Thoughts About Home by Deborah

The Continuum of Life

The scent of ripened fruit hung heavy in the air that night. David and I walked through the peach orchard under a full autumn moon. I don't remember why we found ourselves in the orchard so late. All I knew for sure that night was that I would give birth within the next twenty-four hours. We would be parents for the first time, I was sure of it.

 

All these years later I recall the moonlight, David's nearness, and the strong scent of peaches. David had come home from work to find me crying in our room. Instead of comforting me, he reached for his camera. I'd never been pregnant before and certainly birth would be a whole new passage for me.

 

Recently, I was in the room with a dear friend who learned she had a short time left to live. I knew before she did. A conference call had been arranged so that her two sons, one calling from Washington,

D.C., the other from Los Angeles, could tell her themselves. When the phone rang, and she answered, I could tell by her expression that it was her boys. I nodded, touched her leg and left the room.

 

When I returned, the phone call was over and she sat in her hospital bed, staring straight ahead. She spoke first. "There's nothing more the doctors can do for me," she said. "I won't get better."

 

She was not a praying sort of woman. But I am convinced prayer can take many forms. I was not the only other person in the room. Her sister was there as well as a dear friend. Each in our own way told her we loved her.

 

I miss my friend. She died on Derby Day while David and I were in Audubon Hospital as he recovered from heart surgery. I remember her calls to us, full of concern and best wishes. I remember the phone call early Sunday morning that told me of her death. I remember how the last times I saw her, she would take my face in both her hands and kiss my cheek in farewell always adding she loved me. It was unlike her to be so affectionate, so eye to eye deliberate in her pronouncement of love.

 

I look back now and wish I had been more patient, less afraid, had told her just as deliberately how much I loved her, how much I valued her friendship, how much I had learned from her and how much I had yet to learn. I didn't want her to leave. I wanted her to stay.

 

Now, she visits me in my dreams and we share a brief time of conversation. Her voice hovers over me in my dreams and I can't recall the setting or reason for her visit. But she is okay now. Of that much I am sure, just as I was so sure about pending birth of our child all those years ago in that moonlit peach orchard.

 

What I was to learn from that birth was that I would no longer fear my own death. As I gave birth, I understood that birthing was as natural as dying. It was all a part of the continuum of life. I want to live and I want those I love to live but when death intervenes, I have learned to accept it as a fact. That's what people do; they live and then they die. The hard part remains living each day with a keen sense of joy and celebration for the love that surrounds me.

 

Even though they tell us the recession is technically over, for many the hard times persist. I am not minimizing the difficulty of financial insecurity. All I am telling myself and anyone who will listen is that it must not eclipse the joy, the tenderness, the goodness of all we have that money cannot touch or save.

 

Home, in every language there's a word for it; it's that place in our hearts that makes each moment a room of its own, a prayer of its own, a space in time to reach for the miracles that we know will come.

 

Mid-summer Morning

The house we live in was built in 1891 on the same limestone that once supported the Southern Exposition. For those of you who may not know, the Southern Exposition (1883-1887) was a sort of mini-World's Fair that exhibited the latest in art, farm equipment and inventions. The building that housed this collection of wonders extended from Magnolia Avenue on the north to Hill Street on the South and from Fourth Street on the east to Sixth Street on the West.

 

When the building was disassembled in 1887, a man by the name of Slaughter bought the land and created what are now St. James, Belgravia and Fountain Courts. So, the limestone was recycled to sustain the houses of the courts and the roof slate was used to side a hospital and doctor's house built on Sixth Street in the 1890's and billed as the first hospital west of the Alleghenies dedicated exclusively to the treatment of women.

Today we call them Slate house and Junior Slate house. No longer a hospital and doctor's home, they now house an architect's office and condos.

 

Our house on Belgravia takes on a different slant of light depending on the season. It faces north so ours is the last side of the court to see snow and ice melt. Ours, too, is the last side to watch our Mountain Laurels spring into bloom or our Tulip Magnolia release her heavenly pink blossoms.

 

It is now mid-summer and cool enough to carry breakfast outside near the fountain in our small courtyard. What is it about the sound of running water that is such a comfort? I sip my hot coffee, listen to the mockingbird whose trill goes on and on from one song dipping into another, and relish the early morning. Last night I was awakened to the soft but persistent hoot of an owl in the magnolias.

 

I lay awake thinking about this house that I love, the timeless grace of it. The bed we sleep in was given to me by a childless couple in their nineties who were leaving their home of 47 years to move into assisted living. The bed had been a gift to the wife from a dear friend in Texas. It had been her friend's grandfather's bed. They gave me the bed with the promise that one day I would make of it a gift as well.

 

So, the night, the owl, the bed, the woman, all rest on the foundation stones of the building where Edison first displayed his 16 candle-powered light bulb. It is said in those days, families would gather before the Southern Exposition with dinner baskets and picnic on the grounds of what would later become Louisville's Olmsted designed Central Part. But long before Frederick Law Olmsted ever saw the land, these families sat transfixed waiting for dark when they would behold the dazzling display of Mr. Edison's single light bulb.

 

In the dark, I drift back to sleep waiting for morning in the arms of this old bed, held in the rooms of this old house, in mid-summer, lulled by the owl, to be awakened by the light with the bird whose song never seems to stop and whose variations are endless.

Sustenance

My husband, David, came very close to dying. My thin, athletic husband who had always been careful about his diet and exercise had chest pains while walking our dogs and called his doctor. One test led  quickly to another and revealed major blockage in his arteries. His cardiologist said, “It’s 100% genetic. There is nothing you could have done to prevent this.” Following a catheterization, David had a quadruple by-pass performed by Dr. Steven Etoch at  Louisville's Audubon Hospital. The photograph that accompanies this brief letter was taken by David’s brother, Bob, in CCU, less than two hours after surgery.

Audubon Hospital became our second home. We slept there. We took all of our meals there. We received guests there. Instead of walking them to their cars, I accompanied them to the elevators. From our windows we saw geese in flight, the distant cityscape against the early morning mist rising off the Ohio, the forest with a stream running through it that embraced the west side of the hospital, the side where we were kept, the cardiac wing. In the morning we could hear the bird calls filling the trees. Our room had windows I could actually tilt open for fresh, cool, sometimes rain drenched air.

 David was in CCU for less than 24 hours and once we were in a room where flowers were allowed, they came. The flowers did. They felt like a blessing. We became known as the room with the beautiful flowers.

 Ned Morris, our rector and Emily Schwartz, our assistant rector, stopped by with prayers and their presence. On Sunday afternoon, Ned brought us the Eucharist. Ned prayed with us before the catheterization, the night before the surgery, and throughout the entire ordeal. We are truly blessed to have him in our lives and to have Emily with her beauty and youth and deep spirit.

 Kate brought a single down comforter from home for me and I made my nest of a bed on the couch along one wall nearest David’s bed. She downloaded movies to her I-pod so that I could don ear-plugs and watch old movies while David slept. And because she is my daughter, she gathered a small library of reading material and made sure I had the most recent New Yorker.

 Our son, David, was the designated griller at his wife’s family Derby party and brought me a full plate of delicious picnic food for dinner later that night.

The morning of David’s surgery I looked up as David’s brother Bob slipped into our room. David was showering. I was packing up our things. It was five am. A few minutes later, our daughter Kate, opened the door and joined us. Before the morning was over, all who could would gather round a table in the snack area off the waiting room for cardiac surgery. David’s sister, Annie brought food for snacking. Kate, her husband Craig, our son David, David’s brother Dick and his wife Deborah, Bob. Ned, Emily, my sister Cynthia and my brother, Gerald. Later my brother, Thomas would join us. Each of these people lead very busy lives but they stopped what they were doing. If I had tried to arrange a dinner party to include them it would have been impossible, but without my asking anyone, each of them put their lives on hold and came to be near. For hours they talked, laughed and snacked together around that table.

Through it all, my phone was filled with emails of support, blessings, offers of food, love, encouragement. Then, like the angel at  Bethesda, a nurse appeared to say David had been removed from the heart-lung machine and the surgeon was closing him up. She escorted us to a small room near Cardiac Critical Care where Dr. Etoch would meet us.

David now walks without pain. He tires easily but each day he grows stronger and the pain has now gone. We were sustained the many prayers and kindnesses of our family and friends. Our lives are filled with gratitude.

Beyond This Place

What to tell you next? How David and I traveled south to Alabama through a slow and dense fog over the mountain from Sewanee on a cold, rainy afternoon through the back roads into the strange beauty of a denuded northern Alabama landscape with Victorian houses starkly rising like Confederate apparitions from the middle of bare fields, not a soul in sight, just the presence of these magnificent houses now quiet except for the imagined families that once graced their rooms so full and alive now gone, gone, nowhere to be seen the saintly grandmothers with the sweet smiles and thick waists in their aprons and wide heeled house shoes, the fathers in their suspenders holding a newspaper in one hand, looking out at us from the front porch as though we were the long anticipated guests for a late Sunday dinner. And, of course, somewhere in the background would be the middle-aged mother, a shawl draping her narrow shoulders and a hand gathered at her throat as if to protect herself from the chill of encroaching darkness.

 

We drove on through the rain until the fields turned to vast lakes and we zipped across long bridges to settle ourselves high on a hill in an old house with wide porches and a view of the water.  It rained steadily as we met our innkeeper and were ushered to our room with its tall ceilings and quiet chill.  The heat was turned up and we unpacked, placing our clothes and books in a way that warmed the room to us.  I have always loved creating a space for us wherever we’ve found ourselves, no matter how grand or modest the rooms, how near or far our home of the moment, stepping into a strange room and making it ours, if only for a night.

 

The next morning, I took breakfast with the innkeeper.  David had left the house hours before to meet with the men he’d come to see on business.  When I awoke and sat upright, I stared into the mirror over the dresser opposite the bed.  I had the disheveled look of a child suddenly aroused from a deep sleep and for a moment I stared blankly at this vision of myself as a child of certain age in her oversized silk pajamas, the top so large as to expose one shoulder, one bare shoulder as simple and spare as a child’s. Then I rose, slipped my bare feet into the dark flat shoes I wear with my night clothes, pulled on a long robe and made myself presentable before stepping into the wide center hall with the sound of rain, everywhere rain splintering the silence of this simple old house.

 

She was there, bustling in from the kitchen, pushing her hair away from her face with the back of one hand, while holding a cup and saucer in the other.  She smiled and asked if I’d like some coffee.  I said I would and she nodded toward the table set for two at the far end of the hall.  As dutifully as a child, I went to the table and took my place.

 

When she asked if she might join me for breakfast, I said I’d welcome her company and the two of us sat , for the better part of the morning, talking about the house, her five children, now grown and gone, her childhood in North Dakota and her love of old buildings.  It took a long time before she mentioned the dissolution of her marriage and the quiet discrimination she’d felt when branded by the local elite as a woman on her own.

 

Later, I would shower and dress, pack up our belongings and then strip the bed, folding the sheets carefully before placing them in the old wicker clothesbasket in one corner of our bathroom.  By the time David returned, it was early afternoon and we bade our farewells with hugs and promises of return.  Then, like some anonymous presence, some quiet and simple force, we retreated, into the rain, over the bridge, past the lakes, absorbed, absorbed into our lives beyond this place.

Beautiful Dreams

The house is tired. Abandoned by her mistress of 40 years she is now used by the family for reunions at Christmas and St. James Art Show. Otherwise the place braves the seasons alone except for tenants on her back floors. Her lovely beveled glass front doors have a threatening note taped to them saying if one so much as touches them an alarm will summon the police with such a noise as would raise the dead.

 

Tenants now enter through a side door into a small quaint room where someone’s grandmother had once wintered her ferns. From there they ascend a narrow back stairs with a satin rope as the railing. It is the kind of deep maroon satin rope churches use to mark pews for the family during funeral services.

 

The house is now for sale. Her public rooms are large. The foyer flanked by the front stairs was meant, I am sure, as some sort of gathering room. The living room to the left used to have pocket doors. They are gone which makes me angry until I spy the French doors leading to a stone terrace. I move quickly to remove the chairs blocking the doors, struggle with the locks and voilà, the doors open. However, the storm doors have been painted shut, locks and all, so I must satisfy myself with the light alone, a partial epiphany. I know the breeze in the trees, the smell of fall leaves, the sound of the nearby fountain all would flood this stale room with life and energy.

 

From the living room one enters the dining room where, I am told, the long table was left by an earlier owner all those years ago. In one corner of the room is a fireplace. Its mantle has an oval mirror with two small stands protruding to hold, I assume, candles. I am wrong. They are cake stands perched high connected to the mantle. I imagine cakes on the stands at Sunday dinner. A banana cream and a coconut cake. You could have your pick but you must finish your vegetables.

 

A staircase begins outside the dining room. The staircase is refined with alternating spindles of varied designs. As you climb the stairs a bank of stained glass windows face you. Each panel has a crank. They were meant to be opened as were the casement windows in the side sleeping porch at the end of the back hall on the second floor. My friend, Sena, lives next door and the porch from her study is eye to eye with this porch.

 

Later in the day she gleefully says I must buy this house. We could talk on summer nights between our porches as though we’d each climbed the huge old cotton wood between us. We’d pretend we were girls again and talk about our houses.

 

My fantasy continues as I walk down the hall toward the very front of the second floor, into the largest of the two bedrooms. As soon as I enter that room I feel the light. The house faces east so this room on this bright autumn morning is filled with the slanted light of early November. In the sitting area I notice on large window. It opens onto a small balcony which hovers over the front porch. The floor is made of stone with flag poles on either side.

 

I know then that each morning, weather permitting, I’d walk out my bedroom window and sit on my stone porch to watch the sun rise in the east or in the night wait for the stars and the mood to climb over the old trees, high enough for me to see and know it was time to retreat to bed and reading and sleep all the way until sunrise.

 

Then both Sena and I would live in magical houses with huge rooms and hidden passages. Sena says, “You’d breathe such life into that house. It needs you so.” And she is right. David would get those French windows open and together we’d bid the evening goodnight. Then we would walk back through, close the open windows and fall into the magic of this old house on the eve of our old age. And the young tenants could stay.

Photographs by Ad Cat Media. See more photographs at Autumn On the Court.

Voices

Our daughter Kate was born one chill October morning in 1979.  She was a dream come true. David and I had lost a child whose heartbeat we had heard and whose fluttering kick I had felt.  After the loss of that pregnancy in 1977, the doctors would caution me against becoming pregnant again too soon.  I remember my defiance. I remember my grief. I remember dreaming of our lost child and I refused to guard against another life.

My mother-in-law, Laura, went with me for the post pregnancy visits to my doctor. She’d lost several pregnancies herself but had the perspective of age to shield her from the raw grief I carried. She never forced her knowledge on me.  She did not discount my loss the way so many others did in those days. She acknowledged my loss and that for me was the beginning of healing.

Then that December, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.  After exploratory surgery and a stomach bypass, she was sent home to die. She was given until March to live. She was 55 years old. I was 31.

In those bleak days following her surgery, I would sit by her bedside and listen as she told me she didn’t deserve this, she didn’t want to die; she’d just reached the point in her life where she felt she was beginning to figure things out and she wanted to learn more, love longer, and perhaps impart some measure of the grace she’d been granted.

I listened. I wrote thank you notes for the flowers which came daily. I helped with the ordinary household chores. Then, in February, I learned I was pregnant.  David and I decided we would not tell her.  She already felt robbed of her future.  She adored her only grandchild, our son, David, and so we chose to let her live in the moment.

In early March, I declined coffee after dinner.  She asked me, point blank, if I were pregnant.  I told her I was.  She asked for my due date.  I told her, October the seventh. There were no words of congratulations, no expressed concern for the safety of this pregnancy. She was too sick for such normal exchanges. We understood, without saying so, that the two of us had entered a solemn pact. If I could give birth, she could live until my due date.

In late April she went to bed one spring afternoon and she never dressed again in anything but bedclothes.  She’d begun to die in earnest.  As her stomach grew distended with a rock hard mass, mine grew full with the tenderness of new life.

With no medical intervention, Laura lived until the early hours of October the seventh.  We were with her at home when she passed. Three mornings later I gave birth to her first granddaughter, Laura Katherine, so named for each of her grandmothers.

In the last days of her life, Laura told me, “The phone rings often in the night, and every time it does, I think of you.”

When Kate was born, she cried until the nurse handed her to David whose voice she recognized.  I like to think somewhere deep in her memory Kate remembers the voice of the woman whose own life was extended by the promise of hers.  Home is where the voices of the ones we love never die.