August l999 Diary in Red Hook, Brooklyn

After a summer of unrelenting heat and humidity she wakes up on this day to find it clear and cool. She is sleeping on her Uncle Snavely's reddish velvety couch, the one that has been in the farmhouse where she visits as a child every year she can remember for two weeks. It is here that she feels she belongs. Among the plain people on the Willows Farm on Eshelman Mill Road, Willow Street, Pennsylvania. She learns this as she sleeps upon the couch in her Red Hook home. She needs that couch. That’s why she buys it at the auction where her Uncle Snavely’s collection of old precious family things are sold. The rat holed but lovingly patched feed bags made of linen from the days when each farmer had their own bags to be refilled over and over again with feed. She remembers going with her uncle on the tractor to pick up feed. He rarely says any thing except on occasion as he looks across the cornfields he says, “Look at what God does!” Her two daughters drive a rented truck to take the couch home to Red Hook. It is a hard trip but she is grateful to them for driving. 

 

At home she goes into her garden and spends the day there. She pulls weeds and smells the Concord grapes. She feeds the birds, looks at the gray sky full of the light of the sea and blessedly cool. She breathes and feels glad to be in the first home she has owned alone.

 

She remembers her mother and knows how deeply she loves her. Her mother is dead a year now - May 27, 1998. It puzzles her, the depth of this love, like blood. Not to be questioned. And yet as her mother comes close to death she cannot bear to see her.  Her mother was like a caged bird waiting to die. She isn’t present when her mother dies. She wonders why her mother doesn’t call her. She knows her mother knew she is dying. And yet she knows that her mother loves her, like the forest they walked together through and never talk, like the sky they watch together and the way she could tell her mother what she thought about things - never personal - nothing about the father. Her mother listens to her with interest as if she is learning something. Her mother takes her seriously. Her mother could not protect her and will not acknowledge that he was scary. She tries to forgive them both.   

 

As she is weeding she knows her daughters cannot be around her very long. They love her and they know she loves them but as she looks at the sky in Red Hook she must trust them and wait. She must learn to do this without her heart breaking. Her heart always does break because they are far away and don’t answer her calls. She has never been able get beyond her grief. Her mother said, “I gave you my blessing.  Why do you want more from me?” Her mother said this to her thru a dream after her death. She could never get enough attention. Her daughters could never tolerate her need and couldn’t understand it. They thought they were suppose to do something about it.
 

August 3l, 1999 The Psychiatric Hospital

She comes to the end of her day at the psychiatric hospital where she brings Pinkus Zuckerman playing Beethoven violin concertos to ease herself and to bring beauty to the tormented ones she works with. Today a young man who says he was a soldier in Bosnia (he pulls the hairs out on his legs to make himself feel alive) smashes through a plexiglass window, grabs the pieces and threatens the other quavering patients. He listens to Beethoven and becomes still and says, “Hear - everything that is in the human heart is in this music!”
 

Her heart breaks for him. She again thinks of her daughters, he is their age. She realizes she doesn’t know where they are either one of them.  She must not call them but if anything happened to her like an accident they would want to know where she was.  They do not want to let her know where they are. The grief passes. She will call her friend Gunther - he calls himself the wandering Jew. He will permit her to be filled with sorrow because there is nothing to be done and life is full of grief yes it is. She calls him and he tells her again - his voice full of grace that it is okay there is nothing to be done - one must bear this. And she feels better. She returns to her house - 204 Richards Street - across from the projects and the abandoned sugar factory. She looks at it. The flowers in her yard, purple petunias and orange marigolds have seeded themselves.  There is peace in the gray sky and coolness. She always thinks of her daughters in the garden. Somehow it is about them. Her exquisite granddaughter, little Neda, who walks like a dancer and touches the flowers like they are holy loves flowers too - as she did. Baby Neda picks every flower she can off the stems, squealing with joy at each blossom. It is a memory she will always keep, seeing this child, her daughter’s baby girl with light in her eyes. Her daughter’s birth brings her joy - she gazes at her and feels peaceful - in those infant eyes that live in her heart. Her daughter’s infant eyes are still in her heart as she waits for her to return. Peace in her garden sometimes in her heart and tears. She has always been cursed and blessed to know. She always knows when her daughters are suffering and she feels they are suffering now. But she can do nothing but wait. Gunther says that. He was a war orphan in Germany and had lost both his parents in the camps. He said that there is that suffering and there is nothing to be done about it. She looks at the gray sky full of Autumn now and the golden colors of Red Hooks’ sea. Her heart is like the ocean. 

 

Shirin and Sara went with her to Lancaster when both her parents died. 1998 her mother -1999 her father. They had agreed that her mother should die first because she would not be able to deal with the 25 room house full of furniture. Her father agreed to do that - die first - and to take care of David their autistic son. She herself put David her brother in the special home - New Holland Pa. - Welsh Mountain - a Mennonite home in Amish country. She drove herself from work to put him there after both her parents died. 

 

They took good care of him there and loved him. When he died of a lung embolism in 2006 all of her cousins came to the funeral and Aunt Maude said God has David in his hands. It seems they all loved him, especially cousins Ken and Dorothy. They took him out sometimes - Dorothy said he could have been my brother.