by Susan Lobb Porter | Kids, Life |
Holy crap! Today was Memorial Day in the US…and you know what that means…Shopping! Barbecues! White shoes until Labor Day! Flags! Flags! More flags and bunting!!! Because people died and we have to show our respect, right?
Banks closed. Stores open.
WTF??? Well gather ’round, girls an’ boys, ’cause Arty Life has a story to tell you.
Once Thrice upon a time my son was in Iraq.
He was not there for the scenery.
I can say, without a doubt, that I spent all three of his deployments AND the time in between deployments AND the four years after he got out when they could still call him back…I spent all that time dwelling in the various stages of bat-shit crazyland.
That’s right…BAT-SHIT CRAAAAAAAAAZY LAND!
It ain’t easy being a warrior mom. In fact it sucks.
Because war sucks.
On his 21st birthday, FirstBorn told me he felt like he was 40. Said his hair was coming in gray. Well hell, he did some growing up in a way that most of us will NEVER know. But in the end we were lucky. He came home.
But not all of his friends did.
I stopped painting back then, started writing. Writing when life was one-step-at-a-time-make-it-through-another-day-fragile. When every car coming up the lane was cause to stop and hold my breath until it passed our drive.
When I didn’t know if I would ever see my son again.
I wrote. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote.
I wrote my heart. And I kept it close. Shared parts of it with one or two friends.
They read it and gently suggested I ‘talk’ to someone.
Someone who wouldn’t have a clue. Who wouldn’t understand. Who didn’t know what it was like to have people shooting at their kid. Don’t think so.
So I ‘talked’ to my computer. For years.
And in the end, I came home too.
by Susan Lobb Porter | Life, Writing |
The first time I met Mary*** (not her real name) I went home and killed someone.
Well, actually I went home and shoveled horseshit…continued shoveling horseshit because that was what I’d been doing before I met her. Before I drove down the lane and introduced myself to the new neighbor who’d yelled at my son a few minutes earlier and forbidden him to cut across the back end of her property.
On a trail through the woods used by the locals for years.
She was… polite when she first came to the door. Frost old biddy all decked out like June Cleaver, down to the pumps and pearls. Squeaky clean. I, on the other hand, was in my manure pickin’ clothes. Dirty shorts. T-shirt with a stain of green horse slobber where you couldn’t miss it. Black rubber boots and a baseball cap.
I was nice when I introduced myself. The smile was, umm…real. I did not offer to shake hands because I’d come straight from the barn and my hands were not presentable by anyone’s standards. Even mine. So I stood there on her front porch, said hello and welcomed her to the neighborhood. Then I mentioned she’d met my son.
It went downhill from there. She blasted me about trespassers (and those who trespass against them). Forgive us our sins, oh Lord, especially if I said something rude. Which I may have. In fact I’m sure I did…but only towards the end.
We did not get off to a good start.
So I went home and continued shoveling shit. And while I was shoveling, I plotted her murder.
It was a most entertaining hour.
I finished with the horses, fired up the computer and started writing. Fictional revenge was oh so sweet. Mary, in my mind, became a far more colorful character than she could ever hope to be in real life. Thank God for literary bitch slapping. Eventually she was joined by a former sister-in-law. And a former boss. And a chairman of the board.
One by one they replaced Mary on my shit-o-meter. Her character took on aspects of them all, eventually coming into her own.
I worked on the story from time to time. People who came into my life and pissed me off found their way into it. People who came into my life and amused me…same. Murder. Parody. A little bit o’romance. My own private world where I could dictate Who. Did. What.
I was a couple hundred pages into it when something bright and shiny caught my attention. Or maybe it was a rabbit. I dunno. I just put it away one day and went on to other things. Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of finishing it.
And then last night around dusk I walked down the lane to fetch the mail. The box is where the lane meets the county road, about a quarter mile away. A young man drove by in a pickup and stopped to chat. A nice kid, Mary’s grandson. And then she drove up. Mary. She’s lived here over a dozen years now and we’ve never really talked other than polite hellos at the mailbox. But last night we all chatted. Most of it was Mary, admiring her embarrassed grandson. Asking me to admire him too. Which I did.
Then she reached through the car window and took my hand. ‘We had a rough start,” she said, ‘but I’ll never forget what you said to me.”
Oh crap, that was a long time ago. What the hell did I say to her??? She couldn’t have heard me call her a bitch under my breath when I got into my car that day, could she?
She looked at her grandson. Looked at me. “You told me I could walk on your property anytime I wanted to. I never forgot that.”
Damn…was that an apology? I. Think. It. Was.
But what the hell, I’m still killing her off. Cause it’s a good story. And I’m going to finish it one of these days.
