~Hericane~

Hana was contemplating a pink packet of saccharin while she eavesdropped on the other diner's conversations. As in most places where she stopped, they were talking about the weather.

"The weather man of channel eight said we are looking at another week in the one-twenties."

Hana accepted her eggs and bacon from the waitress with a sad smile. She sprinkled on the salt and pepper, and looked at the portrait of the desert framed by the window. She was in the middle of Death Valley and had stopped for breakfast at the "Last Chance for Food and Gas".

"I swear to god, if we didn't have air conditioning in here, we'd all by frying like sardines in a can. If we don't get some rain soon, this whole valley is going to be nothing but scorched earth."

She had left San Diego the day before with no clear destination in mind, only that she couldn't bare another second inside of her sterile home. She and John had both wanted to have many children, but after two miscarriages and three years of IVF treatments she had finally accepted that she was broken and would never be able to have children. John had said they could adopt, but she knew how important it was for him to see his own eyes looking out of his baby's face. She left because she was the broken piece of the family puzzle.

"The reservoir is 'bout to dry up, if we don't get rain soon there will be no water for the livestock."

She sliced the yoke with a toast corner and felt the first tear burning in the corner of her eye. Rather than trying to suppress it, she thought of the names of the children she would never have--Dennis, Irene, Ophelia, Vince and Katrina. When she thought of the name Katrina, she envisioned what her baby daughter would look like--big blue eyes just like her daddy and jet black hair. The first tear made a path to her collarbone that other tears began to follow.

"Looks like clouds are beginning to form over the mountains."

With the first tear set free, the others rushed to follow and soon she had a double line of tears coursing down each cheek. She was silently crying, the sub-sub's hadn't started yet, but she wasn't worried about creating a spectacle of herself in front of strangers. She knew they weren't paying any attention to her, they were looking out the window.

"Well I'll be god damned if it ain't raining!"

The first drops fell onto the tin roof where they sizzled like water in a deep fat fryer. After their entrance, bigger drops began to fall and soon the rain was sheeting down the windows and dancing on the hard baked earth. Four of the five diners at the "Last chance for Gas and Food" walked outside to tilt their faces towards the sky and allow the rain to wash the desert from their skin.

She couldn't allow herself to think about how happy the people were that it was raining, she needed to hold onto her grief and let it grow so that the rain would continue to fall. She knew that she was responsible for the rain.

It always rained when she cried.

She pulled a prescription bottle from her purse and fingered the cap. The pills inside were meant to suppress her "delusions of grandeur", but all they really did was numb her enough to stop the tears. It was true that when she took them she felt less responsible for the people affected by the drought of her not being there, and the people who drowned under the weight of her tears when she was there. But they also made her feel like a zombie.

At the age of four she thought her name was "No-NO Hana" but after hearing the Hawaiin legend of Noenoe Ua Kea O Hana, she realized that her parents were only calling her by some of her proper name, and that she was the embodiment of the girl who had been turned into a rain cloud by her father. They lived on Mount Waileaila and it was her grandmother who had told her the legend and ended with the words: "Take a nap now Maleah, and dream happy dreams so that when you waken the sun will be out and we can go to the beach."

At the age of ten her family had moved to Ocean Side California. During the first summer they went to Disneyland, and Sea World, and Knott's Berry Farm. She had a new best friend named Susan, and during that summer she was so happy that it never rained. During the Spring of the following year, Susan found a new best friend and Hana was left alone on the playground. Her tears had been so bitter that mudslides had taken out a section of the coast line. Because she was old enough to understand the concept of civic duty, she realized that she was responsible for every house that had been lost in the mudslides caused by her tears.

That was when she resolved to maintain happiness. While the families that belonged to the houses talked about all they had lost to the channel 3 anchor man, Hana was eating a banana split with her new best friend, and the rain stopped.

By the age of fourteen, Southern California was experiencing a drought and Hana knew that she had to be sad occasionally, just until the canals ran with water and all of the flowers bloomed. During the Spring months she lay in bed at night and thought of everything that would make her sad, like broken windows and puppies lost in drain pipes. As soon as the tears started forming in her eyes, the rain clouds would gather. She would fall asleep with light misty rains nourishing the land.

From the ages of 14-18, she took the time to be sad every spring so that the world would get the water that it needed. Her parents never asked her why she was said, they never asked her why she was happy either. They were busy with their own lives and they never seemed to understand that their daughter could control the weather.

At the age of 24 she married John--it was a beautiful June day without a cloud in the sky--but over the subsequent years there had been many rain storms. After the second miscarriage, John had thought that a trip to Mexico would cheer her up. Instead, her tears had been so bitter that a village was flooded and all of the little cardboard shacks were buried in the mud. The realization that she had wiped out an entire village was so intense that she fell into a depression that wouldn't be comforted by John's words that they could try again and they would have a houseful of babies.

She explained to him that she wasn't crying because of the baby she was crying because of the village that had been destroyed by her grief. He contacted their family practitioner and suggested that she take a few days at a local mental health facility. The doctor suggested that many women fell into a depression after losing a baby, and that a rest and some medication would be all that she needed.

After many sessions with her psychiatrist, she confessed her secret power over the rain and he had added the little white pills to her daily diet and admitted her to the facility for a more lengthy stay. Her mother had come to visit her and told her that it was all her grandmother's fault that she had the lunatic notion about the rain. She told her to stop telling such crazy stories so that she could go home. After three days of taking the pills she met with her counselor and he remarked that it hadn't rained in three days, and he asked her how she was feeling. She replied that she felt tired and blurry. He asked her if the foggy weather was caused by her blurry emotions and she used her mother's advice when she replied, "Of course not."

She didn't bother to explain that she caused rain, not fog. When she left the facility, she understood that she could never again admit to her power. She also felt rather proud of herself for all of the green that she saw, her previous weeks of crying and shed so much water that the residents of San Diego were able to water their lawns, fill their swimming pools and wash their cars.

Two months after being releases, she missed her period. She bought five home pregnancy kits and all confirmed that she was pregnant. She stopped taking her medication for fear of what it would do to her unborn child. The doctor confirmed her glorious news and for three weeks she imagined Katrina forming tiny fingers and itty bitty toes as cute as corn niblets. She woke every morning to her sun filled room and she would place her hands over her still flat stomach and sing lullabies. When she went grocery shopping, she bought packages of diapers and baby bottles. She began painting the nursery, she planned an under-the-sea theme complete with a mural of dolphins and angel fish.

She was buying glow-in-the dark stars to attach to ceiling of the nursery when her period started.

So did the rain.

She traded the stars for maxi-pads and left the store knowing that her tears would cause all of California to slip into the ocean. When she got onto the Interstate she didn't know where she was heading, just that she couldn't face her sterile house or the empty nursery.

She finished her breakfast and then considered the bottle of pills that would give her the blurry feeling that neither hurt nor pleased. Her intention had been to take a little sabbatical with her pills and her broken heart, but the reaction of the diner at the "Last Chance for Food and gas" gave her a better idea. It was a horrible twist of fate that she couldn't carry a baby to term, but with her ability to bring the rain she was the epitome of fertility. Every desert that she traveled through would bloom.

The pride that she felt in that moment was big enough to squash the emptiness of her childless arms. She got up from her booth and went to the restroom where she popped the top off the bottle and dumped all of the little white pills into the toilet. She knew that her husband, and parents, and doctors would be disappointed by her actions, but there were children all over the world living in drought conditions and she alone had the power to change their lives.

When she walked out of the restroom she caught sight of the diners laughing and celebrating the rain and she had to think of think of her baby names to damper the buzz of joy that would stop the rain.

She approached the waitress at the cash register with tears trembling behind her eyelashes. The waitress accepted her credit card and swiped it through the machine.

"Look at those damn fools out there, you'd think they never saw rain before I told them it was going to rain this week, weather man of channel six has been talking about the El Nina all week."

Hana walked to her car and avoided eye contact with the patrons enjoying the deluge. She thought of baby Katrina and decided that she wouldn't call John until she reached New Orleans.

~One Hundred and Ten Beers~

When I found out that Maggie had left my brother I responded with, “She’s a lesbian.” I believe this is a common reaction among woman who think their brother’s are the epitome of every thing a man should be.

My husband is Maggie’s brother, so he jumped to her defense, “No she isn’t, she’s just strong.”

As the months during the divorce stretched on the whispers on my side of the family began:
“Do you think…? Is she living with a woman, where do they sleep? Is it…do you think?”

The name Trixie began floating through my husband’s family mail, and the insinuation was the Trixie was Maggie live-in lover, though no one knew for sure. Her telephone call was the pin that popped the bubble of speculation:

“His sis! How are you and my brother doing?”
“Maggie! So good to hear your voice, we are doing just fine, works good, we are both real busy…Are you a lesbian?”
She sighed.
And then there was a silence on the line.
“Hey, you know what? Let’s pretend like I didn’t ask that, it’s none of my business.”
She sighed again.
And then she began to speak.

She told me that she was a lesbian, and that Trixie was her partner. She spoke to me in a voice that asked for neither a hall pass out of purgatory, nor the plea that I accept her lifestyle. By the end of our conversation I realized that I didn’t care what Maggie did in her bedroom, she was still Maggie

In July we embarked on our annual trip to Missouri. It is a twenty six hour trip that is driven by a man who is obsessed with beating his time. Consequently, we were on the road at 3:30 AM, with Nebraska’s ear pressed on the windshield. Fog lent the illusion that we were in a confessional, and the highway coaxed the words from my lips:

“Maggie is a lesbian.”
“No she isn’t, she’s Catholic.”
“Actually she is, she told me…and I think she is Pentecostal now.”
“Once a Catholic always a Catholic.”
“We are going to meet Trixie at the family reunion.”
“Who is Trixie?”
“Your sister’s partner.”
“Partner, like compadre or best friend.”
“No, partner like hugging and kissing and carpet munching.”
“Maggie isn’t a lesbian, she’s a-sexual. She has no interest in sex.”

At noon the following day we rolled onto the farm, and into the arms of my husbands siblings, parents, cousins, Aunt, Uncles and the guy who is just a really good friend.

And Trixie.

We spent a week, one day, never leaving our seats. The cold beer in everyone’s had was their life line out of dehydration and heat prostration, consequently, we all drank many.

We discussed our children:
“Yeah, the little brown one with the dirty face, that’s Isaac! Oh there he goes back into the woods, do you think I should make him get dressed?”
We talked about each others hair-do’s:
“So, that color is called hibiscus, do you mean it can be found in nature?”
We touched on our jobs:
“I sty because of the benefits package, this year I got a free set of hemmheroids, and a peptic ulcer.”

The sun settled into the earth and the fireflies took over the light show. Our skin went from dripping to merely oozing sweat. The frogs and crickets and cicada’s crept close to the patio to serenade us and listen to our conversation.

Trixie handed everyone a beer, and I noticed that her eyebrows were perfectly arched, and that her lipstick had held up under the humidity. I looked at Maggie and recognized that the lines between her eyes had been smoothed away, and the smile was so new that it hadn’t had time to crease her skin.

And we continued to rock and mock each other with the affection of extended family until the fireflies were exhausted and only the stars lit our faces.

When Trixie was finished handing out cold ones, she announced: “ I am going to count the cans behind grandma’s house.”

“I counted them an hour ago, and there were 110” someone announced.

“There are ten of us here, does anyone have a calculator so we can do the math to see how many beers we each drank?” came a voice out of the darkness.

When Trixie came back to the party she had new lipstick. When she got a 7up out of the fridge we realized that she had created a wonderful euphemism for vomiting, and we would be negligent in our familial duties if we did not mock her for her inability to hold her beer.

The night pulled the cool beer though our pores, and as we became anesthetized in our chairs, the unspoken truth of the lesbians was laid in the laps of the collected siblings and in-laws:

“Is it okay to call lesbians dykes?”
“Sure, if it’s okay to call straight women cock suckers.”
“You know, lesbians are in style right now, having a sister who is a dyke gives me some street creed.”

When the reunion was over, we peeled ourselves out of our lawn chairs, and poured ourselves towards home. At 3:30 am we floated on Nebraska, and again it wanted to talk about the lesbians:

“I don’t think God cares who we love, as long we are loving someone.”

“True” answered the cicada’s through my open window.

~Last Waltz~

I lay awake tonight, waiting for you to fall asleep.

Every night your shadow runs over my covers,and I hear you walk towards my bed. I think that you arrive at ten o’clock after the children and your mother are asleep. It is only logical that you would wait for our children to sleep before leaving and I hope you are home before they awaken. When you arrive I sent my internal clock at ten and I know that in eight more hours someone else will come into the room. This other person will touch me, roll me, and clean me, but this person will not speak to me. Nor will the next three people that come into the room. If they come in pairs they talk to one another. But they never talk to me.

And so all day I wait for your arrival.

You come into my room and I can smell you. You always shower before you come in and I appreciate that. You always did come to bed smelling fresh.

You walk directly towards my bed; there is no hesitation in your steps. You walk with the same bounce as you did before, and I am so glad I didn’t take that away from you also. You pull a chair towards the bed and I know that it is heavy by the sound of it dragging. I remember birthing our children at the hospital and that you slept in a reclining chair close to my bed. I imagine that the chair you pull forward now is of the same variety, and I always wish that we could have a bigger room so that you could have your own bed.

When you get the chair by the bed you take my hand and start talking to me. I always knew that response on my part was not necessary for you constant flow of words, and now I am grateful for that fact. You take my hands into your own and you stretch my fingers and rub them between your palms. I do not know if you are aware, but my hands get cramped from the lassitude of inactivity and your caresses of my hands every night revive and awaken them. When I was whole I tuned out most of the words you spoke about your day but now I listen to every syllable. I anticipate each inflection and I revel in every chuckle.

Before you fall asleep and before you are done speaking to me, I hear you kneel by my bed and pray. You whisper your prayers so softly I can not make out all of the words but I know that they are being heard because I am bathed in the sanctity of the moment. I feel you clutching my hand and I hear the emotion tangling your breath, and I pray with you. I do not know what it is you are praying for each night and so my prayer is simply that yours be heard.

When you finish praying I hear you settle back in the chair. Most nights you pull my hand close to your face and I can feel the gradual gentling of your breath. It reminds me of holding our infant children on my shoulder and feeling the slow gentle pausing in their breath that let me know they were asleep.

This was the moment I was waiting for tonight, as I am most nights. When you fall asleep, when your breath is coming in long snorts and yawns, and my hand is close to your face…then I can be with you.

While your breath caresses my still fingers, I envision us as we were.

You would be surprised to know which memories I cherish the most. You and I, we had some wonderful times together. But when I am creating our nightly scene, it is the most average of days. I recall cooking dinner, and filling your plate and serving it to you. I imagine myself folding socks while you watch the television. I see myself driving the kids to school, and I hold your hand while we watch our children at the park. I create scenes in which I am outside mowing the lawn, and you are watching me from the window. I turn and smile at you, and you come outside with an ice cold beer.

On these nights, with my hand close to your face, we go on long road trips. We float the river and catch steelhead and sturgeon. Because this is my world- my creation- I always make sure your fish is huge.

And of course we dance.

There were so many nights that you and I danced in the living room while our babies slept. You mentioned the other night that you missed dancing with me. Don’t you realize my darling? We are dancing every night while you sleep.

I was waiting for you to fall asleep tonight because we have some things to discuss. I needed for you to hold my hand close to your face, and I needed to feel you baptize me with your warm breath.

Tonight we waltzed. I made you lasagna… and we drank a bottle of wine. Then we lay by the fire and I caressed your head.

My love tonight is the night that I am leaving. I have laid here for 73 days, and I have heard your footsteps, and your prayers, and your breathing, and I do not want this for you any longer. I know that you cry when you are here, I have tasted your tears when you kissed me. I hear the breaks and starts in your voice when you bring the children and answer their questions about me. I know that you must be aching every moment of every day because of your nights in the recliner next to me.

When this accident first happened, you came near me and sobbed. You begged me to get better and come home, and so I tried. I concentrated my energy on just moving one finger, just fluttering my lids, just to do anything so that you would know I was still here. As time went by I realized that I was no longer in charge of what happens to my physical body. I can not control the movement of my bowels or bladder, and each time I feel the release of my waste, I inwardly cringe in shame and revulsion.

In the beginning you came to me with hope and promise, but I can tell that you no longer feel the same. I know this is so because you no longer say your prayers loud enough for me to hear. I can hear the difference in your muffled crying. In the beginning your cries were desperate, now they are resigned.

Tonight I waited for you to sleep so that you could walk me to the door, and I could tell you how much I have loved you.

I feel supreme guilt knowing that I can not control my body any longer. I can’t open my eyes, or even stall my breathing. I tried to get better for you, but I am not able. And I am so sorry that I have failed you.

Tonight I will do the last thing I can do for you and that is allowing this to end. You are a man of sunshine and springtime, and you were never meant to be sitting deathbed vigil in the middle of winter.

Lying here for 73 days, I have discovered the spirit/body disconnect. And I have learned the combination to your dreams. I am sure that I can still visit you there when this is over.

However, I will not do so.

You have set here for 73 days and mourned for me, and I can not bear for you to mourn another day. Tonight I am going to allow myself to escape the prison that my body has become, and my prayer is that you will escape it also.

~Why Am I in College?~

This website is set up specifically to answer the question, "Why am I in College?"

When I first heard the question my response was: I never want to ask "do you want fries with that?" ever again. I assumed that my response to that question was standard.

I was shocked to find out that the answer to that question ranges from: "I am in college because I want to achieve my full potential" to "I just want to get laid."

Perhaps you are in college right now, perhaps you went to college years ago, maybe you are planning to go to college soon. You can add to this discussion by telling me:

"Why are YOU in college?"