Weaving. . .

—From EF—

I took a trip to the Midwest last week, the provocation being a high school reunion of the class of 1957, and I spent five days being a weaver. Each day was centered on a different part of my life, and weaving that yarn into a pattern was intense and beautiful. My core is still humming.

I was born in Brooklyn, not the Midwest; my mother was “sent east” to deal with my unplanned arrival. I was eleven days old when my adoptive parents picked me up at the hospital and handed me to their housekeeper to make the plane ride back to their Indiana home. (They had driven to Brooklyn, but a three-day car trip back through February ice was not a good idea for a newborn.) I landed, grew up amid cornfields nine miles from Valparaiso, and never knew that my birth-mother was less than a hundred miles away in Wisconsin.

I had a hard time with my adoptive mother, and my real bond was with the surrounding woods and fields where I roamed freely as a wild little girl. This trip was a reunion with my classmates, yes, but much more with the land that had always welcomed me. On the first day of my trip I was driving down the old country road toward a childhood neighbor’s home and was a bit unsettled by the number of semi-suburban new homes that had popped up. Then I found John’s address by a familiar driveway, turned in, and was immediately in a different world—enclosed by a long narrow corridor flanked by tall sunlit trees. I stopped the car for a minute to breathe the cool clean air that I remembered so well.

I spent the day was with John and his family, who still lived on the farm that had been my own family’s closest neighbor. During a road-trip stop in 1995, I impulsively dropped in on him for a brief afternoon chat. He stunned me by saying that his parents knew that my home life was painful but had no way to intervene. What he told me was life-changing: I hadn’t made it up, it was real and witnessed. Last Thursday was a long afternoon lunch shared with his wife and younger daughter, trading stories of those years, and fond memories of those now long gone.

Friday was spent with the couple who bought my old home years ago. It has been beautifully renovated and is brightened by the energy of their two children. I got the grand tour of the house, and then we went out to walk the trails that they’d cleared and marked in the woods. I took them to the site of the old apple tree that had been my favorite refuge, held safely in her branches. In her old age she became sickly and was taken out, but in 1995 I was given the opportunity to dig for her roots. I brought back with me the glowing reddish chunk of heart-root I’d found, oiled and smoothed, and all four of them took turns holding it close. They plan to plant another apple tree.

Saturday was the reunion, about thirty of my classmates gathered in the sunny meeting-room at the back of a pizza parlor. They knew I’d tried to come last year but got re-routed to St Louis by a storm that closed O’Hare, so this year we made up for lost time. Sixty-seven years re-sculpts faces and bodies, but it was fun putting the puzzle together. I felt welcomed now in a way that had never happened in the fifties, and I had fun being somebody who could now hug and laugh. My coke-bottle glasses, braces, and panicked introversion were long gone.

I then drove on to visit my one high school chum and convey the greetings from the reunion she had planned to attend with me. Her bones suddenly said “no” and now she has three screws bridging a spontaneous fracture and is in a rehab facility. In spite of the pain she could give a good hug, and we traded stories for a few hours—wishing it could be longer. When we were in school, neither of us had known that the other was suffering abuse. Life is strange, but we cherish and celebrate our long friendship and the amazing lives we’ve led.

Sunday I was with my brother and his wife, who have welcomed me into their home as many times as possible since we found each other through DNA in 2018. Dan is three years younger than me; I was the “oops” and he was the welcome result of marriage. Time only sharpens the many traits and quirks we have in common, and our visits are a celebration. He reminds me that no, I wasn’t ordered on-line and delivered in a box, I’m real and have blood family.

Monday was a whole day with Flora, part of my life in theatre since 1967. She was a mainstay of the ensemble we were part of founding, Theatre X, and is known and beloved by Milwaukee audiences for the many roles she has played and created over the following decades. It was the kind of quiet lovely day that only happens with decades of closeness: breakfast, a second cup of coffee in the living room, a walk in the nearby wooded park, my making myself at home in the kitchen preparing a huge Salade Niçoise, an evening reading our current novels, punctuated by scenes from the Men’s Gymnastics.

Tuesday I returned home, to a delighted CB who appeared to have thrived. If anything, he looked stronger and livelier than when I left, and he’d eaten every bit of the multiple meals I’d cooked and frozen for him and for our son’s two-day visit during my absence. We both had agreed that the risks of my absence were worth taking and could be navigated OK, and that was true. What was woven is warm, lovely, and enduring.

###