Genny
“Why is someone sweeping the rugs upstairs? It’s still dark out! You couldn’t see well enough to run the sweeper in the dark, or not to do a good job of it, anyway.” She felt ungrateful as soon as she thought it, because whoever was doing it, if someone were doing it, was doing her a favor. She didn’t care too much how dusty things got up there, but she had to keep up appearances and lugging that old Electrolux up the stairs wasn’t her idea of a good time. The sound rose and fell, and Genny concentrated, screwed her eyes tightly shut, and listened to hear if the sweeper and the person running the sweeper were making progress down the hall. By doing this she realized that she was awake, and that she had either been dreaming or she had heard the wind and thought it was the vacuum cleaner. She couldn’t always tell when she was awake or asleep, or what she was hearing or seeing too clearly (or more frequently and more troubling, thinking), but the refrigerator had kicked on so she was going with awake. “Awake, and no one is upstairs vacuuming, and it’s windy.” The mantle clock was ticking away, and if that could go on ticking for another day, well, then, maybe she could, too.
She lay still under the heavy blankets and breathed slowly and deliberately in and out through her nose three times and then exhaled through her mouth to see if she could see her breath. She couldn’t, but it was still pretty dark. “Maybe I’ll get to sleep in bed in a few weeks,” she thought hopefully. Heat was expensive, so she had shut all the hot air floor registers on the second floor, had wrapped old encyclopedias and atlases in towels and pillowcases to cover them, and had shut the door to the stairwell leading upstairs. She couldn’t afford to heat the upstairs, too, the downstairs was expensive enough. When she was a little girl she’d slept in a cold room with frost on the nails that had come through the roof above her head, and she’d had to break the ice on the water in a pail to cook in the mornings. Of course she’d also had a sister in bed with her to help keep warm and to help her cook, and the intervening six decades with creature comforts had undoubtedly softened her. “Oh, well, add that to the list of things that I'm not as much as I used to be: tough.”
She lay motionless for a while, listening to the clock tick and the wind blow and the fridge run, feeling the heft of the mound of blankets pressing on her chest. It was time to get up. She wanted some tea and she had to see about the pressure on her bladder. Genny started the laborious process of getting up from the chair by scooching her bottom down a little to the left, then to the right, back and forth, moving down the naugahyde. After a pause, she rolled the mass of covers off her chest and torso, at an angle, creating an escape route. She wasn’t strong enough to pull the lever on the old recliner to bring in the foot rest, especially on the cold mornings when the limbs – and the extremities even further out – needed extra urging and attention, so she just left the recliner in a prone position. “Just like I’m gonna be all day if I don’t get moving,” she thought.
Bottom down, blankets off, arm of the chair uncovered so she could push herself up, carefully so as to avoid falling, and on the fourth try she put her right leg on the floor. It took a good ten minutes of starting and stopping, every winter morning, to get out of the recliner that had become her bed. It was completely undignified, but no one was there to see it so it really didn’t matter, and she didn’t think of it as being diminishing. If she ever fell, well, then someone would likely see the result, and that wouldn’t do anyone any good. They’d have great reason to get her out of the house then, for sure. Gotta be careful. Once she was standing she figured the new day counted, so she said a quick prayer of thanks to St Mary and John the Baptist for living to see another morning, then after a pause she said out loud in English that it would be okay if she hadn’t, but maybe they knew best.
She took her terry cloth housecoat from the arm of the sofa, which she could reach while holding on to the recliner, pulled it on, tied it closed, and shuffled into the cold kitchen without turning on any lights. Electricity wasn’t free, and besides, if the boys driving out to the County Highway Department saw lights on at this hour they’d wonder what in the world she was doing. Maybe they’d wonder if she was making out okay. One might maybe stop in to check on her, thinking she’d fallen at dinner time and hadn’t been able to turn out the light. Maybe one would wonder if she’d have zucchini bread made and coffee on, and stop in under the pretense of checking in on her. In any scenario, she’d have to put on coffee and make a good show of being in control of things. Or worse, they might just call Louie and tell him she was up at this hour. No, she’d wait the twenty minutes or so for the dawn and get all the free light she needed, without the scrutiny. There was enough of that in Pine Grove without inviting any more. In the indistinct grey she proceeded slowly but confidently, muscle memory and habit working so her mind could pursue other things.
Now standing in the cold kitchen, she balanced herself against the sink and said her Morning Offering. One hand over the other, she moved to the front of the stove while saying a quick prayer to Lou, or for Lou, she corrected herself. She missed him, every morning and every meal. She prayed for her daughter – Genny missed her, too – and for good weather for farming, and to St. Vincent for the poor.
In the growing grey light in the kitchen she took the solitary clean white cup with the tea-stained interior from the drain board, filled it at the tap, and emptied it into the kettle where it sat on the stove. She could barely lift the kettle from the stove to the sink, in the mornings at least, and anyway it took more heat to boil two cups than one cup. She took the used teabag from its resting place in the jar lid on the back of the stove and dropped it into the bottom of the cup. While the electric ring popped to life and began to glow orange with heat, she returned to her prayers to complete the Angelus (unsure of the time but thinking there was nothing really magic about six, noon and six in any event) and the Memorare, one of her favorites, with its beautiful old verse and baroque syntax. She then paused, listening for the bubbling of the kettle, the cover over the spout that would whistle being long gone, and when it was ready she carefully lifted it to fill her cup, balancing herself with her left hand on the towel rack. She'd made her morning tea.
She used to shear sheep and deliver them in the cold barn with exposed arms, she used to hang bushels and pounds of wet clothes onto the clothesline, she used to stand for consecutive hours behind the wheel of a tractor pulling a disker in ruler-straight rows, she used to string fence around their property, she used to do some of those things after being up all night dancing with Lou if a band had come through, and here she had to take hold onto the towel rack of the stove to keep from toppling over making tea. “You’re getting soft,” she thought, and then laughed at herself. “You’re getting old, is what you’re getting,” she said, and added “'Have already got.'”
She returned to her prayers. She reeled through her Notre Pères, saying one each for the Pope, the Bishop (who she prayed knew what he was doing but was not at all convinced), and for the new pastor at St. Anne’s (though this might also fall under “praying that the Bishop knows what he is doing”), and for the President, and for the soul in purgatory closest to heaven. Some days she prayed for the ones furthest away, figuring they could use a boost, but this morning she thought she’d go for some immediate good.
The first week in March was still too early to do much in the way of gardening, but she had to do something visible outside so that folks would know she was good for another season. “Of all the dumb reasons to put in a garden, to keep other people from worrying seems nearly at the top,” she thought. It was a lot of work to contribute to the greater peace of mind of Pine Grove, but she would do it. There wasn’t much doubt that the town could use greater peace of mind.
The tired teabag, in a slow, graceful, feeble unfurling, darkened and flavored the mug of boiling water. Out of habit Genny had reached over and snapped on the radio, listening for the farm report and weather. Crop prices and livestock futures didn’t really matter much to her anymore, but how did you stop doing something you’d done for years, especially if there was nothing to take its place? She’d read something about “empty ritual,” and the expression struck her as odd, and maybe a little offensive. Who was to determine the carrying capacity of another’s rituals? Her rituals weren’t empty. She liked them, even if their original meaning or use has long since passed. Maybe she even needed them.
The garden was a ritual for Genny, and brought comfort to her life - she bad mouthed it around others, but it brought her a sense of the cadence of passing time, and that comforted her. And it brought peace of mind to her neighbors and anyone who should happen to drive by. And beauty to them, too, because once she got it in she was tenacious and keeping it up. Comfort and beauty. And zucchini, God knows. And weren’t comfort and beauty and zucchini meaningful? Of course they were. Did the ritual have to be weighted with county-wide import for it not to be empty? What about pleasure, too? She really loved that garden, and watching the miracle that had sustained her and Lou and their family and their ancestors and their children, writ small, all under her care, certainly brought her pleasure.
“That’s it, then. Pleasure plus comfort plus beauty plus zucchini equals meaning. 'Empty ritual', whoever thought of such a thing?” Happier, she washed her empty teacup, that she didn’t remember draining, and went about making toast. She had to eat before heading into town or she’d pass out at church and there would be more talk about getting her out of her house.
Church: that was another ritual that she loved, but she didn’t ponder more on that right now. Reaching some conclusion about her garden was a good enough start to the day.
Posted by Bren in SoCal at 3/29/2010 12:22:00 AM
“Why is someone sweeping the rugs upstairs? It’s still dark out! You couldn’t see well enough to run the sweeper in the dark, or not to do a good job of it, anyway.” She felt ungrateful as soon as she thought it, because whoever was doing it, if someone were doing it, was doing her a favor. She didn’t care too much how dusty things got up there, but she had to keep up appearances and lugging that old Electrolux up the stairs wasn’t her idea of a good time. The sound rose and fell, and Genny concentrated, screwed her eyes tightly shut, and listened to hear if the sweeper and the person running the sweeper were making progress down the hall. By doing this she realized that she was awake, and that she had either been dreaming or she had heard the wind and thought it was the vacuum cleaner. She couldn’t always tell when she was awake or asleep, or what she was hearing or seeing too clearly (or more frequently and more troubling, thinking), but the refrigerator had kicked on so she was going with awake. “Awake, and no one is upstairs vacuuming, and it’s windy.” The mantle clock was ticking away, and if that could go on ticking for another day, well, then, maybe she could, too.
She lay still under the heavy blankets and breathed slowly and deliberately in and out through her nose three times and then exhaled through her mouth to see if she could see her breath. She couldn’t, but it was still pretty dark. “Maybe I’ll get to sleep in bed in a few weeks,” she thought hopefully. Heat was expensive, so she had shut all the hot air floor registers on the second floor, had wrapped old encyclopedias and atlases in towels and pillowcases to cover them, and had shut the door to the stairwell leading upstairs. She couldn’t afford to heat the upstairs, too, the downstairs was expensive enough. When she was a little girl she’d slept in a cold room with frost on the nails that had come through the roof above her head, and she’d had to break the ice on the water in a pail to cook in the mornings. Of course she’d also had a sister in bed with her to help keep warm and to help her cook, and the intervening six decades with creature comforts had undoubtedly softened her. “Oh, well, add that to the list of things that I'm not as much as I used to be: tough.”
She lay motionless for a while, listening to the clock tick and the wind blow and the fridge run, feeling the heft of the mound of blankets pressing on her chest. It was time to get up. She wanted some tea and she had to see about the pressure on her bladder. Genny started the laborious process of getting up from the chair by scooching her bottom down a little to the left, then to the right, back and forth, moving down the naugahyde. After a pause, she rolled the mass of covers off her chest and torso, at an angle, creating an escape route. She wasn’t strong enough to pull the lever on the old recliner to bring in the foot rest, especially on the cold mornings when the limbs – and the extremities even further out – needed extra urging and attention, so she just left the recliner in a prone position. “Just like I’m gonna be all day if I don’t get moving,” she thought.
Bottom down, blankets off, arm of the chair uncovered so she could push herself up, carefully so as to avoid falling, and on the fourth try she put her right leg on the floor. It took a good ten minutes of starting and stopping, every winter morning, to get out of the recliner that had become her bed. It was completely undignified, but no one was there to see it so it really didn’t matter, and she didn’t think of it as being diminishing. If she ever fell, well, then someone would likely see the result, and that wouldn’t do anyone any good. They’d have great reason to get her out of the house then, for sure. Gotta be careful. Once she was standing she figured the new day counted, so she said a quick prayer of thanks to St Mary and John the Baptist for living to see another morning, then after a pause she said out loud in English that it would be okay if she hadn’t, but maybe they knew best.
She took her terry cloth housecoat from the arm of the sofa, which she could reach while holding on to the recliner, pulled it on, tied it closed, and shuffled into the cold kitchen without turning on any lights. Electricity wasn’t free, and besides, if the boys driving out to the County Highway Department saw lights on at this hour they’d wonder what in the world she was doing. Maybe they’d wonder if she was making out okay. One might maybe stop in to check on her, thinking she’d fallen at dinner time and hadn’t been able to turn out the light. Maybe one would wonder if she’d have zucchini bread made and coffee on, and stop in under the pretense of checking in on her. In any scenario, she’d have to put on coffee and make a good show of being in control of things. Or worse, they might just call Louie and tell him she was up at this hour. No, she’d wait the twenty minutes or so for the dawn and get all the free light she needed, without the scrutiny. There was enough of that in Pine Grove without inviting any more. In the indistinct grey she proceeded slowly but confidently, muscle memory and habit working so her mind could pursue other things.
Now standing in the cold kitchen, she balanced herself against the sink and said her Morning Offering. One hand over the other, she moved to the front of the stove while saying a quick prayer to Lou, or for Lou, she corrected herself. She missed him, every morning and every meal. She prayed for her daughter – Genny missed her, too – and for good weather for farming, and to St. Vincent for the poor.
In the growing grey light in the kitchen she took the solitary clean white cup with the tea-stained interior from the drain board, filled it at the tap, and emptied it into the kettle where it sat on the stove. She could barely lift the kettle from the stove to the sink, in the mornings at least, and anyway it took more heat to boil two cups than one cup. She took the used teabag from its resting place in the jar lid on the back of the stove and dropped it into the bottom of the cup. While the electric ring popped to life and began to glow orange with heat, she returned to her prayers to complete the Angelus (unsure of the time but thinking there was nothing really magic about six, noon and six in any event) and the Memorare, one of her favorites, with its beautiful old verse and baroque syntax. She then paused, listening for the bubbling of the kettle, the cover over the spout that would whistle being long gone, and when it was ready she carefully lifted it to fill her cup, balancing herself with her left hand on the towel rack. She'd made her morning tea.
She used to shear sheep and deliver them in the cold barn with exposed arms, she used to hang bushels and pounds of wet clothes onto the clothesline, she used to stand for consecutive hours behind the wheel of a tractor pulling a disker in ruler-straight rows, she used to string fence around their property, she used to do some of those things after being up all night dancing with Lou if a band had come through, and here she had to take hold onto the towel rack of the stove to keep from toppling over making tea. “You’re getting soft,” she thought, and then laughed at herself. “You’re getting old, is what you’re getting,” she said, and added “'Have already got.'”
She returned to her prayers. She reeled through her Notre Pères, saying one each for the Pope, the Bishop (who she prayed knew what he was doing but was not at all convinced), and for the new pastor at St. Anne’s (though this might also fall under “praying that the Bishop knows what he is doing”), and for the President, and for the soul in purgatory closest to heaven. Some days she prayed for the ones furthest away, figuring they could use a boost, but this morning she thought she’d go for some immediate good.
The first week in March was still too early to do much in the way of gardening, but she had to do something visible outside so that folks would know she was good for another season. “Of all the dumb reasons to put in a garden, to keep other people from worrying seems nearly at the top,” she thought. It was a lot of work to contribute to the greater peace of mind of Pine Grove, but she would do it. There wasn’t much doubt that the town could use greater peace of mind.
The tired teabag, in a slow, graceful, feeble unfurling, darkened and flavored the mug of boiling water. Out of habit Genny had reached over and snapped on the radio, listening for the farm report and weather. Crop prices and livestock futures didn’t really matter much to her anymore, but how did you stop doing something you’d done for years, especially if there was nothing to take its place? She’d read something about “empty ritual,” and the expression struck her as odd, and maybe a little offensive. Who was to determine the carrying capacity of another’s rituals? Her rituals weren’t empty. She liked them, even if their original meaning or use has long since passed. Maybe she even needed them.
The garden was a ritual for Genny, and brought comfort to her life - she bad mouthed it around others, but it brought her a sense of the cadence of passing time, and that comforted her. And it brought peace of mind to her neighbors and anyone who should happen to drive by. And beauty to them, too, because once she got it in she was tenacious and keeping it up. Comfort and beauty. And zucchini, God knows. And weren’t comfort and beauty and zucchini meaningful? Of course they were. Did the ritual have to be weighted with county-wide import for it not to be empty? What about pleasure, too? She really loved that garden, and watching the miracle that had sustained her and Lou and their family and their ancestors and their children, writ small, all under her care, certainly brought her pleasure.
“That’s it, then. Pleasure plus comfort plus beauty plus zucchini equals meaning. 'Empty ritual', whoever thought of such a thing?” Happier, she washed her empty teacup, that she didn’t remember draining, and went about making toast. She had to eat before heading into town or she’d pass out at church and there would be more talk about getting her out of her house.
Church: that was another ritual that she loved, but she didn’t ponder more on that right now. Reaching some conclusion about her garden was a good enough start to the day.
Posted by Bren in SoCal at 3/29/2010 12:22:00 AM
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