? An ambulance was called. I sat on the curb. Waited, but wanted to keep running. But where? I stepped up into the metal truck. No sirens were needed. A bed waited. No drugs or straps were used. They let me go. My husband always said I was too smart. I could talk my way out of anything. But I knew I wasn’t crazy. As much as it looked like a breakdown from a medical point of view, I had a spiritual point of view. I broke, but I did not break.

I had never wanted to be like my mom. She was never stable. But as I ran through the streets screaming, the part of me that feared being like her took over. It was only in this taking over, this seeing and expressing that part of me that I could release the control I thought I had over all the crazy that was within me. It was the part of me that watched from a space above the crazy that saved me from actually breaking into another reality.

Actress Jessica Lange, recalls some of the “crazy” characters she has played. Maybe, she shares, “it’s a great opportunity for me to get rid of that craziness through someone else.” Some of us carry a thread of crazy, or the fear of it, and we need to shake that crazy out. All of us, I believe, carry a thread of something in us that we need to shake out and get through in order to uncover who we really are, and build from there. I did, and I’ve been building ever since.

The second was submitted by: Star Roberts

“Around the Bend”

The  screen door slapped against its old wooden frame, sending flakes of white paint to the floor as we hurried out. It was a beautiful day for a walk. One of those shimmering late August afternoons in southern Oregon farm country. The sun was lowering in the sky and the heat of the day was down. A logging truck whizzed down the highway with its last run and a slight breeze carried the scent of recently cut alfalfa.

As we made our way down the gravel driveway onto the path that separated the ditch from the road and got farther from our tired house, from him, our hearts settled back in our chests. Without talking we walked single file, Mom leading, down the open valley, away from the scattering of houses. A neighbor’s peacock cried off in the distance.

We headed south toward the bend in the road and from there took a hard-packed sheep trail through stands of scrub oak up into the hills. As we walked, grasshoppers shot in front of us making zipping sounds as they startled in the tall grass. Our pace slowed, working our way up the ridge and we stopped from time to time to catch our breath. I could see sheep off in the distance and at age twelve, I still had the urge to chase them, like I had so many other times, but I stayed close to Mom and my sisters, Sally and Mona.  The farther we got from home, the easier it was to forget why we were walking and enjoy the soft tawny beauty of the dried hills rolling up and away, calling us to follow.

We walked for a long time until our stomachs were growling and our feet were sore. Canvas sneakers with toes poking through and cheap rubber thongs from Woolworth’s are not made for covering much ground. On a good day dinner might have been on the table and it wasn’t hard to imagine a plate full of fried potatoes and venison being washed down by a big glass of milk from our cow, Tilly.  Girl whining and theatrics seeped into what little conversation there was and after a bit Mom said “Well, I guess we’ve been gone long enough.” Long enough, I thought, for him to pass out.

As we worked our way back down the ridge on the trail that lead toward home a frightening but familiar smell seeped into our noses – something was burning. Our eyes were drawn towards the bend we had come around earlier and the column of smoke rising up behind it into the clear blue sky. We looked at each other and all registered the same thought at once, then broke into a run. As my feet hit the trail towards home, my insides screamed,  No, No, No… But I knew. We knew. It was our house. On fire. Again.

The third was submitted by: Susan

“Man, It’s Hot Up in Here”

It was my time to relax.  Dinner served, plates cleared, dishes washed and put away.  I went downstairs to the only air-conditioned room in the house besides my father’s bedroom.  He was an air-conditioning and heating contractor, installing hundreds of central units in residential and commercial buildings.  We only had a single window unit in the family room.  It was summer in the South; even at eight o’clock in the evening, it was miserable.

I worked for my mother for twenty five dollars a week.  I watched my five younger brothers, cooked lunch and supper, cleaned house, and cycled mounds of laundry through machines that spun endlessly.  Mom worked as an office nurse for a cardiologist.  We were warned not to bother her at work unless and until bones broke, teeth went missing, or large quantities of blood were spilled.  And to wear clean underwear if we came to the Emergency Room connected to the clinic where she worked.

I had just settled into one of the homemade plywood sofas when the light in the stairwell leading down to the basement began to flick on and off.  My father bellowed, “Lights out. Everyone in bed.”  I was the only one downstairs.  The others were probably huddled under bedcovers feigning sleep.  Dad was drunk.  He assumed a personality we called the “Russian Bear”: cold, angry, and dangerous.

At first, I sat still thinking I could pretend I wasn’t there.  I knew he wasn’t likely to take the walk down the steps.  I’d outlast him very quietly.  The light continued to flick.  Off.  On.

So I gave in and angrily switched off the air conditioner, the television, and the basement light.  I began to climb the steps.  He waited in the hallway at the top of the stairs.  I had to pass him to go to my bedroom.  As I reached him, he raised his hand as if to backhand me.  He’d never done that before.

“That doesn’t scare me,” I stupidly said.  He was a big man.

Then all I could see were his hands hitting me right and left.  I ducked and ran past him into my room.  He followed.  An oscillating fan on a chair became an obstacle I was more aware of than he.  I landed seated on top of my desk facing The Bear.  The fan waved from the chair just behind his right leg.  The slapping did not stop.

My younger brothers alerted by the sounds of yelling and blows ran for my mother.  She appeared in the scene behind my Dad, calling his name and insisting he stop.  She picked up a lime green stuffed alligator from my sister’s twin bed.  She began to flay him with a toy.  I looked at her, the weapon, and the attacker.  I knew my mother would never be able to protect me.

The green alligator distracted him.  He stepped back into the fan which crashed to the floor.  I saw my chance to dash when the focus was off me and on to the fan.  I ran outside into the black, hot, summer night.

I couldn’t run away from home.  My older sister, wearing clean underwear, worked as a nurses’ aide at the hospital with the Emergency Room.  My last task of the day was to pick her up at eleven thirty.

The next day Mom arranged for me to travel by train to New Orleans to visit her sister.  I stayed there several days and swam in her apartment pool.   I returned home and went back to work.

No apologies were ever spoken.