Summerfire

The old timers called it summerfire.

They gathered around the pot bellied stove in the general store, these retired, disabled, or widowed old men and re-told stories everyone already knew but still laughed at.   They put on their rubber boots and suspenders and red flannel shirts, packed their pipes and took their seats, whittling, spitting, smoking and rocking away, trying to fill the empty hours.   They spent their nights in ones and twos, playing fiercely contended games of cribbage and dominoes and drinking more than was good for them, then stumbled off to cold beds and old dreams.  They were a rough lot with their unshaven, leathery faces and gruff tobacco- ruined voices but they could tell stories.  Oh, could they tell stories.  Tales that would curl your hair and drop your jaw, as my grandmother used to say.  Mostly about the one that got away, be it a woman or a fish didn’t seem to matter, or the blow of ’38 off St. Georges Banks or the night ol’ Jimmy Sparks shot up the dance hall and kilt his wandering’ wife deader’n a mackerel.

 

“They’s memories powerful more sharp than they’s wits,”  Nana would tell me, “Don’t be thinking them things aren’t true.  Mostly anyways.”

The summer I was sixteen though, the summer I fell in love for the first time, was old enough to go to the dance hall on Saturday nights (provided I was bright eyed and repentant when called on to go to church the next morning) and be walked home in the dark and kissed at the backdoor just out of range of the moonlight, well, that lovely and perfect July and August, they were talking about summerfire.

My mind was so distracted  that summer, that  I didn’t give much thought to the fires.  Johnny was a tall, slim-built, chiseled- faced and well brought up young man with high cheekbones and a mass of intense dark red hair always at odds with the slicked down look he tried so hard to keep.   He charmed my grandmother with his manners and easy smile, utterly disarmed my mother with flattery, and swept me off my feet with his first glance.  The moment we’d boarded the scow at East Ferry, he’d leaned in to the passenger side window,  smelling of Old Spice (my daddy’s favorite aftershave) and ginger, and given me a grin.

“Reckon this is gon’ be our summer?” he’d asked and winked. “Figure I’d better be askin’ ‘fore anybody else gets the chance.”

I’d nodded, too stage struck to find my voice, almost too nervous to catch my breath.  My heart was suddenly beating so loudly I was sure he would hear it and make some sort of humiliating joke.  I thought if he did I would up and die right in the front seat of the road-weary  old Lincoln, never see seventeen much less the inside of the dance hall.

 “Pick you up Saturday night,” he’d said instead, “Long about seven.  If……” and here he paused and gave my grandmother a tip of his cap and a brilliant smile, “That’s okay with you, Miz Watson.”

Nana had nodded, trying not to smile and busying herself with counting out coins for the passage.

“I ‘spect you could do a lot worse than Doug and Marylyn’s boy, “ she’d said calmly, “Good stock. Good family.”

I could only shiver.  I’d known him all my summer life, always liked him, and all I could do was shiver.

“What was that all about?” my mother, who had been following  behind us in the old Mercury station wagon wanted to know.

“Doug and Marylyn’s boy wants to take her to the dance Saturday night,” Nana had said, so casually you’d think it happened every day of the week, “I said he could.”

My mother had blinked in surprise and I’d steeled myself for the familiar You’re too young lecture, hoping  that she wouldn’t feel the need to deliver it then and there and only dimly realizing that this would be the first one I’d actually fight for.   My heart was creeping steadily toward by throat again and I didn’t think it was the sun warming my face and neck.  I was stilling actively avoiding her eyes when she shrugged.

“Well…..,” she said slowly and I knew she was appraising me, considering me, “Well, that’s alright then. I don’t guess a dance will do anybody harm.  Not if it’s Doug and Marylyn’s boy.”  She stepped back,  pressed both hands to the small or her back and stretched like a coiled but chubby spring then shaded her eyes, looked toward the island and frowned.

 

“Look, Mother,” she’d said and nodded, “Smoke.  Wonder what’s burning.”

Sure enough, a patch of sky at the far end of the island was spreading dark like a spider web, curling and spiraling up over the tree line.  Nana had peered at it over her bifocals.

“Coming from The Point, you reckon?” she’d asked.  Her voice had been edged ever so slightly with concern, just enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck.  Our house was at The Point, it sat on the corner lot with a strawberry field between it and the road and the ocean a stone’s throw from the sloping front yard. 

“Central Grove more’n likely,” Johnny had said with something like an oddly superficial reassurance, “Most of the summerfire’s been mid-island.”   He’d given us a not-to-worry grin, pulled a Players from the black and blue pack in his shirt pocket and lit it despite the mild wind, cupping his hands around the match until it caught, flared and died.   For a second or two the salt air was tinged with sulphur.   Then seeing Nana’s face, he quickly smiled.

“Could be just a grass fire, Miz Watson,” he’d said quietly, “Don’t you worry ‘bout it none.  Likely be out ‘fore you get halfway down island.”

But it wasn’t out and it wasn’t a grass fire.  It was, in fact, one of the idle fishing shacks past the old  breakwater, a tumbledown old affair that hadn’t been used for years.  By the time we’d pulled into the long gravel driveway we could see the red and yellow flames and the air was dirty with smoke.   A fine spray of ash floated like dust - no, more like snowflakes, I thought, like the flurries we would get in New England on those bitter cold January days - brief and harmless.   Island volunteer firefighters were out in force and the blaze, bright but brief, was contained fairly quickly.  It wasn’t so much the fire that caught everyone’s attention, one more abandoned bait shack was no great loss, but the fact that it was the third fire in as many weeks made people sit up and take notice.  No one wanted to admit that there might be, living and working in our very midst, someone who would set fires.  It was far more comfortable to blame it on summerfire,  a random mix of heat and lightning and boredom, a careless  but surely unintentionally tossed match, a wayward spark, perhaps.   Suspicion, which had been, until the bait shack fire, a passive and slow moving beast wearing blinders and minding its own business, began to peer around at its surroundings.  It was growing up, feeling around and picking up speed.

“It can’t be one of us,” the schoolteacher told my grandmother, “It just can’t be.”

 Nana, bless her practical, no nonsense soul, looked unconvinced.

“Three weeks, three fires,” she reminded him cooly, ” Two of ‘em ‘fore the first summer family even got here.   Ain’t no coincidence in that, teacher, no coincidence at all, by God.”

The night before the dance while I was being sick with anticipation and begging my mother for permission to shave my legs for the first time,  the schoolhouse caught fire.  In the telephone office next door, Elsie heard an explosion and a WHOOSH! of air, tree limbs and flying schoolbooks slammed into the side of her small house, shaking the foundation and rattling the old woman’s teeth out of their accustomed place on the nightstand by her bed.

“Kee-rist!” Elsi had shrieked and like to have flown to her switchboard, denture-less and still in her nightclothes, to raise the alarm.   The island’s emergency alert system - the church bell in the steeple of the Baptist church - was ringing furiously only minutes later but Elsie, seeing a raging fire with flames shooting a hundred feet into the air, “A wall of fire!”  she screeched in a raspy, lisping kind of wail all across the party line, knew it was useless.  “All I could think was to snatch that ol’ tomcat and run for the hills,” she confessed to my grandmother, “Never been so petrified in my all born days!”

The telephone office was saved -  only by a whisker  the old timers said - but the one room schoolhouse which every island child had attended at one time or another and which had stood its ground against the metal and brick consolidated school on the mainland and every other form of progress, was a total loss.  All that was left, a charred and blackened foundation covered in ash and bits of burned up books, sat desolately under the old singed and now smoky trees.  It was a sight too sad to bear for the schoolteacher who walked through the debris with his shoulders hunched and his face buried in his hands.

“I don’t understand,” he kept repeating, “Great God Almighty, I don’t understand who would burn a school.”

The schoolhouse fire was all anyone could talk about the next morning.  At McIntyre’s, the old timers huddled in a tight circle, drinking their morning coffee and uncharacteristically snapping at each other about what ought to be done.   One side was for calling in the Mounties, the other for keeping it in the family and as Nana and I passed by, the argument escalated.

 “Eustice Haines,” ol’ Cap’n Judd yelled at one point as Nana and I navigated the cluttered shelves in search of bobbie pins, “You ain’t nothin’ but a durn fool and you ain’t got the sense to come in out of the rain if’n you think we can handle this ourselves!”

Not to be outdone, Cap’n Judd snatched his cane and whacked his brother just below the knee where Eustice’s wooden leg was attached.  The sound was like a shot and was immediately followed by a string of curses as Eustice got to his feet and lunged at his brother.  My grandmother was so startled, she dropped a tin of canned peaches.  It rolled all the way to the counter before encountering  Miz McIntyre advancing on the group of old men with her broom clutched in two white-knuckled fists.  She gave it a wicked kick and it went airborne, soaring through the dust motes and cigarette smoke like a hot knife through butter and landing with a wet thud, dented and scratched, on the old pot bellied stove.

“Out!” she hollered, waving the broom like a club, “Every one of you useless, good for nothin’, chatterin’ old gossips!  Out, I say!  Go warm your backsides somewheres else or I’ll be givin’ you somethin’ to talk about for a month of Sundays and then some!”

“Well, Elizabeth,” Nana said mildly, “Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“It’s all this summerfire nonsense, Alice,” Miz McIntyre said with a profound sigh, “They don’t talk ‘bout nothin’ else and it ain’t good for business.”  She smoothed her apron, brushed back a dark strand of hair and gave us a weary smile.  “Now what was you lookin’ for?”

“Bobbie pins,” I told her shyly, “Aunt Vi’s gonna curl my hair for the dance tonight.”

“And I reckon we’ll take them canned peaches,” my grandmother added.

“Oh!” Miz McIntyre whirled toward the old stove, snatched the now-beginning-to-swell can of peaches with one apron-wrapped hand and hastily set it on a nearby flour barrel.

“Mercy me, wouldn’t that’ve been a fine mess,” she laughed, “Now, let me see about bobbie pins.”

There were, over the course of the next two and three quarters months, seven more fires.  A second abandoned bait shack, Sam Melanson’s ramshackle old barn, a dusty and unused fish factory office, a whiskey still high in the hills above St. Mary’s Bay (although the general opinion was that that one might’ve been natural causes, ol’ Micah Albright was known to drink heartily of his own profits and it didn’t take much imagination to see that he could’ve gotten careless), and two summer homes across the cove.  A crowd of us, Johnny and I included, were hanging out on the old Prescott steps the night of the second cove house fire and we watched the flames break out and travel in an unnerving straight line toward the fuel oil tank.  The explosion was staggering and immense, it lit up the night sky like some massive fireworks display.

“Jesus!” Johnny exclaimed and ran for the telephone at McIntyre’s while the rest of us headed for the barber shop where the volunteer fire fighting equipment was stored.

A week later, the final fire took the dance hall.  Sifting through the wreckage, the Mounties discovered a body - a young boy, they thought, in his early teens maybe, buried beneath a pile of charred latticework and collapsed walls, badly burned but still recognizable - a summer boy from a new family who had rented a cottage on the adjacent island.  An angry and troubled boy whose parents had thought would work things out away from the noise and heat of the city, a boy nobody had ever noticed, an arsonist whose body was taken home in a box by broken hearted parents.

Some of the good island folk were relieved and grateful to have someone to blame but the old timers, warming their hands, telling their stories, and minding their newly found manners, knew it was more complicated than a random city boy gone a little wild.  There wasn’t and never had been anything simple about summerfire - it woke, worked its dark magic for a time, and slept - no one knew where and no one went looking.

Just like summer love.

Cool Wave

It was pitch black when I woke from the dream - some faint, foggy thing about soldiers and warfare - and there was barely a wisp of it left.  Whatever small fragment of the day my memory had latched onto quickly mingled with all the others.  The little lighted alarm clock read 2:38 and the dream was gone by 2:39 if not by the time my feet hit the floor.  I roused the dogs while trying not to wake the cats and padded my barefoot way to the back door.

The night air - unrealistically cool for July, it couldn't have been more than 60 degrees - was still and full of waiting rain, the moon was low and shimmery.  The improbable cool wave was in its sixth day and everyone was talking about it, how wonderful it was to have their windows open and their air conditioners off, how freaky for July, how odd. The dogs moved slowly into the cool darkness and I wondered if maybe they'd been dreaming as well.  I was pretty sure they liked having this break from the heat as much as everyone else.  To not have to run central air in July in the south is next to unthinkable but here it was - six days of cool and damp - even three solid days of rain had not made anyone complain.  I couldn't find a soul, not even among folks who have lived here all their lives, who could remember such a run of weather.

I thought about going back to bed but suspected it would be a waste of time and energy so I sat on the deck to smoke, think, and listen to the quiet.  It was too early for the doves to start calling to each other but I heard the old familiar train whistle, the hum of the electric wires, the crickets.  I wondered who else might be up at this hour, what they were doing, what the voices in their heads might be saying.  It was several minutes before I heard the music and at first, it was so distant and so soft that I thought it was my imagination - an echo, I told myself, maybe a memory or a sleepy, half-formed wish - but then I realized that the dogs heard it as well,
all three were sitting placidly, heads cocked in the direction of the sound.  A guitar, I thought, no back up, no band, no vocal, just a single guitar in the middle of the night.  Playing Merle Haggard's Someday When Things Are Good, I'm Gonna Leave You. 

I was thinking that it was a waking dream when Haggard slipped easily into Ray Price's Night Life.

Not real, I told myself, not happening. 

But the dogs were still listening.

Feeling like a fool, I got up as quietly as I could, stood on my tiptoes, peered over the fence and saw what I was sure was a mirage - sitting in my neighbor's porch swing was a shirtless stranger in faded denim jeans and a stetson hat with a guitar across his lap and a Siamese cat sitting at his side.  

Losing it, I thought dismally, this is what delusional is like.  It's three in the morning and 60 degrees in July and this is a hallucination.

I feared taking a second look - he might still be there and what would that say about me - so I hurriedly led the dogs back inside and crawled back into bed with the covers pulled up to my chin, putting walls and windows and structures between me and the (imaginary) music.  My last thought was wondering if you're aware of it when you lose your mind or does someone have to point it out.

A few hours later, morning arrived in its ordinary way with birds singing and dogs barking.  I'd forgotten about the guitar player dream entirely until I glanced out the kitchen window and saw a Siamese cat asleep in my neighbor's porch swing, one paw under its chin, the other resting lightly on a stetson hat.

Time Lines

Sometimes life pushes us in directions we ought to have found for ourselves ~
Bob Hoskins, "Maid in Manhattan"

Even when you know it's the right thing to do, putting the crazy behind you is not always an easy thing to do. It will trail after you like a lost puppy, whining and pleading for you to take it back, promising whatever it takes to tempt you into a backward step.  Changing habits takes practice, determination, focus and an open mind. Learning to see the same old things in new and different ways - trusting in yourself to pull it off without the luxury of instant gratification - goes against the grain.  Time is a short, muddy, dead end road.  You learn to stay between the ditches or risk a wreck.  You learn to wait.  You don't learn to wait patiently.

At times, as I find myself rushing through life - more or less from one crisis to the next - I can't help but wonder at the silliness of it all.   A few seconds here and there can't possibly make a difference, I remind myself as I wait for the endless light to change, the pizza to arrive, the 'phone to ring, the file to upload, the dogs to come in, the clothes to dry, the band to start.  And yet I resent this empty, idle time.  It creates space I feel compelled to fill, usually with worry or impatience or simmering anger.  

I'm coming! I would yell to my mother.

So is Christmas! she would yell back, a tired old line but delivered with a certain menace that always made me cringe.  The more I tried to be quick, the more frantic and scattered I became, exhausting her patience and short circuiting my confidence.

If you were Paul Revere..... she would say with a long suffering sigh.

I know, I know, we'd still be British colonies, I would answer, a line I knew by heart and would grow up to use myself on more than one occasion.

I didn't think much about time then.  When you're twelve or thirteen (and going on twenty-one as my mother was fond of saying), it stretches out before you like an interstate highway.  My head was full of book reports and worry about running out of my allowance, whether or not I'd be asked to the junior prom and had I practiced enough for my next piano lesson. Time was a misty abstraction, a grown up worry I didn't have time for and couldn't make sense of.

At sixty-six, it's closing in, pressing in on me from all sides.  It's gotten too real.

Meanwhile life keeps pushing me, sometimes gently, sometimes with enough force to move a mountain.  I tell myself that it knows what it's doing but the truth is that I've come to believe that if a thing is meant to be, then it will find a way.  

Be nice to time.  It doesn't have much of a sense of humor and it doesn't need you the way you need it.

Let life give you the occasional shove.


   

Tis Wondrous Strange

Ain't all that great to be named after a cookie, you know, Shortbread grumbled to my daddy, his mournful face in a serious pout as he laid out fresh haddock in day old newspaper and efficiently tied it with a length of string. Some of them jokes get real old, real fast.

My daddy smiled.  

Nothing in a name, my friend, he replied kindly, handing Shortbread a quarter and and me the haddock, They wouldn't ride you if they didn't like you.

Mebbe so, Shortbread shrugged but he didn't look convinced.

He'd been, my daddy had told me, a premature baby, born barely alive and not expected to survive his first few days.  But survive he did, even without life saving treatment and all the best available medical help.  Ol' Doc McDaniel had been cautious with his parents, warning them not to expect a good outcome, to prepare themselves for the worst but Shortbread was a fighter - he made it through his first week, then his first month, then his first year - and though he was underweight and tiny and struggled harder than anyone could've predicted, he made it.

On his third birthday, he went missing for several hours and was discovered half underwater in the pond where we went eel fishing, waterlogged and nearly drowned.  

He was five when he fell through the rickety rungs of the loft ladder in the old hay barn and landed smack dab in a milking stall.  

Poor ol' Bessie went dry for three days, his mother confessed, Thought we'd lose'em both for awhile.

At six, he caught his arm clean up to the shoulder in a milking machine, at seven his daddy ran over him with a tractor, and at eight he contracted polio.  By then, beginning to believe that this small and adventurous child was invincible, his mother and daddy simply force fed him massive doses of vitamin C, wrapped his legs in hot packs and splints daily, gave him oatmeal baths and oxygen and re-taught him to walk with the aid of iron braces.  He was clumsy and awkward and would never run free again, but he survived, more or less intact and during the long days of that dreadful summer, the island women brought cakes and pies and homemade ice cream with shortbread cookies. 

Boy could eat his weight in them shortbread cookies, his daddy would say and smile, Reckon it could be worse.

After a rugged start, the years between eight and eighteen were relatively uneventful - two bouts of viral pneumonia, a broken upper limb here and there - the iron braces gave way to lighter weight and more flexible aluminum and with increased mobility, Shortbread was inclined to take more risks.  Snapped his elbow when he stumbled on the steps and tripped over the dog.  Dislocated a shoulder when he plowed straight into a ditch teaching himself to drive.  

Been through more broken bones than Carter's got pills, Rowena complained as she patched him up for the dozenth time, Boy, you ain't never gonna see twenty-one less'n you slow down some!

When a standard transmission turned out to be more than he could handle though, it was Rowena who suggested he learn to ride.  She had, as it turned out, a reasonably young mare who could still kick up her heels and knew tricks - how to count, and turn on a dime, and best of all, how to kneel to be mounted.  

Just a matter of balance, she told Shortbread patiently, She kneels, you get on.  She gets up and you go. You're lighter'n feather, boy, hug her sides with them braces and she'll carry you anywhere.

What's her name?  Shortbread asked doubtfully.

Rowena laughed.

That's the best part! she said and gave the mare a light pat on the rump, It's Lorna!  Like Lorna Doone! She might 'been named after a cookie just like you! She's got the same kinda stubborn streak you do!  You were made for each other!

It was, the entire island had to admit although not at the time, an inspired idea.  A lonely, young mare who could run like the wind and missed being ridden and a boy just slightly broken and in need of legs came together and became lifelong friends.  When my daddy and I left the factory and started across the road and up the path, Lorna was contentedly grazing in Aunt Lizzie's front yard.  Shortbread whistled and the now elder horse unhurriedly strolled toward him, knelt gracefully so he could climb on, and then rose up with a pleased whinny and a toss of her mane and carried him home.

Years and years later, Ruthie wrote me about Lorna's death.

Nigh onto 28 she was, the letter read, and she jist laid down in the pasture one evenin and didnt get up again. We cant imagin whats to become of Shortbread.

The second letter arrived a few months later.

Shortbread died yesterday mornin, Ruthie wrote, Rowena done found him down in the back forty by the hangin tree where he buried Lorna.  He werent never the same after losin that mare and Ro thinks he jist give up. 
Funny thing is that crooked ol man-tree be more n a half mile from the house and we looked all over creation but aint nobody found his braces. Somes sayin Lorna come back fer one last ride on account of Shad swearin he heard hoofbeats round dawn but I reckon he pitched em and they was carried out by the tide mebbe but even so I been thinkin bout that Shakespeare verse we learnt in Bible school, the one about there bein more things in heaven and earth, you remember, "Tis wondrous strange" or some such.  Reckon theres things in this life we aint meant to know.

I think so too.

Shades of Beige

If my life had depended on it, I couldn’t have told you what I expected from my first meeting.

Being chronically afraid of arriving late, I’d driven the route to the old church the night before to be sure I wouldn’t lose my way and on the actual meeting day, I invented a migraine and left work a half hour earlier than necessary.    It seemed foolish to care so much about punctuality - surely being late wouldn’t keep you out, I told myself - but we are what we are and I was determined to be on time.  I pulled into the church parking lot with thirty-five minutes to spare, more than enough time to change my mind, not quite enough to find the courage to actually do it.

It was early October, cool to the point of chilly, well dark by six-thirty and the church, sitting high on a hill overlooking the grimy city, was caught in a crossfire of wind.  It whistled around me, crooning it almost seemed, reminding me of the loons that used to call to each other after sundown when I was a child spending summers on my grandmother’s farm.   A school-sized milk carton skittered roughly across the pavement, a glossy newspaper page flew directly in front of the windshield.  Winter would be here any day, I thought, in a month it would be cold enough to snow.  I badly wanted to turn the ignition key and head the old Volvo wagon to the empty apartment on Dead Horse Hill.  Telling myself it wasn’t a fit night to be out - I was hungry and headachy, had forgotten my gloves and was wearing only a light jacket that offered next to no protection from the wind - I gave the key a hard twist and the engine roared to life.  Home and safety was twenty minutes away.  The door to the church was only a few steps across the parking lot.

“God, give me strength, “ I said outloud, turned off the engine and headed into the wind.

The meeting room, as plain vanilla as the church was gingerbread, was tucked away at the end of a long, fluorescent lit, maze-like collection of corridors in the church basement.   Hand lettered signs and arrows were tacked at each intersection and turn of the carefully, neutral, non-threatening walls.  The carpet (threadbare in places) was beige, the ceiling (in need of paint) was beige.   There were beige bulletin boards hung on beige walls, push bars instead of doorknobs, and no windows.   I followed the signs and arrows, faintly distracted by the possibility that I if I were to drown, I might disappear in a veritable sea of beige.  And then without warning, I was at the last set of beige double doors.

“Al Anon”, the hand printed sign read.  And underneath, “ AA” with a smudgy arrow pointing back the way I’d come.

I hated new things, unfamiliar places, first times.  I hated doing things I’d never done before or feared I couldn’t do well.  I had no gift for small talk with friends let alone strangers.  I’d forgotten what a genuine smile even felt like.  I was afraid of crowds.  All things considered, I thought, it was some mild form of insanity to think that some old, sorry, clichéd self- help group would be of any use.  I had my pride, my privacy, three cats depending on me and a husband locked up in a sterile and unfriendly alcoholism treatment center.  I wasn’t about to admit or advertise my troubles to a bunch of losers or religious do-gooders.   I was thinking I’d go home to the little apartment on Dead Horse Hill, forget all this nonsense and crawl into bed until tomorrow when the door suddenly swung inward and open. 

“Welcome to Al Anon,” a pretty, young, well dressed blonde carrying a tray full of coffee mugs said to me, ”I’m Alma.  You can sit anywhere.”

And for no good or comprehensible reason, standing there in that lonely, windowless hall with its harsh lights, the smell of coffee, and this sweet-faced stranger, I began to cry.

“Please,” she said gently, “You’ve come this far.  It’s only a few more steps.”  She balanced the tray with one hand - it trembled slightly and on sheer reflex I reached out a hand to help her steady it - she took a step back and leaned toward me with a confidential smile.  “Besides,” she stage whispered, “We have cookies.”

“Oh, well,”  I somehow managed a shaky smile, “If there are cookies…..”

The room was as colorlessly beige as the hall with a wide circle of what my grandmother would have called card table chairs lining the walls.  A table just inside the double doors offered an array of books, pamphlets, t shirts.  Another was neatly laid out with a Styrofoam cups, paper napkins and plastic spoons and a chirping coffee pot.  Two paper plates held an assortment of cookies, chocolate chip, oatmeal, raisin.  Hung above the tables were brightly colored if tattered posters held in place with scotch tape, the Serenity Prayer crookedly centered between The Twelve Steps and The Twelve Traditions.  Above them, a 20x30 sheet of poster board proudly proclaimed the name of the group, its meeting times and in heavy black script an invitation to Take what you need and leave the rest.

“Your first time?” a voice at my elbow asked quietly.

A woman, about my age, holding a chocolate chip cookie in one hand and a small blue book in the other, smiling at me.  She had kind eyes.

“I’m Denise,” she said matter-of-factly, “ I know the first time is the hardest.  You’re welcome to sit next to me.”  

I hesitated, not at all sure I could handle this much kindness.  She smiled again, nodded to the round clock on the wall.

“I’m sitting right under the clock,” she told me then added, “It gets better, hon, it really does.”

I don’t remember most of what was said or who said it.  I do remember that there were very few empty chairs, that it was mostly women in them, that there were horror stories I’d never imagined a person could live with, and that somewhere along the way, the knots in my belly untangled and I began to chip away at the walls I’d built for myself. 

Hope is a funny thing, sometimes elusive and hard to hold onto, sometimes hiding in plain sight, sometimes just around the next corner.  I’d hoped to learn how to make my husband stop drinking and instead was taught about detachment, patience, boundaries, self-esteem and faith.

Hope had blindsided me.