By Rachel Pridgeon

                  My grandmother begins her notes the same way, always with the weather.  This was a warm day.  What a beautiful morning.  Just an eighth of an inch of rain today…we need it so badly.  My own mother fears the same fate—not old age, she looks forward to that, but a preoccupation with the weather, a sign of stagnancy, boredom, monotony, as measurable as rain collecting patiently at the bottom of a gauge. 

Can it be spun a different way, happier?  Her notes begin with weather, just a shadow of her in the words, a cloud passing over the page.  A rainbow this morning.  It sets the stage, the mood, the lighting.  I see lightening in her letters, fog in her forgetting.  But try as I might, weather as a metaphor bores me, so maybe I am my mother’s daughter after all. Or perhaps it’s a different weather I’m interested in.  A whether, if you will, which one of the two wins my empathy: Mother and Grandmother, situated at two ends of a string constantly folding on itself, infinitely measurable.   

My mother says she had a sad childhood.  One of storms that sent lightening through her quarter horses.  I wrote a poem about that once, entitled “Elegy.”  “My mom’s quarter horses/ were electrocuted during/ a storm, both of them tied/ to a feeder—one large/ conductor of current.”  The only poem my professor handed back with the word finally scrawled at the bottom—whatever that meant.  Finally the poem’s over?  Or, finally you wrote a poem? 

            So my mom’s childhood wasn’t one of marbles and baseball cards, like my dad’s.  Oh, it could’ve been a lot worse.  There wasn’t any abuse—at least not the bad stuff that makes for good memoirs—or tragedy.  No, the tragedy would come later, in the form of a plane that took my mother’s two brothers and dad down with it.  But before all that, her childhood was sad because her mom and dad were unhappy and they stayed together, anyway.  They stayed together, and took the kids to church, and in the pew sat a boy, girl, boy, girl, dressed to the nines, and no one knew they were so unhappy. That was the worst part, she says.  They made a pretty portrait, a balanced equation: two boys, two girls, side by side.

My mom made it her mission to give her own two boys, two girls happy childhoods by loving my dad with everything she had.  A half-laugh.   I swore I’d never marry a farmer. I’m telling you, you’ll be surprised by who you finally marry. 

Finally, Mom?  An end against which all else is measured?  So I can some day watch for weather, face open to the sky in one perpetual question?  Can it be spun a different way, happier? 

Please, Mom.  I clasp her hands, and she’s crying now in that scary way, without sound.  I listen to her fear.  I don’t want you kids to be miserable in your marriages like my mom was. 

And still is. She remarried seventeen years after my grandfather “was killed.”  My mother is bothered by this phrasing, in how it sounds like the plane killed my grandfather, or the weather, which wasn’t recorded as being particularly bad that September night, twenty-nine years ago. 

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My parents are going on forty years of marriage this December.  I recognize their occasional fights, I hate to say it, the way people know it’s going to storm; there’s a pressure in the air, the slamming of a truck door as he speeds off to the farm in a cloud of dust.  And I know nothing burns her more than the suggestion that she is talking to him like her mother talks to her husband.  I remember when he got prostate cancer, and I recall my mom’s sobs as she told me in the bathroom one morning before school.  The mornings stand out a lot.  Growing up, I caught them stealing kisses in the kitchen every day before I boarded the bus with my brothers and sister.  She’d be at the stove, fixing us bacon and “dippy eggs” with toast, and he’d walk up behind her, and I hate to say it, pat her bottom until she turned to put her arms around his neck.  God, do they love to neck.  Twelve years old—that’s how old I was when I walked into their bedroom in the middle of the afternoon one summer, only to see the drop and roll of my dad’s naked body off the bed, and my mom, desperately trying to be casual in her question.  What do you need, Rach?

She says a child needs her parents to love each other, that’s all.  That’s the best gift you can give a child, and if you can’t give it, you owe it to yourself and your children to separate.  She says this with conviction, with green eyes focused steadily ahead.  I try to imagine her mother, my grandmother, arriving home after a long shift at the hospital, fixing dinner for four kids, still in her nursing uniform.  After the plane accident, it was her nursing friends who never left her side, spent the nights with her, took turns bringing her lunch so she would eat.  I’m not sure she’s ever been off tranquilizers, my mom says.  She’s suggested counseling, even offered to do it together, but my grandma won’t, can’t.  So their therapy comes in the form of an annual memorial concert to honor my grandfather and uncles’ lives.  But like any memorial, this event is more for the survivors, than for the deceased.  It’s always held at our church, St. Mark’s Episcopal, and afterwards the church women serve fancy punch in pretty colored cups. 

It’s no accident that the service is centered on music.  It’s the medium my mother speaks, prays in; she’s the organist and choir director at St. Mark’s.  One of my earliest memories: my mom in a long black choir robe, playing the organ.  I’m beside her, maybe four, maybe five.  She is moving, boy is she moving, her feet stamping out a bass line, one hand on the organ keys, the other pulling out a stop, sending the air soaring through long brass pipes secured to the sanctuary wall.  No wonder she is bored by my grandmother’s meteorology, with all that wind and sound at her fingertips.

In college she studied under one of the best organ scholars in the country.  Before her senior recital, my mom was so nervous that my grandmother gave her a tranquilizer.  My grandmother worked as an RN at a state hospital for many years, and one winter, she went away to one herself when my mom was a girl.  No one talked about it or asked any questions, just a blanket how’s your mother doing?

             And now?  How is she now?  I sit across from my grandmother at her kitchen table, always a home grown rose adorning the center, or at my computer with her emails before me, and the weather is nice, and we could use some rain, but for the most part she does pretty well.  She’s so sharp, so sharp.  You’d never know she lived through plane crashes and breast cancer, and now, her husband is dying and she hates him for it, you can tell in her tone of voice, the roll of eyes, the sighs.  My mom feels sorry for her, analyzes her: A long time ago your grandmother decided she doesn’t deserve happiness, and that’s why she talks to him the way she does, and did, to her first husband.  It’s so sad, so sad.  But there was a time, I remember, when she and my step-grandfather, Marv, were in love.  He, with all that thick white hair like a cloud engulfing his head.  She, with her rose garden and oh, their wedding reception in an antebellum bed & breakfast.  My grandmother fell in love twice in life, and for eighteen months or so I remember she was really happy. 

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The only picture I own of my maternal grandfather—“killed” before I was born—sits on a chair in the corner of my bedroom, a prop I occasionally pick up and study.  Actually, it’s a picture of him beside my grandmother at Strawberry Lake in northern Michigan, when they were courting, I think in the 1940’s.  They’re stretched out on the lake’s embankment.  The photograph is in black and white, but it’s easy to see this was a bright day, water flashing under a hot mid-day sun.  He’s the classic image of a teenage heartthrob: thick wavy hair, deep set eyes, strong jawline.   My mom says he was poor, the son of a widower-farmer who raised seven children by himself.  It was his good looks, she thinks, that won my grandmother’s heart. In a tight white t-shirt, he’s lying on his side with his head resting in his hand, facing my grandma.  She’s in a striped herringbone jacket (so heavy for such a bright day), sitting up and turned at the waist toward the camera.  Their hands appear to be touching in the tall grass, but I can’t tell for certain.  What I notice is her impish grin, eyes glancing up at whoever caught this private moment by the lake.

This was a warm day.  What a beautiful morning.

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 So what happened? My mom’s and my favorite game.  We play for hours, usually in the car on shopping trips.  And then this past spring the game centered on me.  Mom, I’m in love.  And he’s not a farmer, and he’s been married before, and his wife and oldest child died in a car accident a year-and-a-half ago.

            She knows all this.  Joel was my mentor’s husband.  I babysat for their two boys, followed the family to Georgia in pursuit of a Masters in Fine Arts, where both Joel and Susan taught graduate poetry and nonfiction workshops.  I would’ve followed them anywhere, and nearly did, to Amman, Jordan when they were awarded Fulbrights. 

Only half the family came home.

 My grandmother understands the profundity of this loss: the family severed in half, one side of the equation gone.  She still watches the sky for rain, or perhaps for the cross of plane exhaust with a fresh fear in her throat: My little brother is training to be a pilot.  He tips the wings when he flies over our farm, to let us know it’s him, look, it’s Jon!  The slender Cessna is white, with red stripes sectioning the plane’s body.  This summer he took my mom up.   She understands his passion, this medium of prayer he’s found.  They plan another flight, this time a little farther in distance, but have to cancel because “there was weather,” Jon says.  He is so careful about weather, on all of our behalves. 

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             In Georgia, Joel and I took long walks on his lunch break.  We’d sneak away to share our depression over a cigarette, commenting occasionally on the antebellum houses, their sad state of disrepair after years of neglect.  There’s the house belonging to Flannery O’Connor’s aunt.  I can still see Joel pointing with his cigarette to the peeling columns, up to where a tenant’s cat laid basking on the porch’s roof (how did it get there?).  I think those old mansions were metaphors for our respective relationships at the time: his marriage to Susie, my destructive involvement with a peer.  We’d walk the entire lunch hour in that mid-day heat, speaking our pain, until it was time to head back to school, each stinking slightly of smoke and sweat.  We rarely touched, except to light our cigarettes, or to squeeze an arm at the sound of an approaching car, pulling each other back from the crosswalk until it was safe to continue.   With the word divorce, it took me a few steps to realize Joel had stopped walking, had stopped right between those wilting mansions to cry for his children.  No, he couldn’t sever the family like that.  They would stay together.  Jordan would be a new start. 

I prayed for a break in the heat that day.

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            My mother cries when I tell her I’m in love, not because she disapproves, but because she is so scared, her childhood passing before her eyes, on a highway bounded by fields she admires aloud in one breath, and then in the next, I don’t want you kids to be miserable in your marriages like my mom was. 

            Just now—and I mean just now, as I was typing that last sentence, she called to tell me my step-grandfather, Marv, has had another mini-stroke, and might have to be put in a home.  My grandma, having nursed others all her life, is tired.  She is cross to her husband.  But when Marv’s sons suggest they will take him to Wisconsin or to Indiana where they live, my grandma is deeply offended.  To take him away, off her hands, is an admission that their marriage is not good, that she cannot offer him the care and affection he needs, and vice versa.

            My mother, like her mother, swore she’d never marry a farmer.  They met at a Farm Bureau dance, I kid you not.  My mother was eighteen, a freshman in college, a budding musician.  An absolute beauty, my father remarks.  She fell in love with his good looks, too.  At twenty-six, he dated lots of girls, so many that his parents feared he would never marry—and he did, too, after moving back to the farm to run and manage it with his father.  But he found my mom, and to narrate their love story is to commit every cliché in the book.  Let me just say this.  Weather is a part of my mother’s story, whether she wants it to be or not.  It’s either “a good year” or not, depending on two factors: rainfall and temperature.  But it’s a good marriage, I know that much.  Or do I?  Is the gauge always set to our own measurements?

On the night I learned Susie and Cyrus (Joel and Susie’s seven-year-old) had died in a car accident in Jordan, I went for a walk.  I had to walk.  The director of my MFA program, who delivered the news, got in his car and went searching for me.  He found me, I don’t know how he found me, on a side street not far from the school.  I remembered a particular mansion I hadn’t shown Joel on our walks, but when I found it, I couldn’t remember why or what revelation its architecture held for me.  It was just a house, beaten down and weathered.  I got in my director’s car at his prodding.  It was February and cold in Georgia.  Finally.

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            Pray for rain, Al.  My mother to Al Roker on national television. We stood outside NBC’s studio from 4 a.m. until the taping stopped at 9:00 sharp.  There was a drought that summer.  My mother made a sign for me and my siblings to hold on the first morning of our first trip to New York City.  It stretched the width of all four of us, her two boys, two girls, and it commanded Al Roker to pray for rain in Michigan.  Fifteen seconds of fame, but they were full of my mother’s infectious smile, so big her eyes closed.  When she’s upset, her eyes pinch shut and the corners of her mouth raise in the same way, so that sometimes I’m not sure if she’s laughing or crying.  She had a sad childhood, true, but she was given four happy ones with each of her kids.  We shared that with her, she says.

            Some of my mother’s happiest childhood memories are riding her horses with her older brother, Doug, when they were teenagers in 4-H.  They showed horses, won all sorts of ribbons and trophies.  This intrigues me because, hard as I try, I cannot imagine my mother on a horse.  On a stage, okay; on an organ bench, absolutely.  But on top of an animal, with all those heady smells and jerks of the muscle?  And there’s so far to fall.   But then I imagine her riding beside her brother, galloping away from their house, faces upturned in the rain, and I know why I didn’t grow up with horses.  My brothers and sister and I didn’t need them.

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            After the accident, Joel and his youngest son, Darius, moved back to New England, to be closer to his family.  I joined a doctoral program in southern Ohio.  The distance between us is only geographical now, bridged by monthly visits.  We share everything: our grief, our bodies, our writing.  I could say something sentimental about the force of friendship bringing us together, but the truth is, I can’t explain what it means to find love in the wake of tragedy.  Some people judge us.  I didn’t tell my family for a long time, because of this.  I didn’t want to hear it’s too soon, or this is just like you, always trying to save broken men.  But they didn’t say either of those things, just expressed their fears that it might end sadly, and hasn’t he been through enough?

My brother, Mark, did say to me once, before I even knew Joel, “You crave drama in your relationships because you had a happy childhood, and you’re bored.”  But that’s not quite right, either, in the same way that I’m not convinced my grandmother’s attention to weather is a diversion, as my mother believes.  Boredom?  No way.  I think it comes from some unspeakable need to understand change, the one constant in this world, the true finally. 

Pleasant morning in the garden, cool but sunny.   How’s your weather?