A Cold Night in January

I never did like Iowa, in fact I despised it - hot, humid air that suffocated like an unwanted wool blanket in the summer, and bitter, cold wind in the winter that pierced through your body like long knitting needles.  My mother moved back there with me in tow when I was three, and left me to stay with my grandparents.   They lived in an apartment above the bar they owned in Rockwell, and that's where my first clear memories start - in that little apartment with a couple of uncles and two grandparents that gave me a "sense" of what home could actually feel like. I remember many times of sneaking down the back stairs after dinner and standing on tippie toes to open this huge door that led to an enormous room called a tavern.  Then scurrying across the room and back behind the bar to where my grandpa was.  He would prop me up on his knee to lift me high enough so I could pull the beer tap back to fill the icy mug he'd placed below.  After a couple fills, I promptly got paid for my work with a yellow bag of peanut M&M's that he'd fetch from a shelf high above.  I was never down there long before we'd hear my grandma's voice lilting across the room - "Leesie Lu, get your butt over here".  And standing in that door, would be this short, quite plump, rosy cheeked lady with her hands on her hips, the sweetness in her voice betrayed her attempt to appear upset with me.

Iowa wasn't so bad then - and might never have been had I been left to live with these wonderful people.  But shortly after my forth birthday, I remember standing in that apartment looking down from a window so high above the frosty street below, flurries of snow passing in between my view and the sight of my mother's smashed up car below.  It was a white car, with red tail fins and I remember a feeling of unease flooding me as behind me I could hear one of my uncles talking about how lucky my mother was to have gotten her foot stuck under the gas pedal before the car started rolling  (an experience I would come to know intimately). That is my last clear memory of that wonderful little apartment.  My mother had gotten married,  found the "pentacostal" religion and had come to take me away.  I'm sure I could have never lived there as long as I did if she'd had a clue as to how happy I was.

Life after that was a flurry of moving, and it wasn't long before we left Iowa for Kansas pulling a huge mobile home behind us.  We were there for my first  year of school, then off for Arkansas, mobile home in tow. We moved onto an isolated evangelical retreat up in the Ozarks, the land of the copperheads and razorbacks....and of turantulas, scorpions and outhouses. My "bedroom" in that mobile home was simply a set of built-in bunks that you passed as you went down the narrow hallway. The bottom little bed was mine, a scary place that my mother would sometimes leave me a carefully picked gift for the pleasure of hearing me scream.  The two I remember best were both in glass jars - one was a tarantula, the other a scorpion. If a 1st grader could have a heart attack I wouldn't be here now writing this.  At the end of that school year, we headed back to Iowa where I would spend the next 8 years. We left the mobile home behind and moved into small two room shack that was a blacksmith shop previously.  Two rooms with a toilet in a tiny closet.  I was just absolutely thrilled with that, no longer would I have to close my eyes and pray that a spider or something worse would climb up out of that smelly hole in the outhouse we had in Arkansas.  That house slowly grew in size in all directions, but it never grew into a home.  But there are a couple good memories that have held their place amongst all the bad.  There are two.  Only two that never became so tainted that they could be filed anywhere else - my brothers.  There was almost three of those memories, but only two that survived birth.

I had just turned 8 a few months before that cold night in January.  Every day had become more and more thrilling as my mother's belly grew and I fully understood that the baby to come would be my brother or sister. One day just before my 8th birthday, I found my mother at the kitchen table writing names on a piece of paper.  When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was deciding on a name for the baby.  I don't remember anymore what the name would have been if it was a girl - but I do remember my horror when she said if it was a boy it would be Jeremy, Jerry for short.  At that time that name brought to mind a boy at school who I didn't like and I immediately started begging her not to call him that.  In a rare moment of what I thought was kindness, she told me that I could pick out a name- as long as she agreed to it.  I took this honor very seriously, and stood there for a bit and my mind raced as I stared across the room trying to think of all the names I liked.   My eyes gravited to a cloth calendar that my mother had pinned to the wall - not your typical calendar, but one she'd gotten at the feed co-op the year before.  It didn't have pages to turn to each month, instead it showed all 12 months of the year , each month with all the days in small print.  Above each month was simply the first letter instead an abbreviation.  The top half depicted the first 6 months, and letting my eyes drift across each line of letters I could see:                 

            J F M A M J        Along the bottom was....         J A S O N D                

And that was what I chose that day- Jason.

To this day, I will never know for certain if my mother became almost human while she was pregnant - or if I was just always so happy that I projected that on her. I'm pretty sure it was the latter, because I know I was still terrified of her that night I woke to hear her screaming. This was before any add-ons had been done to the house, so my room was merely a separate section of the living room, which I could see clearly from my bed. I remember peaking out from under the covers (that I normally kept all the way over my head to combat the cold) and seeing my mother laying on the couch across from me. Her knees were up in the air, her left hand clutching her forehead - then she curled forward and I realized I could see much more of her than I had ever wanted. I quickly covered my head, afraid she's glance my direction and realize I'd seen her bare bottom. But the next scream was too much, I had to know what was happening - and I realized that I'd heard other voices besides hers and my step-fathers - my grandparents. That next scream was deep and filled me with impending doom, but didn't stop me from fixing those blankets to where I could take in what was happening. Within seconds of looking again, I must have forgot that was my mother's unclad butt in my view - because my only memory of that moment is seeing the purplish color of my brother's head and then his entire body just before my grandma came from the other side of other room - moving faster than I had ever seen. She plucked the baby out the mess he'd entered the world in and held him upside down in front of her, one of her pudgy hands clamped around his tiny feet. My grandpa was right beside her and moved with such skill I would never had known that this was the first time he'd ever unwrapped an umbilical cord. As grandma being pacing the room, still holding this baby before her, I heard her telling him to breathe and begging him to cry. I remember her slapping that tiny thing on the butt and somehow knowing that since my grandma wouldn't hurt a fly - that it must be somehow necessary.

And after what seemed forever and becoming more and more frightened as I heard the panic in grandma's voice mount.....I heard a faint, soft whimper.

After that the silence ended and relief flooded me as I heard grandma laugh and grandpa crack a joke and for the first time in so long, all was right with world.

It was over an hour before my brother Jason was admitted into the Mercy hospital twenty miles away in Mason City and it was over a week before they brought him home. The umbilical cord my grandpa unwrapped and been wound 3 times around Jason's neck. His oxygen had been very limited in utero during the last months of my mother's pregnancy. In the years to come I remember her talking about brain damage, and her saying that his head was bigger than it should be - but my mother never had a kind word to say about anyone so I never paid much attention. I can honestly say that I never saw a thing wrong with him, he was the most beautiful creature in the world that I'd ever laid eyes on. After a week of spending long, cold days alone in that house - pacing the floors like an expectant parent, they brought my brother home. My mom deposited him in my arms shortly after so she could rest and suddenly the world wasn't as cold and empty as it seemed before.

The week before on one occasion when my mother wasn't at the hospital, she informed me that she had decided to name my brother Jeremy anyway. But I still felt pretty important when she said his name was Jeremy Jason, and that we could call him Jason. And we did.

The following year she lost my next brother, at eight months along she fell right on her belly one night at her bowling league.  But the year after that she brought home my youngest brother, Tim. They were both perfect and I adored them.  The only problem I ever had with either one was they didn't like wearing the cute little dresses that I would dress them up in.

Jason's Birthday

a note from his big sister