A Recollection at Dusk

As the sun was getting low, I went out to inspect the garden.

Charlie the cat sauntered out of her cat house on the porch, careful not to look too excited to see me. Adrienne or I usually bring out a treat at nightfall. And then she bolted back, because the whole neighborhood rocked with the sound of wheels.

Jimmy’s boy whizzed by in one of those plastic cars you propel with your feet like the Flintstones. The Artful Dodger was with him on a bike. The middle child of the Dodgers brought up the rear, on a lime green scooter, in a teal green dress. She brought the scooter to a noisy stop as she approached the house.

“Hi! Remember when you told me to be careful on my scooter?”

Yes, I remembered.

“Well I wasn’t!” She grinned as she hiked up her dress, showing off a long scrape from ankle to mid-thigh.

Because she was smiling so broadly, I tried to look appreciative instead of horrified. “That’s quite a shiner! Be sure to clean it with soap when you take your bath tonight!”

She promised she would, and scooted off.

“Come on, Charlie,” I said to the cat. “Let’s have a cigar.”

“Cigars” are what I call that type of cat treat that looks like a long Tootsie roll made of meat. Charlie followed after me eagerly. I unwrapped a chicken-flavored cigar, which she gobbled as she sat next to me.

I was reminded in my Facebook memories that we’ve been in this rickety old house for ten years this week.

This is the ten-year anniversary of realizing we weren’t going to be homeless at the very last minute, because I’d called the landlord and told him we had enough cash for the deposit before any of the other interested people had a chance to scrape the money together. The anniversary of moving all of our books and clothing from one house to the other with a shopping cart. Of realizing we’d moved from a furnished house to an unfurnished and we didn’t have anything to sit or sleep on.

Michael said to me, as we moved in, that we’d better find a new house when this one’s lease was up, because the basement was musty and the electrical wiring looked old. I said that shouldn’t be difficult, because we were on our way out of Steubenville so that he could be a successful professor of philosophy and I could be a smug professor’s wife. We’ve now been here for one hundred twenty months. I am an author, and he works at a restaurant.

I thought about this as Charlie and I patrolled around the vegetable garden and that ridiculous strawberry patch. The strawberries are almost ripe– maybe another week to go.

Adrienne was three and a half when we moved in. She was excited to start homeschooling for preschool. When we were trash-picking furniture outside another rental house ten years ago, she found a hollow plastic Christmas reindeer as big as she was, which she insisted on taking home. At first she named the reindeer “Childhood,” and then she named it “Big Fat Hen.” We still have it, stored on a corner of the porch when it’s not on the lawn at Christmastime. On another trash-picking expedition soon afterwards, I found that terrible dollhouse where we played for hours with her action figures. We still keep it furnished and carefully cleaned, in a corner of my room.

Adrienne herself came out just then with Lady McFluff the guinea pig, who she placed on the ground under a laundry basket. The pig nibbled on the clover while the cat sat nearby, staring, sometimes moving forward for a sniff but touching her. Adrienne sat on the grass with me, chatting.

Adrienne has had a 4.0 for all four semesters at the public school this year. She’s going into the eighth grade next fall. And she is happy.

As for me, I’m learning to be happy.

I was supposed to be a smug professor’s wife, and a mother of six or seven happy and well-adjusted homeschooled moppets. I was supposed to take them to daily Mass, and volunteer to teach CCD and the youth group, and weep with joy at their First Holy Communions. As it is, I am a mother of one. I have a chronic illness I finally learned to keep in line when I was nearly forty. I have severe religious trauma that won’t go away. I try to go to Sunday Mass if the panic attacks will let me, and I pray when I go hiking.  I don’t think that I will ever stop grieving the life I was supposed to have. I suppose that no matter how long I live, I will never stop naively hoping I’ll be pregnant next month, or the month after that. I suppose that, until I meet God face to face, I will always fear that God couldn’t possibly understand or forgive my failure.

I’m glad to be a surrogate grandmother to the neighborhood children.

I’m looking forward to another year of teaching history and geography lessons at the after school church outreach next year. I hope I get to teach for more than one afternoon a week. It’s more fun than homeschooling was. It turns out I’m really no good at teaching the Three R’s, but I’ve got a knack for social studies.

When I moved into this house, all I wanted was to get out of it as quickly as possible and begin my real life. Not this terrible transitional period where I was a chronically ill, chronically poor failed graduate student, but my real life. And my real life has happened here.

It turns out that a real life is something that happens to you, while you’re waiting for your real life to start.

The street lamps came on, as the sky went from blue to orange to violet over LaBelle. I heard the Artful Dodgers’ mother call for them on the next block, and Jimmy call for his boy on this one.

Dusk settled over the Ohio Valley, and I was home.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.