The Furious Spinner

(My sister Kathleen has always been the photographer in my family. She was fascinated with my camera, so she took a lot of the photos below. She would be disappointed if I didn't post a photo of my parents' cat, Geena (who bit my mother remember), so you will see the cat, too. I suppose the cat has something to do with the narrative, peripherally. No, I don't dislike cats in general; I dislike cats who bite my mother.)

Tuesday

My sister Kathleen came the day after we arrived. The four of us sat at the tiny kitchen table eating and talking. Mario stayed mostly upstairs, sleeping or resting. This visit feels different from any of the visits I’ve had here since I left in 1980. Usually I feel punched. One time I curled up on the couch and didn’t get up for three days. Another time I thought Mario and I might breakup; another time I felt like I would break apart. Six years ago when I visited I swore it would be the last time.

I’m not sure what happened in the past when I come home. Was it a geography thing? My parents are certainly not evil or bad people. My sisters are not evil or bad people. I am not an evil or bad person. There are no huge explosions when I’m home. No name-calling fights. Nothing like that. Is it that I take up space? I always have. When I try not to take up space, I take up more. Does that get annoying?

I don’t know. Or maybe I do know but right this second I am hot and tired and I can’t think of the words to articulate what used to happen when I went home. Last visit, as I’ve mentioned in other posts, I felt that I knew with absolute certainty that my parents did not like me. I felt as though they wanted to diminish me and put me in "my place." I felt as though they wanted me to be different from who I am.

And all along, I realized later, I wanted them to be different from who they are, too.

Six years later, I am older. They are older. The world is so different from what it was six years ago. None of us had any idea that the world could change so drastically. We are no longer interested, perhaps, on what separated us; now we know what we share and what we believe to be true about the world: or what should be true.

So we sat at that kitchen table and ate and talked and laughed. I didn’t take anything anyone said personally. For instance, my mother looked at some soup I made and she said it looked disgusting and ugly. Six years ago that would have hurt my feelings. This time I laughed. My sister Kathleen, Mario, and I drove to Ann Arbor and shopped at Whole Foods. Mario was still shaky, still sick, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Kathleen and I walked around the store in a daze. Finally we landed at the bakery. We stood in front of the confections display for a long time. In my family we are not gourmets. We don’t eat a lot, but we eat often, and we can talk about food for just about ever. Or we can just stare at it. Kathleen and I stared at the food. I didn’t get anything because every goodie had gluten flour and sugar. I saw a big cinnamon roll that looked delicious. I thought my parents might like it, so I got it. Then Kathleen and I went and stared at another food display. Eventually Mario scooped us up, and we went home. Once there, Mario went right up to bed.

I gave my parents the cinnamon roll. My parents think I eat like a freak. They’ve never said that. Well, actually, my mother may have said that. But they rarely even want to try the food I make, and they never offer to make me anything. I don’t try to force my food on them and vice versa. Getting them this cinnamon roll was a nice gesture on my part—although I’d forgotten that earlier in the day I’d gotten them long johns from Marv’s Bakery in Brighton.

Let’s pause here for a Marv break:

When I was a kid, my dad and I went to Marv’s Bakery almost every Sunday after 6:00 a.m. mass. We always got long johns with white cream filling. Maybe some donuts, too. I can’t remember. I only remember the long johns because I loved them. We’d take the white bag of goodies to my grandmother’s house. (Do you think my father let me have a bite of the roll to help tide me over until breakfast? I was not good at fasting for communion. I often ended up throwing up in the bushes sometime during mass.) Once we got to Grandma’s house, she made this spectacular breakfast. (I know you’ve heard this story before but that’s the way it goes...) Afterwards my grandma, grandpa, and father would sit around drinking coffee and reading the paper. Sometimes I’d go out and feed the chickens or climb up onto the fence of the paddock where the stallion lived and watch him pace.

And I always ate one of those long johns. Tuesday morning, Mario and I drove down Grand River to Marv’s Bakery. The road was bumpy and terrible, like old times. I looked for the old bar where I used to go dancing and get drunk when I was eighteen. The Crossroads. And I looked for the little subdivision where I lived in a house with my boyfriend’s uncle who was accused of killing his wife. I didn’t see either place. Didn’t matter. But there was Marv’s. I didn’t remember the mural of the two bakers out front, but the building looked the same. Inside looked the same. Long and narrow with displays of baked goods in an L-shape. I ordered the long johns and asked if it was the same owner from when I was a kid. She said the same man had owned it for 35 or 40 years. (Probably 40-something years actually.) I took the white bag of long johns and brought it back home to my parents. I bought a long john for me, but I didn’t eat it.

I felt buoyed going to Marv’s. Nothing looked the same in my home town. It was always so jarring to come home because my body remembered it as it was but not quite. I remembered my wonderful small town without the sprawl of ugly box stores up and down and all around it. It was a quiet small town with a Mill Pond and two drugstores a couple blocks from one another. And a library in a red brick building. And a graveyard right next to the Mill Pond where we looked for ghosts when we were one age and we went to make-out when we were another age. I grew up in a small town where half the people in town at least had grown up with my parents and who still knew my mother as one of the Kelly girls. I lived in a small town with lakes all around it, and in the summer we had to tolerate the tourists along with the mosquitoes. I grew up in a small town where we looked forward to the 4th of July parade and the carnival that came to town then. I grew up in a town with one hotel right in town, the Pink Hotel. I walked a little faster when I went by it on the sidewalk. When I was a teenager one of my uncles hung himself there and my father had to go identify him. I grew up in a small town where my father took me to the post office to get my social security card when I was very young. It was a big deal. Probably afterward we went to the lumber yard a block or two away from it. Or maybe to the Dime Store to pick out some candy from the open bins. When I had a dentist appointment after school, the bus would drop me downtown and I would walk to the dentist office just off Main Street. Afterward, I’d walk another block over to the library where I’d sit upstairs looking at history books while I waited for one of my parents to pick me up.

I loved my town. I never wanted to live anywhere else when I was a girl. My town was in the fastest growing county in the United States when I was growing up. During the 27 years that I have been away from Michigan, development has obliterated my town. I no longer recognize it. I used to walk or drive down Grand River and go by the building where my parents met when it was a restaurant. My father was the dishwasher, my mother a waitress, and my grandmother was the baker. Now the building isn’t there—or else it’s been remodeled so much that I no longer know it.

I could tell you stories about most of the places in town, except the buildings are no longer there. So many have been replaced by the faux buildings, quick and dirty buildings designed to house chain stores, buildings without vision, buildings with fake architecture. Monoarchitecture. It’s always jarring to my body and spirit to come home and see it the way it is now. Mario and I tried to think of a word to describe it. A constant state of vertigo? Or maybe I develop a kind of Jean Sartre nausea each time I go into my home town now. It’s like being in two worlds at once, only the most-present world ain’t got no soul. If I had never moved so far away, perhaps the changes would make sense, perhaps I would be able to go with the constant shapeshifting...

As it was, I was glad to see Marv’s Bakery was still there and it hadn’t changed that much.

I bet you’ve forgotten about the big cinnamon roll at this point. My parents went on and on about how big it was and how were they going to eat it, and I laughed and laughed, and soon it was a big joke about this monstrous cinnamon roll. Six years ago it would have hurt my feelings—I would have thought they didn’t appreciate me, didn’t like me, and on and on. Now it was just funny. I told them to shut up and eat the damn thing. After they finished it, they said it really wasn’t big enough. Why hadn’t I brought more? You know how family gatherings can be. A little thing can unravel the day or it can become the joke of the day. We had our joke.

This visit was one of my better visits with my parents. We always have good visits when I see them in Arizona or when they’ve come out to the Pacific Northwest. The visits seem to go better with only one or two daughters around. If there’s four or five of us, it’s a little dicier. Maybe we all unconsciously compete or fall back into destructive childhood behaviors. Who knows? This time, I just enjoyed their company.

My mother didn’t talk a lot, but I saw flashes of her sense of humor. They have a cat that they adore. My mother likes that cat better than she likes her kids. The cat bit my mother the day before we arrived, so I was not feeling very kindly toward it. It’s not a friendly cat. I asked Mario to stay away from her because I did not want to contend with him getting bitten, and I stayed away from her for the most part. We barely saw her. When we did, she looked like she was about to jump out of her skin. One night I said to my mother, “Why is your cat so unrelaxed?” She said, “Because she’s part of the family.” I thought my mother hadn’t heard me and that she was answering some other question she thought she’d heard. “No, Mom, why is your cat so unrelaxed.” She looked at me and said, “Because she’s part of the family.” Oh. I get it Mom. I laughed. One morning we were talking about the fires in California. We hadn’t realized the seriousness of them until we saw that 1,600 homes had burned. I was leaning on the table with my elbows resting on the Detroit Free Press. Jokingly I said, “This is a big deal. I can’t look it up on the internet. How do you people live like this? How do you find out anything!” My mother tapped one finger on the paper. “Here,” she said. “Oh yeah,” I said, and I picked up the paper.

One day my sister, Dad, and I took a walk down the two lanes. There’s only one lane now and it’s a private road, but we walked down it anyway.




(Kathleen & me. Dad took the pic.)


(Dad & me. Photo by Kathleen Antieau.)


(Lloyd Antieau. Photo by Kathleen Antieau.)


(Dad & me walking down the lane. Photo by Kathleen Antieau.)

When I was a girl, I spent hours, days, weeks of my life on the land across the road from our house. I took the long trek down the lanes to the Huron River and played up on the bluff amongst the trees, usually by myself.



It was good to walk there again. It’s owned by the area park system, so I’m hoping it’ll never get developed. Nowadays, the sound of the traffic on the highway is an omnipresent noise. When I was a girl, I only heard the freeway if the wind shifted a certain way and then it was a muffled noise, the sound of ocean waves. The songs of birds and the wind through the trees was the music I heard when I was a girl.


(Photo by Kathleen Antieau.)

Does it all sound too idyllic? Do I sound too nostalgic? I believe that each and every person has a right—has a need—for a childhood spent in Nature as I did—or in some kind of sacred geography that informs and inspires them. My parents provided me with that. The place where I grew up made me who I am today. Isn’t that true of most people?



After our walk in the two lanes, my father and I went in the back yard and looked for deer bones. A deer had died there one winter not long ago. The dead deer had dissolved into the earth it seemed, and we found no trace of it, but I got to walk with my father and I asked him about all the beautiful landscaping he had done around the yard. He is an artist with flowers and grass and bushes.



They are always wild-looking and cultured all at the same time. Good cultured. Like Emily’s poems, for instance. They are wild, yet you know a poet whispered them into existence. My father looks most at home outside. He knows the names of every plant. When we walked in the woods together when I was a girl, he knew the name of nearly every plant there, too. I’d point to things and he would tell me their names. I was in awe. What kind of magic was that to know the names of everything? Didn’t that mean then that my father knew everything and everyone?


(This is the house where I was raised, although my parents no longer live there. It was pink during much of my childhood and then red. It didn't have a garage. I shared the front room furthest to the right in this photo with three of my sisters until I was a teenager. Then my room was in the new "dorm" upstairs, the top left window. That's where I stared out at the stars.)

We laughed a lot this visit, my sister, parents, and I. I haven’t laughed that much in years. My parents are interesting people. I would be friends with them if they weren’t my parents. My mother was an artist. She painted; she took photographs; she wrote. She still appreciates art. I found out she likes Edward Hopper, one of the artists whose paintings were on exhibit in D.C. while we were there. She was looking at my photographs of his paintings and she said she really liked how he was able to show what people were really feeling. I said, “Especially their loneliness.” She said “Yes,” that was it.

The last night I was there, my mother said she was feeling something but she didn’t know what.


(Mary Antieau. Photo by Kathleen Antieau.)


(Geena. Photo by Kathleen Antieau.)

I encouraged her to tell us what it was, but I didn’t press it and things moved on. But she did seem out of sorts or irritated. I was sleeping in the open loft above the living room which meant I couldn’t go to sleep until they turned off the tv and went to bed, so I felt a bit out of sorts too, waiting for them so I could go to sleep.

Finally the lights went off and I was able to try and sleep. I woke up several times. The moonlight lit up the yard and I was reminded of all those full moon nights when I was a girl: I had loved being outside in the full moon, or just standing in my bedroom and looking out at the light and shadows, marveling at the brilliance of it all, how my sunny world became slightly different and even more wonderful under the bright moonlight. And the stars twinkled and I knew it was going to be a cold cold night. So each time I woke up on the last night, I stared out at the moonlight draped across the lawn and on the old oak trees like a cloak they were all shrugging off. And the moon shined down on me from the skylight.

Thursday

Before I left in the morning, I hugged my mother goodbye as she sat at the table. She said, “I love you, I really do.” I wondered if she was trying to reassure me or convince herself. I stroked her hair and told her I loved her, too. My mom stayed inside while the rest of us went outside and my sister took more pictures of us. I hugged her and my father goodbye. I hate these goodbyes. It’s always then when I feel like I didn’t do enough, I didn’t say the right thing, I wasn’t good enough. But I didn’t hang onto the feeling. Instead, I was elated that I’d had a great visit.


(My sister Kathleen, Mom, Dad, moi.)

We drove away. I had Mario stop at the gate down the road. I got out of the car, climbed over the gate, and walked into the woods. I walked on my grandfather’s land which was now owned by the metro park. I walked toward the hills, the sacred hills of my childhood. To my left were the half million dollar homes that were built on my grandpa’s land. Before me was a grass-covered road that hadn’t been here when I was a child. On the other side trees and then bushes grew and blocked my view of the hills, although I knew they were overgrown now too. I walked along the path. When I was a girl, there was no old road here. I travelled on this land following the trails that the cows, sheep, and deer had left. This was where I had been most at home.

I hardly recognized any of it because it was so grown up in some places and changed in other places. And the sound of the traffic on the road was disconcerting. I kept walking deeper into the woods, further away from the road. The grass under the trees looked inviting. I walked up into it. The dew washed my shoes over and over as I walked. Birds twittered here and there and showed themselves to me. I said hello to the visibles and invisibles. I thanked the land for my childhood, for my life, for teaching me so much.

I walked out into the sunshine for a moment and looked around. It all looked alien and familiar all at the same time. But I understood this world. I touched the tall blond grass that rose up in a patch here. I looked at the bird houses someone had put in here and there. I looked at the trees and the blue sky. Then I turned around and ducked back into the woods. It was all still here. What had formed me, what had taken hold of me like an artist takes hold of a piece of clay and pinches here and presses there, was still here. I was most at home where the wild things lived, and I was at home here. Even though it was barely wild, I still recognized it. I still knew it and it knew me. The existential nausea receded. Or maybe I just recognized what I was. Bewilderment. Each time I came home I felt the call to be wilder. Now here I was, my soles next to my soul. Bewildered. Betwixt and between. I was at home.

I picked up a stick from a downed oak tree. I thanked it. Then I walked back to the gate, climbed over it, and got into the car.

And we drove away.

Labels: nature, photos, travel

0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.