Not mate, mute. There's a difference

Copyright © 2011 B. Jean Carr      

We once lived in a purple house on a street named Elm. It wasn’t named after a tree, but for my great-great grandmother on my mother’s side, they had a big thing for plants ironically. In the purple house our family was happy. I lived there all my life until my mother died. There was a wide porch painted the lightest shade of lilac and at the start of every summer we’d repaint it. It was tradition; the first day of vacation mom would make up a giant jug of lemonade and a big batch of chocolate chip cookies. The temptations would sit on the window sill while we worked diligently right below it for hours just staring at the beads of water rolling down the sides of the ice filled glasses.

            By the time we were finished the ice would be melted along with all the chocolate and the lemonade would be more watered down than the creek out back right past the tree line. Despite all that we’d dig in, my brothers and sister and I, and devour that lemonade and cookies like they were the last cookies and lemonade filled glasses on earth. The night she died we never even would have noticed had it not been for that tray of rewards not being there.

            It was early morning, first day of summer vacation, and we all sprung out of bed, even little Dandelion who just swirled extra paint on paper while we worked, and got to painting. That year we were determined to finish before that ice melted and the chocolate chip cookies turned to mush. We never even noticed that neither of our parents was home. We were used to mom not being home, we trusted she’d come back in time.

            It was desperate, useless hope. I remember sitting up from painting the porch floor and looking up at the window sill. The sun was rising at just the right point to hit the window sill and blind me for a moment. That was when it finally sunk in that the window wasn’t open, there was no scent of fresh baked cookies drifting through and no melting ice and lemonade on the sill. I still count it as the worst moment of my life. The world had shrunk into this tiny little space of the window sill where there was nothing.

            I’d tried to remember the last time I’d seen mother. She’d slowly but surely migrated to going out every night and not coming back till morning or later. I saw her only in short bursts. I always thought she’d get better. One day I’d wake up and find her making breakfast again whistling country songs or she’d be reading to me as I fell asleep with the words of classics drifting in my ears. That night she never came home. Dad had left without a word to us and gone to the hospital.

            In a single night I became the woman of the house. What had once been a temporary replacement for mother was now a full time job. I was mother, cleaner, baker, and everything else my family needed me to be. At a young age I learned to be independent, to take care of myself. The world had seemed so small, so very small.

             The world, the woods in truth, seemed endless, a vast sea of green that was never going to end. I silently begged for it all to suddenly change into rolling pastures and sunshine. For more than an hour there had been nothing but these trees. Ok, so there had been one creepy looking cabin. but I’m pretty sure a serial killer lived there. I was so not in the mood for a horror movie moment. I couldn’t hold in the sigh of relief when I called Dad to make sure we were at least an hour away from that cabin.

   I should have been well used to such places. I'd seen plently of them in the many years we'd spent going from place to place. Our family never stayed anywhere long. There'd always be something that would make us have to move again. Creepy, cookie cutter, hoarder, masoluem, I'd seen every kind of house imaginable, lived in almost all of them to. I was still missing a few essential sterotype houses, but that wasn't exactly a high accomplishment I wanted to complete on my bucket list.