The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).

Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.

There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).

As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.

Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.

I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.

I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.

Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.

After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.

Here are the things I don't write about here:

My son's colds and coughs

Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three cats, a dog, and three humans

The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I may mention this in passing, but not in great detail, since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious, like work-on-the same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours laborious)

The difficulty of writing something that is long-term, of continuing through it without the instant feedback of blogging

Cooking dinner whether I want to or not

How we're figuring out where the kid will go to school for kindergarten in the fall

Tips and tricks for keeping one's sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with an energetic four-year-old

Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr. T's business trips

My political views

Natural disasters

The pros and cons of having another child

The perhaps impossibility of having another child

My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my current career choice

RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for this space. I'm not sure that many people want to read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers are interested in my personal pieces, either angst from the past or my depressive musings on current life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.

It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is working on something. I just need a few hours with a keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just feels like the right thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify my existence.

So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of the oldies but goodies. We'll see.

Image: Everyday me, as recorded by my computer.

I miss the tall ginkgos with their rotting fruits, the way the berries felt beneath my feet with just enough crunch, a pleasure to step on. The sidewalk was covered with ginkgo leaves, too, bright yellow fans dampened with the rain. A storm had come through the night before, had knocked the leaves off along with the fruit. The air was full of the smell of them, acrid, rotting, sweet.

We were lost and I was defensive about it, but if you were going to be lost, this was the neighborhood to be lost in. The street was tunneled in by wide brick rowhouses, voluptuous Victorians with turrets and whimsical windows accented with stone. Each house had a set of black iron steps, shiny and slick, one-two-three-four, up to the entry. The steps made little caves over doors to English basements, a term which conjures up mold and damp and a view of other peoples’ ankles, the angling of a dog’s leg as it releases a spray of urine against low iron window bars.

He got angry with me after I got angry with him and we had an embarrassing fight in front Martha, a hissy fit that revealed more than we intended. A tense moment with the map revealed my mistake and our luck: we were three blocks from Adams Morgan, a short walk to a few cold beers and a platter of Ethiopian food. The three of us marched from Swann Street to 18th Street, walked uphill against a thin wind. It was getting dark, people were bundled up against the cold. We walked without talking, single-file past the homeless, the crazies, the young people with their know-everything attitude. And then we shared a meal with all the awkwardness of something being over, knowing we had years to go before it would really end.

This is from a Round Robin prompt this week, my (slightly edited) response to a very different photograph.
Photo by Antediluvial.

I trace an outline of my daughter’s hand on thin tissue paper. The paper is pink as cotton candy and her hand is limp. She is asleep.
 
I’ve spent the last weekend tracing her limbs and torso while she sleeps, working my way up to her delicate head and wispy hair. I just want to catch an idea of that hair, a tendril here, a mass of frizz there. In her sleep her toes flex like a dancer en pointe. I follow the stretch of the arch of her foot, sweep up the ball to the tip of her big toe. Elizabeth stirs and tenses as the felt-tipped marker grazes her flesh, but I am stalwart and stay the course, capture the foot for posterity’s sake.
 
Elizabeth is three years old, red-haired and long of limb. Her knees are like mine were when I was her age, stretched and knobby all at once, awkward joints connecting leg bones. I can already see how her hips will jut out at thirteen, will buffer themselves in fat and muscle. Buying pants will become almost impossible for her, will become a source of frustration, and she will start to wear slimming flat-front trousers with wide legs no matter the going fashion. Her skinny legs will protrude from an ample rump, those now-slight hips will grow to temporarily house the wide skulls of ten-and-a-half pound babies. She will slap the first man who remarks on her child-bearing hips and then she will marry him and bear two children in three years.

They will exhaust themselves with fights over money and discipline. When she discovers that he's been sneaking out to Bible study meetings and is on the road to becoming born again, Elizabeth will leave him. I'll take the family in, my 26-year-old daughter and her two preschooler boys, will put aside my plans to redo the upstairs in preparation to sell the place. She'll be practically unemployable, her only experience being reproducing and windexing the glass off the windows, running a vacuum cleaner across the floor so thoroughly that you could eat off of it. It will be as though she were a teenager again, the petty little fights over who left what dish in the sink without washing it, her stealing my cigarettes and popping diet pills so she can stay up all night. I will wonder what happened to my golden years, my "me" time. She'll get an earful every night.

Eventually she will go back to nursing school, will find a new place to live and get a job. One of the night-shift orderlies, an atheist, rational and compelling, will seduce her with stories from his service in the Persian Gulf. He'll move in after their third date and will start whipping that fatherless household into shape. The boys, teenagers by this time, will be desperate to escape the two of them, sick of the discussions of Ayn Rand and the tyranny of other people's gods. There are other things that will keep them away, the sounds that leak from the too-thin walls of the tract house, the atheist's cries in the middle of the night followed by the low dove-coos of their mother soothing him. They will visit me for dinner almost every night and I'll serve them roast beef and potatoes, spaghetti and meatballs, fish sticks and french fries. Sometimes one of the boys will sleep on the pull-out couch, his brother in a sleeping bag on the floor.
 
But for now Elizabeth is a little girl with chubby feet and dimpled elbows. Her neck is thick, strong muscles leading to an unremarkable chin that dips out blandly from under her lower lip. Her dad and I are still debating about whose nose she will have. All children have cute button noses. It takes the hormones and stretching of adolescence to reveal the nose’s true nature.

This is a record of young love and wobbly stability. There's Mr. X in male cheesecake pose, lying in front of the newly-planted impatiens in the backyard of our first Columbus apartment. Here's Loudon the sheltie-dog, a ball of fluff, on his first day home. Sidney and Zoe appear as young kittens, playful, flexible, and sleek. In one set of pictures, Mr. X and I pose separately, each of us holding a champagne glass and wearing the dark-lensed glasses that came with my grandmother's 50s-era sunlamp. We look like goons, but that was the point. And then there are the shots of our wedding, that great party we gave, where his relatives filled the space and made it joyous while mine were reserved and inward, quiet in their happiness. These photos are relics of another time, part of my life but outside of it, too.

As time went on, Mr. X and I took fewer pictures. Fifteen months after we were married, we both got jobs in Washington, DC and life got much more stressful. Mr. X clashed terribly with his incompetent boss. Our living situation wasn't comfortable. The basement tenant in the house we rented, a man named Dewey Wayne (I've since forgotten his last name), had an intense personality. Dewey Wayne had sold his house in Raleigh and put all his money into a move to DC, which included paying a year's rent in advance. He had a habit of leaving his front door open while he took his dog on walks, which was his business, except that his place was connected to ours by a door that we couldn't lock and our neighborhood wasn't a good place to leave doors open. The washer and dryer for the building were in his apartment and he freaked out (rightfully) once or twice when we walked in on him, unannounced, to do our laundry.

Then there were the rats. The backyard, a rectangle of bare dirt dotted with ratholes, held a thriving rodent commune. We had a parking space out by the trash cans and the rats began to use our car as storage space, something we discovered on our way to the grocery store one weekend. As Mr. X pulled out onto 15th Street, the engine began to smoke. Over the course of our ten-minute ride, the car slowly filled with the odor of roasted, rotten meat. We rolled all the windows down and covered our noses with tissues to filter out the smell. When we pulled into the parking lot, Mr. X popped open the hood: two smoldering pork rib bones had adhered to the carburetor. The car stank for weeks. Later a rat actually chewed its way into Dewey Wayne's apartment ("I came in and there he was on top of the refrigerator, munching on a bagel. Like Mighty Mouse," he told us).

Mr. X and I finally fled the rental after five months and bought a house in Takoma Park, Maryland. The night before the house inspection, our car was stolen from our street, though it was recovered somewhat unscathed a week later. In the meantime, Mr. X's job had gone from horrible to intolerable. His old position in Columbus was still open and they were happy to take him back. On the weekend of our second anniversary, only eight months after we had arrived in DC, he returned to Ohio. There were solid reasons for him to leave that had nothing to do with our marriage, but it was the beginning of the end, or at least I can mark the final slide with this event. We were doomed from the beginning.

Mr. X is remarried now. He and his wife have a child on the way. We haven't spoken in a couple of years, though we are Facebook friends. And while the past is always present for me in some way, I don't think much about that time when I was young and in love and it was all fresh and new, when I was with someone who was my loyal protector, when I was learning to be an adult without drama. I wasn't good at living without drama and still courted it with alcohol and arguments, with cruel remarks and coldness, but there was an underlying sweetness to the relationship. Mr. X helped pull me out of my childhood, was the first person to hold out his hand.

The only evidence I have of that time is some paperwork and photographs. We had no children and the last living pet we shared is fading fast. There are no friends in common with which to reminisce, to verify that it all happened. But I'm still not sure what to do with the artifacts, the pictures that show the world that we created for a brief moment, now submerged in memory.

Image: Champagne on our first anniversary, Columbus, November 1996. I still have the glasses and -- strangely, but coincidentally -- my son just fished them out of a toy box this morning and put them on, even though he hadn't worn them for months.