Hundreds crowded the steps and spilled onto the sidewalk, waiting. It was opening day at what was touted as the finest art museum in the Midwest. The Museum of Artwork and Vision, MAV, had been six years in the making; from the first meeting of ideas, to argumentative meetings regarding design, to the ground breaking, to more meetings filled with debate, to the final MAV committee private tour. As opening day visitors paused in front of everything from hand thrown pots to busts to paintings, two children wandered from one room to the next. Their steps led them in an arbitrary tour of things that held little of their interest until they stopped in unison in front of a painting. Small and hung in an obscure spot, it had garnered little attention from most in the crowd. It, however, held the twins with an unaccountable pull, as though they could not move from their spot had they wished. The two understood, in that fuzzy place between mind and heart, that the story behind the painting was one that could change a life. The story had at the very least changed the lives of the ones who lived it, the ones who were in the small painting hung in an unimportant spot in one of the finest museums around.

to be continued . . .

Photo: www.commons.wikimedia.org Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

How it caught his eye, he didn’t know. He bent down and picked it up. It was a misshapen stone about 2 inches in diameter. It was the dark gray of river rock, but on one side silver, red, and blue stripes ran up and down along its surface. He turned it over; but no, it was just the one side where the stripes covered the otherwise dark gray. He put it in his pocket and looked at the sky.

The sun would be setting within the hour, he guessed. The air was already becoming that tempered color of dusk, a subtle dimming of light and warmth. The day’s brightness had gradually left and with it the cheeriness that sunshine brings. He’d been on the river for two hours doing more strolling and thinking than fishing. It was good out here, away from the pressures of committees and expectations and people needing him. Out here it was the way everything should be; slightly rugged and sparkling and colorful. Out here it was real.

The mayflies would be swarming soon. Trout would race toward them, flashing their colorful God-given Joseph coat and splashing in their leap to catch the flies. Then fishing could begin in earnest.

He cast out. It was a good one. He would have a trout or two or more to take home and show off and fry up. There it was! The familiar tug; the fight for life at one end and for food and satisfaction at the other. He pulled and played with the fish until it was close enough to net. With a practiced hand he unhooked his fish. Just as the splash of the trout sprayed him, he heard it.

The leaves of a bush rustle in a variety of ways. A spring breeze only slightly moves leaves in a playful whisper. The wind that stirs before a storm is faster. It’s urgent, a warning. This was neither. It was the sound of someone approaching. But, no. Not someone. The sound was too brash, too heavy.

He spotted it then, the dark brown coat, the swaying posture. The bear looked at him across the river that was suddenly more narrow than a minute before. Snout to the air, it sniffed. There was no way to remove the fish scent that touched his waders and permeated his hands. If he threw the fish to the bear it would be a short time before the bear came closer for more. Slowly he let the fish slip from his hand back to its home in the river.

Fishing was over for the night. He would give the other fisher extra room by his absence. He moved quietly and as quickly as he dared, making his way back to his truck, back to the people who needed him. That was real, too, after all.

Photo: http://www.goodfreephotos.com

Her hands shook a little as she tore open the envelope. She hadn’t expected a letter at all and had only hoped she wouldn’t get a phone call from someone in charge telling her to come and get Chase early. But here it was. And there was his signature.

Dear Grandma,

Thank you for making me go to camp. I’m sorry for that thing I said before I left. Everyone is really nice and I have a couple of guys I hang around with.

At first I was mad and wanted to make trouble and I did. I blamed another kid and we both ended up being talked to. The group leader who talked to us is actually pretty cool. We talk sometimes.

I love everything here. The food is great, especially the lunches. The cook is kind of cute. Don’t tell anyone I said that.

Canteen is fun. Rec is great – I’m awesome. Classes and vespers are really good. Fireside is my favorite.

We drew a target on that one boy’s leg and tried to hit the bull’s eye with spit balls while he was sleeping. He never knew! It was really funny!

I actually read the Bible you sent with me sometimes. I’m going to keep on doing that when I get back. At least I’m going to try.

I know I don’t say it, so I’ll say it now. I love you, Grandma. Thank you for taking care of me.

Your Boy, Chase

She knew her Kaylee would come through. That girl never missed a beat. Homework? Always exact and on time. Bedroom? Neat as a pin. Clothes? Perfectly matched. Sure enough, here was her letter. She ripped open the envelope addressed with hearts and curly cues and began to read.

Dear Mom,

It’s great here! I’ve made a lot of friends. I have to tell you (drumroll) I think I’m in love!  It’s the life guard. He called everyone out of the water and came just to see me on the campgrounds. Can you believe it?! What a sweet thing to do! 🙂

Some of the kids say it’s because I left my swimming buddy without telling anyone. Of course they’re saying that. They’re jealous.

We sing at the top of our voices every single day. It as noisy as gym class, only better. The Dean walks around smiling all the time. Somebody said he might put in earplugs sometimes. That’s just what I heard, though.

I asked the cook for some cookies to pass out in my cabin before we went to bed one night, but before she could give them to me (and I know she would have), my cabin mom came and told me she didn’t want crumbs all over the cabin. Something about chipmunks and what not. So what? Those cute little things would’ve loved a crumb here or there. 🙂

Well, I’ve gotta go. One of the kids got in trouble and another friend got involved . . . oh, who knows. Don’t worry. I wasn’t me!

xx oo xoxo,

Kaylee

PS Don’t believe everything Jessica’s mother tells you.

Pictures: enwikipedia.com

Finally! He opened the letter with a pocket knife. It would be great to hear at last from his son who had been away at camp for a very long week. No one could ask for a better boy than his son. Brown hair, green eyes, a zest for living; oh how he love his boy! His smile was so wide his face hurt as he unfolded the paper and began to read the boyish scrawl.

Dear Dad,

First of all, it wasn’t my fault. Please believe me. Not everyone does. Whew! Glad I got that out of the way.

The food is okay. Breakfast is best, then supper. Me and some of my friends told the cook that lunch could use a little work. I mean it’s only three meals a day. It’s not like science homework, for Pete’s sake. She pressed her lips together and her eye started twitching. I think maybe she needs one of those massages they advertise on t.v.

My favorite part of the day is swimming. The lifeguard seems pretty uptight. It could be from that one girl that they couldn’t find during the buddy check. He should get over it, though. She just wanted to leave before her friend. Like I said, uptight, right?

By the way, I have a mark on my leg that reminds me of the Target sign. My pants cover it up, though, so no worries.

Love, Dixon

His smile had faded with every passing word.

“Honey!” he called to his wife as he hunted for some paper to pen a quick reply.

to be continued. . .

Before we knew what was happening, she had us outside chopping wood. Using an ax was new to all of us except Sam. We had blisters in no time, and started regretting Sam’s turn into the barely visible driveway hidden to all but those who knew it was there. I heard Nigel gasp, and spun around to see Sam’s grandma swinging his ax like a seasoned lumberjack. Who knew the old lady could even pick up one of those things? We turned, zombie-like, to look at the wood pile, and at that moment it dawned on us how it had gotten there. Woa. Sam’s grandma handed the ax back to Nigel and told him it might help if he pulled up his pants.

“Lesson two. Keep private things private so you can get to what needs to be done,” she muttered as she started walking into the cabin.

“It’s chilly,” she called, “Hot cocoa for whoever wants it when you’re done.”

Well we all dropped our axes right then and there and started for the house. She was waiting for us at the screen door.

“When you’re done,” she repeated, pointing to the uncut logs and tools on the ground.

We turned around and spent the rest of the evening chopping. We actually got the hang of it and by the time we were done, we were not just ready for cocoa. We were ready for bed. It was 9:00.

What we had initially thought would be a quick stop for Sam to say hi to his grandma turned into a week. She always came up with a reason we needed to stay one more day. Instead of drinking beer and seeing things our mothers never intended for our young eyes to see, we ended up doing odd jobs around Sam’s grandma’s property; things like turning over dirt for a garden and planting seeds so small we lost half of them who knows where, and learning how to make lemonade with actual lemons, and how to shoot a gun and field dress a deer. Sam’s grandma had us take turns reading Shakespeare and Frost and Thoreau and Lewis to her after dinner while the rest of us listened as we stared into the fire. What school had never done for me, Sam’s grandma did, for it was then that I think I really began to love reading and thinking, both. We fell into bed every night by 9:00 and she woke us up with the prickly side of a broom at dawn. She especially liked whapping Nigel. After a couple of days he began to think it was as funny as she did.

That last night there we sat in the dancing light of logs chopped long before, maybe years before we had arrived. Sam walked over to her and told her spring break would be over in two days and we had to get back home. She reached up on her tiptoes and placed her cheek gently next to his.

“I know. Your mother called and told me.”

We did a double take.

“Grandma, when did you ever have a phone?” Sam asked, looking around.

His grandma motioned to me and led me over to a closet.

“Fred, would you be so kind as to open this door for me?”

I pulled the surprisingly heavy door open, and inside there was a little room, complete with a desk on which sat a cell phone and computer.

After a couple of silent minutes, Trent stuttered, “Wha . . .?”

Our thoughts exactly.

“Lesson ten: change is a fact of life,” she said quietly.

We were quiet the morning we were to leave. I couldn’t smile even when Sam’s grandma laid into Nigel with the broom. It felt like we were going from heaven to purgatory. The week had been filled with lessons like listening to nature clears your thoughts; and one that closely followed it, how are you ever gonna hear God if you’re listening to loud music; and one especially for Nigel, sleeping in makes you stupid; and animals trust people with kind hearts.

Sam’s grandma packed a lunch for us to take back with us and gave each of us a bear hug that nearly took our breath away. Last was Sam, and she hugged him for a long time while they swayed together in the clearing. Then she swatted his backside and he got in the car.

Leaning out the window he said, “Lesson eleven: Listen to your grandma.”

What a road trip: sixty miles and a world away. She smiled and waved as we pulled out of the barely visible driveway hidden to all but those who knew it was there.

Photos: www.goodfreephotos.com

The faint squeak of an old rocking chair caught our collective attention and only then did we see her. Her wrinkled skin reminded me of ruts in a neglected road, but it was soft and the color of honey and glowed like there was a light underneath that we didn’t see. Her not quite five foot stature was slightly stooped, but her step was sure as she rose and lightly stepped off the porch to greet us.

“Grandma,” said our driver, Sam.

“Sam, you rascal,” she replied, hugging him tightly. “And these are your friends.”

“Nigel, Trent, and T-ball.”

She hugged us each, and when she got to me she said, “I don’t know any woman who likes sports quite that much. What’s your given name?”

“Frederick Kellen the third,” I said quietly, my face growing hot.

The others chuckled as they did every time I answered that question which, fortunately for me, wasn’t often anymore.

“A fine name, Fred. I’ll show you all around, but first let’s get refreshed.”

She seemed happier than any eighty-nine year old I’d ever met, not that I’d met many of them.

Just as we were settling around the sparsely furnished cabin to the digest pork sandwiches, home-made sweet potato chips, and sweet tea she’d fed us, Sam’s grandma untied her apron and clapped her hands. We looked up. In the space of time it had taken for us to wander to our chairs and put our feet up; in the short time that we had taken to crack a few jokes and examine the rudely-made furniture; in the time we’d used to watch her fill the kitchen sink from a pump right next to it, she’d cleared the table, washed the dishes, and put everything else away.

“Lesson one: you’re lazy,” she laughed at the verbal dig.

We didn’t know whether to laugh or leave, but Sam didn’t seem disturbed by it, and he was our driver. We were stuck here whether we liked it or not until he decided to go. The road trip had been a group idea, one we’d dreamed up around the table at the school cafeteria, one that had grown from midnight texts and Facebook messages and senior year convictions about how we would live our lives without the restrictions of fathers’ advice or mothers’ apron strings or any other stupid restraints. Sam had always been the one who took our ideas and made them happen, though, and he had taken the lead in finding a route and planning things boys our age should get a taste of; things we needed to know about the world like strip clubs and beer and who knew what else. We were going to be men’s men. Nobody would mess with us by the time we went off to college or wherever it was we ended up. We were ready for it all. Well, maybe not all. We had no idea what to think of Sam’s grandma.

to be continued . . .

“We’re gonna die!” we yelled in unison.

The car was barreling down the mountain road at sixty-five. A spring breeze blew through the rolled-down windows, the radio was turned up with decibels enough to break the sound barrier, and our eyes squinted in the sun’s flashing pre-sunset glare.

It was great, this feeling of freedom; like flying or shouting at the top of a mountain. We laughed as we yelled and every so often the road twisted sharply enough so that we almost believed the top-of-our-lungs mantra we’d adopted on our road trip.

Bottomless drops became tangled montages of green brush that turned into rolling hills. When we reached a mid-point of the road, we slowed and turned into a barely visible driveway hidden to all but those who knew it was there. Brush on every side walled in the long path, barely worn tire tracks led us onward, the spring breeze that had blown our hair and stung our eyes in our race down the mountain now kissed our cheeks.

Ahead and slightly to our left it rested in the arms of the half acre of cleared land. We stopped, cut the engine, and heard something most of us had rarely heard before in our young lives. Complete silence, a deafening presence.

to be continued . . .

Photo: www.wikimedia commons.org 800px-Mountain_Road_in_Corfu-wikimediacommons.org_.jpg Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ;  www.freepublicdomanpictures a-very-steep-country-road-in-the-southern-appalachian-mountains_w725_h546-free-public-domain-pictures.jpg

They’d been hiking for hours. Sweat trickled down his face from the top of his hairline to his neck, a tiny drop detouring to touch the corner of his eye, momentarily blurring his vision. The intensity of the day’s heat had grown from warm and inviting to suffocating.

“How much longer, Dad?” asked his seven year old son.

He looked three paces back to Corbin. The boy was pushing a wisp of his strawberry blond hair out of his eyes. His freckles seemed to multiply under the hot sun.

He took a breath to answer, then paused. He didn’t really know how much longer. He didn’t know because he had insisted they wander from the trail. He had wanted to teach this little guy, the one who was too comfortable with quiet pursuits, that the world was big and he needed to match its wildness with strength of his own. It had been his idea to take this hike into the woods filled with blackened trees and matted leaves and heard but unseen animals so that his boy would learn about manhood even at this young age. A boy had to learn.

How much longer? As a father and as a man he had never been comfortable with acknowledging ignorance, even to himself. When faced with a question, he always had an answer, even if he really didn’t. Never in his adult life had he uttered the words “I don’t know”.

Upon first discovering their situation, they had hiked on and found the opposite edge of the woods. Progress, he had thought. They would certainly pick up a trail without the obstruction of branches to keep them from seeing far. They hadn’t.

“Dad?”

Corbin’s voice was small in the grand expanse.

He stopped, then turned aside to sit on a large rock near the path.

“Let’s sit down for awhile. Pretty out here, isn’t it?”

As their breathing slowed from the huff of hiking to the soft in and out of rest, a sound, nearly imperceptible, quenched the silence.

Corbin’s eyes followed the sound of a muffled whine, and he slowly got up and tiptoed to where he could better observe its source. It was a puppy, old enough to wander, young enough to need its mother. The mother trotted up from behind some bushes that grew crookedly out of the rocky soil. She sat, nudging the puppy, and licked it with her hot tongue.

“She’s kissing him,” Corbin whispered to his father.

The dog picked the puppy up by the scruff of its neck and followed the distant call of her master.

Father and son watched as the dog trotted off. He hesitated, then reached down and hugged his son, kissing the top of his head.

“Let’s follow them,” he said.

Photos: goodfreephotos.com, 1280px-Dog_nose Elucidate CC by 3.0 en.wikipedia.org Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

“I’m just saying that if everyone does what Norton’s is doing,” Julia swallowed, “there won’t be anyone left to pay the utilities.”

It had been nine months since she had first joined the coop, and Julia was sitting in their quarterly coop meeting. Since the coop had started, they had gained three new businesses.They were bound to run into difficulties here and there, she knew; but when she’d received her last utility bill, she’d nearly fainted. Three businesses had followed Norton’s lead and declared that they could not meet their utility payments, leading to larger bills for everyone else.

Caesar O’Swiffy cleared his throat.

“We all know that Norton’s had unexpected legal expenses,”

“From the lawsuit you filed on account of running into a stack of boxes,” thought Julia.

“And the other three had lower profit margins than expected,” he declared. “I suggest you just calm down, Julia. You seem, hmm, rather unregulated in your comments today. It’s bordering on hateful. What do you have against these four businesses anyway?”

Everyone turned toward Julia, and she sank down in her chair.

“Nothing. I have nothing against them. I just don’t want to use my profits to pay for their electric. . .”Julie’s voice faded under Caesar O’Swiffy’s gaze.

“I didn’t realize the depth of your selfishness, Julia,” Mr. O’Swiffy countered.

Members of the coop began mumbling to each other, but Julia didn’t stay to find out what they were saying. She wanted some chocolate, wanted it now, and the candy dishes set out at the beginning of the meeting were empty.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Julia stared at the wall wondering how everything could have gone so wrong. After the meeting three months before, the one from which she had walked out, things had gone from bad to awful.

A series of events including unexpected expenses with the meal programs had led to her finding it necessary to lay off some of her employees. Julia, herself, had taken a cut in pay and could barely meet her mortgage while she juggled bills from the coop. As it was, she was eating breakfast and lunch at work to save on personal grocery expenses, and her cat refused to eat the generic cat food she was now buying and most days had taken to hiding under the couch. 

Her alarm woke her gently, as always, but each morning she had begun to feel alarmed at the sound of it. Allmart employee morale had sunk to an all time low, and although Mr. O’Swiffy had tried to encourage and support Julia by increasing her allotment of Dove Chocolates, Allmart became a place where dissatisfaction was palpable.

There was a knock at the door, and Lexie stepped in quietly.

“Thank you for hiring me back,” she said as she sat some papers down on Julia’s desk.

Julia waved away her thanks.

“I shouldn’t have fired you in the first place. You were – are – one of my best workers. It’s just when Mr. O’Swiffy kept suggesting things about you, I lost my focus.”

Lexie nodded imperceptibly.

Julia looked at Lexie who looked steadily back at her. She opened the store account book and threw up her hands.

“Look at this! I don’t even know where to start. I feel like I don’t know anything about running a business anymore! And, and I’m losing my self-respect,” she finished softly.

Julia jumped up, bumping her knee on her drawer.

“This is where the trouble started,” Julia mumbled as she caught sight of a Dove caramel milk chocolate just inside the barely opened drawer. “Mr. O’Swiffy offered chocolate provided by the coop . . .”

“I miss your cookies,” interrupted Lexie.

Julia sat back down in her chair, the cushioned desk chair, the one where she belonged as owner of Allmart.

“Maybe I need to withdraw membership from the coop.”

Lexie looked hopeful.

“It was such a good idea, though. I hate the thought of losing those connections.”

“Must they be lost if you aren’t in the coop?” Lexie answered, raising her eyebrows.

“Maybe if we hired a different accountant, one who sticks to accounting,” Julia pondered softly, reaching for her phone, “though I do love it when Mr. O’Swiffy brings me chocolate.”

As she picked it up, something new dawned on Julia; or maybe she had known it all along. She would always love chocolate with a love bordering on desperation. There would be days when chocolate would be just the thing to carry her through until she got home to the soft cuddles of her cat (although at this point it would take at least a month of coaxing to get it back to its former self). But as wonderful, alluring, and oh so amazing as chocolate was, there was something it wasn’t. Necessary. And on those days when Julia could almost believe it was, it was not necessary for someone else to give it to her. She would find a way or make one to get it herself.