Free Write Friday: Girl Scouts

We met in a Methodist church on a weekday afternoon. Recite the pledge, munch a snack, craft a project. We’d earn badges through field trips, skills, lessons. I was snack helper, clean up helper. We’d rotate through, sit in a circle on the beige carpet. Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold.

We took our sleeping bags to overnight camp, sang songs around the campfire. Kumbaya. I didn’t like the bugs, the forest air was foreign to my sheltered suburban self. I liked the novelty of it though.

I never was good at selling cookies. My dad retired young, couldn’t take them to work like the others. Too many other Girl Scouts in my neighborhood, we had to ration out the doors to knock on. Most people were nice enough to the awkward girl in the green vest but I wasn’t animated enough to make more than a pity sale. My mom, like me, an introvert and not wanting to be too pushy, didn’t help my failing cause. I wanted to be forward, learn the marketing skills, but I never did muster the ability to sell.

I remember traveling with my troop to the Peace Arch on the northern U.S. border, admiring a stylish girl with long braids and a green beret, souvenir pins stuck to her vest. What travels she’s made, what friends she’s met! I started collecting pins that day, not to trade but to keep: document the family road trip to Disneyland, the annual summers in Hawaii, the study abroad in France, the Mekong Delta, the crowded dusty streets of India and beyond.

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Free Write Friday: Pay Phone

We hardly see them anymore, the free standing booth a novelty. A friend’s son once asked, “Mom, why do they say ‘hang up’ the phone?” Well, this is why: the dangling silver cord like a techy serpent, tethered to a bulky handset.

Now we’re all cordless, no need to connect other than with head down, blue screen filtering. Everything is shiny, posed, captured. No hang ups, strings attached, call waiting. All is instant, polished, curated.

I remember anticipating a call at home, phone ringing in the kitchen, my dad answering hello soon after I picked it up in my basement bedroom. “I GOT IT!” reverberating through the house, high pitched preteen voice anxious for privacy.

I remember fumbling with silver coins at the pay phone, flipping through weathered white pages skimming for the right name, pen scratches and coffee stains marking the tissue-like paper.

I remember a friend’s dad’s car phone, brick handset centered between the front seats of their Chevy Suburban. The wonders of a phone call made from a moving vehicle, away from a stationary box without foundation, without directional bounds. It was fancy, magical, very nearly unheard of. I watched in awe as he answered, mid-errand and corresponded, communicated, then moved on about his day.

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Free Write Friday: Swing Set

The swing set in their their backyard was evergreen, angled legs buried among the smooth stones of a playground’s gravel. Their mother would shoo them out the sliding glass doors, the house couldn’t contain two growing boys and their spirited sister.

She’d scamper down the grassy hill, passing the roses, transplants from their previous rambler in another affluent suburb. That house was too small for their growing family but she remembers the room she shared with her baby brother fondly. The tiny dresser with yellowed fabric, decorative flowers and overlapping plaid; just flashes, fragments of memories.

This new house was bigger, each child their own room, a greenbelt bordering their backyard. She liked to explore among the sticker bushes, pretend to make a meal from the salmon berries that lined the creek each spring.

Two swings hung from the top bar of the modest play set and she usually started here, choosing the one on the left if she beat her brother to it. Skinny legs pumped high, leaning back and letting go at the top of the arc; just the right timing to jump far, ever farther, trying to beat her previous sneakers’ impression in the gravel.

Then she’d move on to the face-to-face glider, tiny backed seats allowed swinging with a friend. They’d hold on to chained ropes on either side, leaning back, leaning forward, mirrored and synchronized.

Eventually they’d grow too big, knees touching. Other activities took precedence as outdoor play receded into childhood. Green paint peeled, rust emerged. Too many years neglected in the damp Northwest air.

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Free Write Friday: Rocks

One day, before the cancer resurfaced, before the papery pale skin that transformed her into a childhood memory, she told the young girl that stones with a complete circle were special. She taught her how to search for them along the rocky shore, barnacles and seaweed camouflage carpeting like a mold.

They’d stroll along the Sound, down a woodsy steeped path, down from the musty cabin, faces groundward, searching for the wishing stones. Sometimes a clear white ring signaled upward, demarcated from the the concrete grey base of an oblong rock.

Decades later she teaches her own daughter: look for the one with the ring, the sign of infinity round and round. Hold it in your hand, warm it, keep it. Or return it to the ocean; give it a new life among the rolling waters.

They like to collect the different stones, squat and oblong, granular and smooth. Such varied colors from the surface of the earth. They turn them over in their hands, so different. One small and delicate with a child’s tensile skin; the other spotted, weathered from decades of existence. They each make a wish, the girl tossing into the sea, the woman holding on, relegating her hopes to her pocket.

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Free Write Friday: Couch

He cried when they took the old couch away. It sat on the front lawn unceremoniously as they carried in the new one: grey heathered tweed, low back, firm cushions, stylish, contemporary.

The old couch looked bulky, awkward in comparison. Beige and bought on a whim over a decade before, soon after we were married. We needed a new couch and had money to spare. Two professionals, no children. We stopped at a furniture store on the way to my brother’s house one day and chose it quickly, unresearched. Unusual for a measured, calculated shopper like me. I was anxious to make our new house a home; real furniture seemed imperative and urgent at the time.

But it served us well through two homes, three children. Substantial back cushions held their form all those years. Good building blocks for fashioning forts. The length just right to stretch out for naps, our toes barely brushing the armrest. We’d pull a hand woven blanket over us, cocooning for a winter hibernation or a spring siesta in the waning afternoon sunlight.

I brought my babies home to that couch, Boppy pillow on my lap, tiny infant swaddled in my arms. The cushions held me through the uncertainty, the exhaustion, the stinging pain of an aching postpartum body nursing all hours of the night and day.

We let the kids jump on it; by the time they came around it was already worn, no need to keep up appearances or needlessly coddle the not fragile.

We’d greet friends, old and new. Birthday gatherings, movie nights, holidays with family, interviews with potential nannies. All of them sat, back upright, feet sturdy on the floor or reclined, elbow cocked back, plate full of potluck fare tidbits in hand.

He cried when they took the old couch away. I felt it too, the tug, the wrenching. So much contained in that substance of wood and fabric.

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Free Write Friday: Birthday

When she was a kid the coolest birthday parties were hot tub parties. Skinny seven-year-olds wearing Care Bears swimsuits would pile into the spa, overflowing the water, grinning through their giggles, secrets whispered past wrinkled palms as bubbles rose from the churning jets. Some parents would let them snack in the tub: sticky caramel corn or lollipops. After soaking there’d be cake and ice cream, opening presents and receiving favors dropped in plastic handled bags. 

She didn’t have a hot tub at her house, always admired the girls who did. One year though her mom threw an elaborate birthday party, a carnival theme. Their sloped backyard was transformed, different stations set up for children to explore. Her mom manned the face painting, tiny lions and rainbows inked onto rosy cheeks as she perched on the picnic table bench. Her older brother told fortunes in the green canvas play tent, towel fashioned into a turban as he passed predictions on to the little partygoers. There were balloons and plastic door prizes. With three kids in her family, it was rare to have such an elaborate birthday celebration. All her best friends and girls she wanted to be her friends were there; she was overcome with glee. 

Her mom always made the birthday sheet cake, sprinkles on top, tube frosted lettering: Happy Birthday! This was before Pinterest, long after and decades before handmade was considered worthier, the hipsters’ and modern moms’ claim to superiority. It was the progress and image-obsessed eighties: Hypercolor t-shirts, squared polyester shoulder pads and blue eyeshadow were king. She always, ungratefully, wished she could have a store-bought sheet cake or an ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins; perfectly frosted corners and magenta lettering sprayed on. Her parents were frugal though, and her mom’s cake surely tasted better. Two facts lost on a child who wouldn’t know, until decades later, what was best for her. 

Now, with three children of her own, she bakes tiered birthday cakes, carefully procures themed party favors, plans activities and decor to suit each child, so their memories will be bright. But she’s also exhausted in the stretched way every modern mother is; she’s gained perspective. Maybe every other year will be a big birthday party when they’re young. Sometimes store bought treats, sometimes just one friend over for a special outing. Because she knows: you really only need one outstanding birthday party memory to last a lifetime. 

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