The Door Girl, Part 17

Days that should have been filled with mediocrity never were-and honestly, I think I liked it that way. I didn't know any other way.

Aunt Cassie let us do things none of the other adults did. Probably because she was busy smoking pot all day and grieving the loss of her beloved.

Regardless, my comrades and I slept in sleeping bags in the back of her station wagon. We never had to check in from morning until the streetlights came on at night. We caught frogs. We had impromptu Halloween parties. In a way, my life was magical.

One day, and now, I can laugh at it, Aunt Cassie picked me up from school with my mattress strapped to the top of the car and asked me where my 13-year old self would like to live. She didn't have any money so she had to move in with my grandma (they didn't have room for me).

So I said, "Lucy." Just as casually as I would answer "Fries," if you asked me what I wanted at McDonald's. I was used to this shit by now. Lucy was my friend at school and apparently her mother had no problem with my mattress being dropped off at their house, because I never heard a word about it.

So, there I was at Lucy's without ever having said goodbye to my trailer park family. "People come, people go, " my mother would always say, so I never got my panties in a bunch.

That was the second time it was engrained in to me that people were transient. They came, they went. And this time, it was time for me to go.

Chalk Drawings....

Weekly Schedule

Monday: Beach Day

Tuesday: Library Day

Wednesday: Splash Pad/Park

Thursday: Dollar Theater Day

Friday: Farmer’s Market

Summer Sanity Plan/Schedules

Summer Schedule

9:00	Breakfast
9:30	Screen time
10:15	Chore  Chart
11:15	2 pages in summer packet
12:00	Lunch
11:30	Play Outside/ Fun Activity
12:30	Quiet Time
1:30	Screen Time
2:30	Play Outside/Fun Activity
4:00	Help mom clean up
5:00	Dinner
6:00	Play Outside/Fun Activity
7:00	Bath Time
7:30	Book Time
8:00	Bed Time

The Tragedy and Goodness of the Wind

There is a tree that stands alone in a field of wheatgrass. The wind loves to play with it; it dances and drifts and never takes for harm what is meant for good. Many might use the verb "ravaged" the tree or "tossed," but I prefer "played with," because nothing from nature's goodness is meant for our harm.

The wind, this life, it plays with us until we learn to sway with it and let it sweep us under in a gentle tumble. There is no breaking of twigs, only the game of life gently teaching us our lessons in whispers. They were never meant to destroy us.

Today, I sway. There was a day I allowed circumstance to render me lifeless.

But now, this wind, this tragedy, I humbly bow and accept that I am but a student kneeling at my master's feet.

Inhale the wind. Let it do with you what it will. And then exhale...joy, deliverance and purity of mind.

Let me tell you a secret...

I'll teach you the magic in the soul. I will let you eat the forbidden fruit. 

But there is a reason you were not meant to eat from that tree. You have to suffer to make this life worth anything. Knife-cutting suffering. Wake-up-in-the-middle-of-your-sleep-crying suffering. Because then, my darling, you will know what joy is. And how it smells and what it tastes like...what it feels like to know joy. It's all a trade-off.

Did I choose to suffer? Perhaps subconsciously? I like to think that I did. That I had the courage to take the fruit from the tree and to know that there is life on the other side of the Garden of Eden.

It took me a long time to understand that. That to suffer truly is joy in the end. It's true, but you don't know that when you are just trying to make it to the other side...to the place where it doesn't hurt.

And then your world opens up and you remember...

You are alive.

The Door Girl, Part 16

When mother and I lived in the townhouse, we had a neighbor named Clifton.  He had a badass mullet and a tattoo of some kind of a falcon across his nipples.  He never wore a shirt and he always had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.  He was one of those people that bounces when they walk because they think it makes them look threatening.  It’s like they’re saying, “Fuck with me and I’ll bounce your ass right out of town just like I bounce across this street to buy my cigarettes.”  Every bounce is a threat.  And with hair jumping around like that and flying nipples, no one was going to mess with him.  Except for maybe my mother.

For some reason, I was drawn to him. He was always asking me questions about myself and my mom. I interpreted being nosey as actually giving a shit.  One day, he was giving me the third degree about my mother.  “Does she do drugs?” he asked.

“I don’t know.  I think so,” I mumbled.

“How much? Does she do them everyday?”

“Probably,” I answered.  As the words were escaping, I didn’t know whether or not they were true, but I knew that I shouldn’t be having this conversation with Wing-nippled Falcon Bouncing Man. 

After a Say No to Drugs rally at school, I had asked my mom if she had ever done drugs and to my astonishment, she said yes.  I remember burying my head in to my pillow and crying.  We had just been told how damaging drugs are and here was my own mother saying that she had smoked pot with my aunt.

So when Clifton was questioning me about my mother, the words spilled out of my mouth.  I suppose in the deepest part of me, I wanted to confide in someone—to have someone make sense of why my mom would do something that was so bad for her.  But Clifton was not that someone.

Next thing I knew, my mother came flying in to my room barking, “Why the hell would you tell the neighbors that I do drugs?  Junie, why the hell would you say something like that?”

“Because you said you did,” I stammered out looking like a deer in headlights.

“I said I TRIED it!” she screamed.

Without hesitation, she tore a sheet out of a notebook she kept for making grocery lists.  With the skill of an artist, she drew an 8 x 10 sized penis.  Then she grabbed her scotch tape and secured that picture to the kitchen window so that it was facing Clifton’s set of stairs. 

Later that night, Clifton said with all the coolness of John Wayne, “Did’ya see that picture of a penis your mom drew?”  I looked at the window.

“Yeah,” I said, heat burning my cheeks and my stomach swelling up with shame.

“Real fuckin’ nice,” he managed to say with a cigarette hanging between his lips, the falcon staring at me all the while.