On a Wing & a Scare - Part 2 (September 2010)

I charged into the bedroom. I scanned the room for bats, but not too carefully. I didn’t actually want to see the bat if it was still there. I just wanted a quick scan to see that he wasn’t still there. I quickly grabbed all my clothes and scampered out of the room, securing the door behind me. From there, I went about the rest of the morning and went to work.

Around 10:00, I called Mich to ask if he had found our winged visitor. Indeed he had. Our friend was sleeping peacefully on the window frame in the spare room. Summoning his long-dormant bat-nabbing skills from his basement-dwelling teen years, he scooped up the bat in a hat, sealed it with a sheet of paper and released the critter outside. It squeaked and squirmed its displeasure and flew away in the unfamiliar morning light. So, we woke it up at an unfamiliar time. Hey, it woke me up at 3:00 A.M.! Turn-about is fair play.

You might think the first thing I did the next day was call a pest control company. That’s what I should have done, but sometimes we Baileys aren’t that bright.

On a Wing & a Scare - Part 1 (September 2010)

One morning around 3:00 A.M. last June, I was minding my own business, sleeping, when a strange noise woke me up. It went like this: FLAP, flap, FLAP. I knew what it was without looking. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there was a bat in my bedroom. So I did what any normal, self-respecting person alone in the house would do when a bat wakes them up at 3:00 A.M. I grabbed my glasses and the bedspread, closed the door behind me and ran downstairs.

I immediately called my husband, not because he was a man, but because I knew he would be awake at 3:00 A.M. (Mind you, if I thought my mother would have been up, I might have called her instead.)

Our conversation went something like this:

“Mich, I said, “There’s a bat in the house.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” he said. “I’m at work.”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I just thought you should know.”

I noted not only a distinct lack of alarm, but also sympathy in his voice. Great. We talked for a few minutes. I calmed down and we devised a plan. The plan was I would sleep on the couch the rest of the night with my cell phone at my side. Mich would call at 5:30 to wake me.

The plan went off flawlessly. I got another two hours of sleep and awoke relatively aware if not exactly well-rested. I went about my usual morning routine – shower, internet, breakfast, blow-dry hair and...then…well, and then I hit a snag. The next step in the routine is “and got dressed for work.” The snag was all the clothes I needed for work were in the bedroom. You know, where the bat could be. (Never mind the bat could have easily escaped into the wider house through the bottom of the door.) I doubted the old t-shirt I was wearing would be acceptable in the office.

Somehow, I was going to have to enter the bedroom. But not in just a t-shirt. Hm. What to do, what to do? Standing in the living room, I looked around until my eyes fell on my fencing equipment. Aha! I pulled on my fencing pants – my green, yellow, and burgundy striped fencing pants. My arms were still bare, though, and it was just warm enough that I didn’t want to pull on my heavy fencing shirt. I scanned the room again and found the perfect thing to protect my arms – a black cardigan with hot pink trim. I pulled that on, put my fencing mask over my head, gloves on my hands, grabbed my sword for good measure and proceeded upstairs.

The Woman & the Girl (October 8, 2002)

I am the woman who took control
And the girl so unsure of herself

I am the woman who risked much
And the girl who played it safe

I am the woman who should laugh more
And the girl who found joy among new friends

I am the woman who searches
And the girl who wondered

I am the woman traveling in time
And the girl who longs for the future

I am the woman whose experience
Is shaped from the girl I was

To Find the Fire (November 7, 2010)

To find the fire in my own words
I read from Stan on his birthday,
Remembering him for Anne, another stranger I adore
I read Frances's words, knowing she's described it just as it is

To find the fire for my own words
I gaze at David and John
With and without sound and motion

To find the fire of my own words
I search in the everyday around me
In the voices of others known
And those too far away to know
But close enough to admire

I type slower than the thoughts and words come,
Too slow to catch them all
But please, fast enough to kindle the fire in my own words

Want (January 9, 1999)

I want
Rapture and sizzle
Gazes filled with wondrous possibility

I want
A warm embrace
And kisses
Felt to the core...every time

I want
To watch
The same creases and lines
Deepen over long and winding time.

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Inspired by a combination of a great New Year's Eve in Chicago (thanks Emily) and a certain amount of melodramatic, single 20-something loneliness. I found what I wanted a few years later.

Post Graduate Intern (July 28, 1998)

Mind over monster,
I holly-hocked
My foundation ring
For a six-month century
And a ticket to tomorrow

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This one was written when I was about two months out of graduate school. For lack of job offers, I took an internship at a historic farm museum. It ended up being a year-long experience, but it set me on my way in my chosen profession. Yes, I know, it's more prose than poetry.

The Source (Sept. 2007)

Six Lakes, Michigan is a small town just west of the geographic center of Lower Michigan – the middle of the mitten. On a road map, you’ll find it at the junction of Michigan routes 46 and 66, 53 miles northeast of Grand Rapids. Six Lakes has a bar, a hardware store where you can find everything from a new stove to a used clarinet, just one gas station, a bank where the tellers greet you by name (because they’ve known you for at least 20 years). Oh, and six lakes, connected by channels that must be dredged out every so often. Otherwise, the cat tails will clog them and then, how will the row boats with their small outboard motors get through to fish or just get home?

Six Lakes is a touchstone, the “source” of and for me. No matter where I have lived, I can go back there. It is where my Mom grew up and where my parents got married. I was probably baptized in that same little church with the green and orangey-yellow glass windows. Six Lakes was where Grandma Neva was and where my favorite Aunt Dawn still lives. It is the source of summer.

First Lake is the main attraction. This is where the tiny public beach and campground is with its perpetually unchanged playground. Donald Duck with a saddle on his back and a sturdy metal spring beneath him has been there as long as I can remember.

First Lake is the scent of green. Not the green of fresh cut grass, not of pine, but of not-too-thick algae with a hint of swamp. It is the scent of splashing water, of little girls making friends with other little girls they will never see again.

About a mile outside of the little town, not too far from the banks of Third Lake, sits an old farm house and 40 acres that go with it. My folks bought the property when I was seven. The previous owners were two spinster sisters. They spent most of their lives there and I’ve spent at least a couple days there almost every year since 1980. The house sits on a rise and from the front porch, you can watch the world go by.

In daylight, you can count vehicles going by – sedans, lots of pick-ups, and a tractor or two. In twilight, you can feel the cement porch beneath you grow cooler as the sun sets and listen to the crickets chirping, heralding evening has arrived. Once darkness has fallen, you can look out on a deep dark sky, twinkling with stars, the Big Dipper ready to catch the shining, sparkling bodies the Little Dipper dumps into it.

Six Lakes is food – it’s the fresh corn on the cob eaten with relish whether you have your front teeth that summer or not. It’s Mom cooking pork steak on a tiny stove on the hottest night of summer in a kitchen cooled only by a metal box fan. It’s Dad, making some odd concoction of cooked Spam and green noodles when he’s home for Christmas from Korea, spur of the moment. It’s making jam with blackcap berries you’ve picked yourself from the bushes just behind the house. It’s Dad grilling chicken on an impossibly old grill that his dad bought in the 1940s or ‘50s.

Six Lakes is well water – the best tasting there is. It’s cold right from the tap in the old fashioned enamel sink. It’s the water that makes your hair softer and it makes mine just a bit more red than anywhere else. It’s the best bath in the universe in a claw foot tub with a perfectly slanted back. You can lounge in the tub, reading Reader’s Digests from 1986 that you’ve read 100 times before. It’s bath water that had to be heated on a stove until 1985. Then my parents saw fit to put in modern plumbing. “Modern” included hot water at last.

Six Lakes is fall – getting cider and donuts from that cider mill with Dennis the Menace on the sign. It is waiting for the bus on the first day of high school when you don’t know a soul your age yet. It’s looking for deer in fields still draped in mist with your school bus driver before lots of other kids are on the bus. It’s sliding down the steep staircase with narrow steps in your socks when you’re not quite awake yet – but you are when you’ve reached the bottom!

Six Lakes is the source. It is where someone I don’t know stops me on the street and asks how my Mom is. We haven’t seen each other since I was 5, but they know who I am. They know who I am attached to. It is driving down back roads with my older sister. We have long conversations about life, the universe, and everything. We do this when we are 15 and 19 or 22 and 26 and still at 30 and 34. We will do that forever, I think. Six Lakes is the well from which I can be rejuvenated. It is my spiritual home. I will make pilgrimages there for as long as I can.

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I originally wrote this as a speech for my Toastmasters group. Six Lakes is my source, the place where I am home, and every self I've ever been and ever will be.