writer – Emily van Lidth de Jeude

Dear Little Emily: Psychosomatic

An oil painting, mainly in grey tones and white, of an elderly woman, laughing in a swoosh of white. She's holding her hands toward the viewer, and a white ptarmigan is flying out of them, towards her left, leaving a flutter of red poppy petals behind. — *Grandma Frees the Ptarmigan, oil and graphite by Emily van Lidth de Jeude*

The audio version of this story is available on my MakerTube.

Dear Little Emily,

You’re sitting on the floor of Mum and Pappa’s house, by the big brown bookshelf and the wide darker-brown row of Encyclopedia Britannicas. You have one open on your lap—number twenty-two—its huge brown covers rested against your bare knees, and you’re running your finger down the one of the many shiny, thin-paper pages of the PSYCHOLOGY section. Jeez there are a lot of things to say about psychology. But nowhere, not anywhere at all, do you see the word ‘psychosomatic’ popping up. Finally, after picking through hundreds of words you can’t bother to try out, you land upon this: PSYCHOPHYSICS, "a department of psychology which deals with the physiological aspects of mental phenomena." Mental. Grandma is a mental case, that’s for sure.

And amazingly, like the heavy book is calling her right out of crazy-land, the next listing in the book is PTARMIGAN. "A gallinaceous bird akin to the grouse." Whatever that means. It says it’s Gaelic, which is impossible, because you know ptarmigans are Canadian or Ukrainian. Grandpa is Irish and he never mentioned a ptarmigan. Grandma says ptarmigans live in Ukraine and in the Rockies, so. There they are.

But what the hell. Psychosomatic. It’s not even in the encyclopedia, right? Like even the definition of Grandma’s craziness is not in the book, that’s how imaginary it is. And the encyclopedia, now you’re nearly twelve, and it’s nineteen-eighty-seven, is the biggest, most trustworthy source of information in existence. As far as you know, little me, and you know more than some eleven-year-olds, but not nearly as much as you think you do.

You’re thinking about the last time you visited Grandma. Daddy dropped you off there for a sleepover, which seemed like a wonderful escape from the terrifying basement corner that you have to sleep in, at his house. But soon you realized there are other kinds of bad.

You sat in the wooden nook while Grandma smoothed her long, pearlescent nails. They’re three times as thick as your nails, because she’s old (though not as old as most Grandmothers, Mum says), and her nails are all covered with ridges, which she fills with layer upon layer of nail polish. You heard the plastic scrape of her nails; the rattle of her bracelets, and you shifted your gaze to the pink and turquoise squares of the kitchen floor. She was still talking, and you were getting tired. “The Devil lives in her,” she went on. “He lives in her mind and when she dies he’ll take her away to his lands.”

This wasn’t the first time Grandma professed to understand the Devil’s behaviour, and it usually somehow involved Mum. Mum says it doesn’t matter because we don’t believe in the Devil, so you sat quietly just waiting for Grandma to finish. “People who leave their husbands are evil,” she continued. “Your mother has the Devil in her heart, and you were born from that woman’s evilness. You have to pray to God to take it out of you.”

“I don’t believe in God,” you said, then, looking bravely up into Grandma’s wrinkly face; her nose kind of lumpy, in a way that made you think that must be the Ukrainian coming through. The angry concern in her sinister eyes leaked out the wrinkles of her face and into the perfect curls of her permanent-set hair. She looked like she might bite you, but you were too tired to care. It would be hours before Daddy would be there to pick you up, and by this point you thought you might fall asleep right there on the table, next to Grandma’s hands, her plastic bracelets rattling beside your head.

“Your mother taught you to say that. She put the Devil in you.”

“I’m so tired, Grandma,” you pleaded.

She looked up then, again, from her nails, and appeared surprised. “Oh, yes, dear. Would you like some Sprite?”

“Can I lie down on your bed for a minute?”

“Of course, doll-babe,” she replied. “I have to go call in the sun.”

You walked down the short hallway to Grandma’s bedroom as she slowly descended the brass-rattle staircase to the basement door, where the sun had begun to peek through, from the cedar trees, outside. “Come on, Sun!” She exclaimed. And, “oh hello, how’s your morning?” She asked of some random bird flying through her yard. And you lay there on her perfectly pink bed thinking about the mystery of fibromyalgia that caused Grandma to stand in the doorway and soak up the sun, every time it shone; that caused her, also, to keep her house a few degrees above normal, because supposedly it helped her pain. Grandma says she has fibromyalgia. Mum, Daddy, and everybody else say she has psychosomatic illness. It’s all in her head. And the Encyclopedia Britannica, for all its wisdom, has declined to comment.

You woke up with Daddy’s hand on your back. Somehow in your thoughts you’d slept two whole hours away, and it was time to go home.

Home is a place of reason; a big tree-speckled yard full of food plants and flowering plants, some ponds, rabbits, chickens, a dog and a safe house to live in. No gods or devils, no ‘fairytales’, as Pappa calls them. You eat what you grow and you see how the actual world works. Everyone is upfront, or so they say. And illnesses are real—the kinds of things you can check with a thermometer and heal with cough syrup, chicken broth, and Earl Grey tea. Nobody has psychosomatic illness in this home. Nobody also calls in the sun, nor talks to birds.

Mum says it’s not really Grandma’s fault she’s crazy. She was born to parents who fled when Russia invaded, and that kind of family trauma can make people a little strange. Grandma says she remembers her own mother hiding up in the trees as her entire village was murdered. Grandma says this as if she herself was in those trees. Which is impossible, of course, since Grandma wasn’t born, yet. But she remembers. Daddy says Grandma is just wasting Grandpa’s money by keeping the house so warm. Pappa says it’s none of our business what she does with Grandpa’s money. You just wonder why Grandma doesn’t have her own money.

Times are going to change, little Emily. Here I am, writing you from twenty-twenty-five—a date you likely find it difficult to imagine. I found it difficult to imagine the year two-thousand only months before it arrived! But here we are. You’re grown. Me. We even had kids who’ve grown up, by now. Russia is beating the shit out of Ukraine, again, and Grandma didn’t die of war or fibromyalgia; she died of strokes, kind of, in the end. Mum died of a brain tumour, and so far as I can tell, the Devil didn’t take her, because I still hear her voice in my head, sometimes reassuring me, sometimes giving her opinions, and sometimes shrieking in alarm. Maybe it’s the Devil after all. Who knows. And I have fibromyalgia.

Yeah. You. You, when you’re grown up, little me, are going to have fibromyalgia, just like Grandma. And no family member is going to dare tell you it’s all in your head, because they’ll all watch you experience the pain and struggle that this stupid illness involves. In fact, one of the doctors who diagnoses you will mysteriously test a bunch of seemingly-random spots on your limbs for pain, and when they all hurt like bruises, she’ll explain that those pain spots are specific to fibromyalgia. She’ll then suggest self-treatment by using saunas, keeping your house warm, and perhaps also trying infrared therapy. Infrared light is contained in sunlight, little Em. The doctor will one day tell you to call in the sun. Well… metaphorically-speaking.

You’re not exactly going to start calling in the sun. But I do try to soak it in as much as my fair skin and hot flashes will allow. I sit out there on the porch, watching the yard of this place you grew up in and that I eventually raised our own children in. I see the garden where I still grow most of our food, and I watch Eamon, the raven who’s been living around here for a few years now, fly low over the sunflowers, and land under the walnut. “Good morning, Eamon!” I call. He doesn’t answer, but sometimes when I’m in the garden he calls, and I do answer. We play a game where I copy his calls, and he changes them. Or at least I think we play this game. Maybe it’s all in my head. Who cares.

Love, Emily

Dear Little Emily: The Best Little Rooster Who Ever Lived

A photo of a woman and rooster, seen from behind, sitting on a garden stair, both looking out at the lush green yard and peach-coloured roses. There is a driftwood stair-railing on the right side of the photo.

This story is also available in audio form, with pictures, on MakerTube.

Dear little Emily,

Today, when you’re almost ten, my little old self, you’re sitting in the dark sparkly sand by the waves lapping. Barnacled rocks poke up from the sand into your thighs, but you don’t care. You have Pappa’s sweater on over your swimsuit, and you’re fine. You hear Mum’s guitar up on the beach, and she mutters that her fingers are too cold to play, even though the fire is right in front of her. It’s September and the family has gone to the beach, maybe for the last time, this year. It gets dark so early right now that it feels almost like Christmas, even though it’s 8pm, and you haven’t gone home for dinner. The end of the box of Old Dutch crackles between Adrian and his friends as they sit around the fire. The aunties are chatting and you can’t hear what they’re saying, but Pappa’s laugh breaks the night for a moment. You’re waiting for the stars to come out, and your heart sings,

Oh watch the stars, see how they run!
Oh watch the stars, see how they run!

Mum stops playing her guitar with a definitive hand-thud on the wooden body, and announces it’s time to go home. It was supposed to be sunnier, today, or at least you thought it would be, when it was sunny this afternoon, and you dug up the potatoes in just your t-shirt and shorts. Your bare feet had carried half the garden in with you, Pappa said. Now you’re washing them in the course gravelly sand, and you don’t want to go home.

The stars run down, with the setting of the sun.
Oh watch the stars, see how they run!

Home is a glorious converted trailer, that Pappa renovates every few years to add a little more to your bedroom. Home is where the sun peeks up over the cedar trees to come flooding slowly over the veggie garden at ten, on autumn mornings, spreading yellow over the dewy grass and the starting-to-brown veggie tops that haven’t yet been harvested. Home is where Mum does canning projects with you; sometimes they’re delicious and sometimes nobody wants to eat the zucchini pickles. Remember that year when you slipped on the log of the lettuce bed and fell splat in front of the rooster and he jumped on your face, and you were bleeding? Well I’m fifty, now, and I still have the scar. Mum said it was because he was an Araucana, and they’re so vicious. You avoided him after that, and warned your friends away from him, too. I wish you knew about Splashy.

When you’re in your forties, your teenage daughter is going to ask to get chickens. Partly out of motherly encouragement, and partly with a giddy childish excitement, you’ll agree to your daughter’s plan, and buy twenty-nine fluffy little chicks, who will spend their first few weeks in a makeshift brooder in your daughter’s bedroom, while the whole family works to finish the best-chicken-coop-ever.

This will be your first experience of “chicken math”, as you’ll later learn to call it. Chicken math, apparently, is when you calculate that eight hens and a rooster would be perfect to keep your whole family in eggs for most of the year. Of course you’ll need twice that many chicks, since half might be roosters. So sixteen, then. Seventeen for good measure, just in case. And you’ll make sure to get some winter-hardy breeds in the mix, so you still get eggs when it’s cold. The mix. Since you want a mix of breeds (brown eggs, pink eggs, blue eggs, and green eggs!) you really should hedge your bets and get at least four of each type, so there might be at least two hens of each breed, after the initial rooster cull. And since you’re buying so many breeds, well… twenty-four isn’t such a bad number, right? It will be twelve after the cull. Approximately.

Breeders are also approximate. And generous. So somehow the number will blossom from twenty-four to twenty-nine by the time the adorable little peeping boxes of fluffballs arrive. Whatever. Chicken math. More meat in the freezer, you’ll say to yourself. And by autumn you’ll indeed have plenty of meat in the freezer, as well as thirteen hens and two roosters. Lester Clark because he’s big, and the Splash, because he’s so cute.

There will be two Ameraucana chicks in that brooder in your daughter’s bedroom, and you’ll spend extra time with them, because they’ll lay green eggs. One of them will turn out to be a mean little hen, and eventually die of some sort of undetermined internal ailment. The other will be a rooster. Despite being very close in genetic heritage to that rooster who gored your face in the garden when you were little, he’s not vicious. He loves you. You will eventually figure out that he’s infertile as hell, though unfortunately you won’t realize this until after Lester Clark pecks his right eye in, and after you kill that giant mean Lester and eat him even though his meat is tough.

You will realize Splashy’s place in the family one day after his pecked-in eyeball will have risen back into its socket, and there in the sunshine of the day will be a giant squawking fracas in the chicken coop. You’ll run into the coop to find Lester Clark just standing there like a giant oaf by the coop door, Splashy having an epic battle with a giant red-tailed hawk, and all the hens crowded with their faces pressed into the corner of their house. Godiva, the actual boss and Splashy’s faithful companion, will be leaning with her back against the other hens, wings spread open to cover them, screaming wildly in the direction of the hawk. In a moment of adrenaline-fuelled foolishness, you’ll grab the hawk off of Splashy and throw it out of the run. You’ll pick up your sweet bloodied rooster and nestle him into your arms. Godiva will release the hens to their business, and Lester Clark will have his neck slit and end up as stew.

A group of black and grey chickens foraging in a clover lawn, with the base of a cedar tree and fencing in the background. In the middle of the group, a white splash-patterned rooster named the Splash stands beside a brown hen named Godiva.

So there you’ll be with eighteen hens, and just infertile little Splashy to protect them all. (Yes I know, I said thirteen, but suddenly there will be more chicks, so… chicken math.) Splashy will originally be called ‘the Splash’ because he is a ‘splash’-patterned Ameraucana. You know, like you might call your neighbour ‘the buzz-cut guy’. But the hawk incident will reveal that this little scrappy black and white dude is in fact The Splash. Not just the only splash-patterned chicken in the flock, but also the feeder of delectable grubs to the hens, the protector of chicks and brooding hens, the announcer of sunshine in the morning, the afternoon, and the moon in the middle of the night, the hunter of rats even in the pitch black, and the faithful companion of Godiva, who is the boss of him, too. Splashy will be The man.

Splashy, despite incongruously being an Ameraucana, will be the only chicken ever in your life who actually wants to be picked up, and when nestled into your adult arms, will promptly fall asleep—always, and without fail. His little whitish eyelids will sink upwards to close, and he’ll murmel his beak like a little old man, contemplating. He’ll need to rest from his constant vigilance over his flock, and your arms are the only place he can do that, most of the time. He’ll become your little love. He’ll hop up on the box outside your bedroom window, crane his neck inside if the screens are off, and crow into your face until you get up, scratch his tiny little wattles, and tell him good morning. Then he’ll go back to stomping circles around the younger hens, herding any potentially-broody hens into nesting boxes, and having his head checked for mites by Godiva.

It’s always a special day when eggs hatch. You’ll know it’s time, because chickens’ hearing is much better than yours, little Em, and they’ll all be standing around craning their heads towards the nesting box for a few hours before the first chicks pip. As hatching days go on, the best brood hens will chase every other chicken away, besides Splashy and Godiva, the undisputed leaders of the flock. And they’ll come and go, eating some chick feed, rearranging some bedding, and often just standing silently, listening to the peeping from under their broody flock-mate.

After a few days, when the hen emerges with her brood, Splashy will stay nearby, standing sentinel between her chicks and any potentially-ill-intentioned other hens. He’ll support her and her chicks until they’ve grown big and independent, running freely all over the yard, digging up your veggies, and roosting in trees that the older chickens can no longer fly to. After a while, Splashy will start chasing away the little cockerels, until eventually you’ll move them to the bachelor pad, before slaughter day.

Slaughtering is not something you will ever enjoy, little Em. I know you’re semi proud, right now, that you can butcher a chicken or rabbit without help, but you don’t have to do the killing yet, now you’re only nine, and Pappa still kills the livestock for you. He’ll teach you, of course, eventually, to kill your own meat. But all of your life until you’re me, now, at fifty, it will still be hard to do. I think I turn off my heart to do it. Slowly. That’s why we have a bachelor pad, now. Practically, the separate run for roosters is a means to feed them their own high-protein feed, and keep them from fighting for a few weeks while they put on some meat before butchering. But it’s also the place I harden my heart against them. I distance myself as I bring them treats. I stop calling them “my love” or “sweetheart”, and I stop loving them.

When slaughter day comes, I take them to the cone, and get the job done, silent tears falling, but no big fuss. They’re just meat, now, as Mum says to you. We’ve learned to do this more humanely, now, settling the gigantic feather-monsters into a big aluminum cone, and gently guiding their heads to hang out the bottom, where I slit their necks until their blood runs straight into the bucket, below. They bleed out in less than a minute, kick their legs mindlessly as their muscles lose contact with their brains, and die. It’s a lot less traumatic than the way Pappa does it, holding them against the ground and chopping their heads off against a board, then holding their flapping, kicking bodies away from himself, as the blood spews. You’ll learn to do that too, of course, before discovering the cone. But the cone will be a relief. A small bit of mercy in a horrible job. But, as Mum and Pappa always say, if you want to eat meat, you need to accept that you’re eating an animal. You need to kill.

Splashy never went into the bachelor pad, of course. He walked around to look at the young boys in their new digs, but he never went in. I always wonder if he knows where they’re going, even though we take pains to never slaughter within view of the other chickens. It’s funny we call these choices “humane”, when humans are probably the least compassionate species ever to exist. Not true, Splashy would say, as he tilts his one good eye up at me and clucks. He loves me, and as of now, I know he thinks I’m compassionate. Or at least he did when I killed him.

For the past year, Splashy’s had some kind of neurological problem, we think. A few times, he ended up upside down on the ground, just looking around him, but unable to right himself. Like a June-beetle fallen on its back. The hens just stood around looking at him, until we found him and set him upright again, and he just walked away as if the day was fine, stomping his feet around his favourite hens, in circles.

But these last few weeks he’s been going to bed early, and then eventually he stopped sleeping on the roost, choosing instead to nest on the wood-chipped floor outside the nesting boxes. Again and again, we found him there, with Godiva standing guard over him. His legs seemed to get weaker and weaker. He tumbled down the ramp out of his house in the mornings, rolling onto the ground and then getting up to go outside like all was well. Falling off stairs and down hills just became his way of getting around. He still found insect snacks for his ladies. He still kept his good eye trained on the sky, watching for threats as the flock foraged. He still came over to see me when I checked on him. Until one day he could barely get up at all, so we took him inside for the day. The autumn sun came out, outside the house – the same house you live in now, little Em, and where I’m still raising chickens, now. That golden light tumbled through the foggy yard and onto the browning veggies; the celery tops curling against their weakening stalks, and the empty squash vines shrinking away into the dewdrop-lit grass.

I brought him in every day and cuddled with our Splashy. I called him “my sweetheart” and “my little love”, and he closed his eyes and leaned his beak against my cheek. Pappa came by and saw him sitting in his box in the living room. He said it was cruel to keep him alive like this, and I knew he was right. But I couldn’t bring myself to kill my Splash. Not this rooster. So again, we carried him out to the chicken house and put him to bed on the chips. Godiva came to stand by him again, and he pecked her, sending her away. He slept alone. The next day he couldn’t get up at all.

A closeup photo of a woman with brown hair tied back, in a red sweater, holding a white and black splash-patterned rooster in her arms. The rooster is resting his beak against her nose, and his eye is half closed.

That day was beautiful. The dew dried right off the whole yard and the sun warmed everything. The light was orange, almost like during a wildfire, but pinker, too, this time, like it was beckoning Splashy to join it. I laid him on the grass and brought him blackberries and other treats. He shared them with all the older hens, pecked the younger ones to keep them at bay, and Godiva never came back to him.

As the sun set, Splashy’s flock took themselves to bed without him, and he looked up at me with his one good eye. I knew it was time, but I didn’t know what to do. I asked our partner to bring me the sharp knife and a towel, and then I just sat there in the deepening evening with our brave little man on my lap. Our partner dug a hole next to the chicken run, where Splashy could always be close to his flock, and I said, “should I kill him at the side of the hole, on the ground, or in my lap?”

“I don’t know,” our partner replied. We were both empty of reason and joy.

I decided the hole was more practical, so I knelt down beside it, the knife in one hand, and my little white splash rooster in the crook of my other arm. I laid him down against the ground and he gave a huge flap, writhing his whole body as if to save himself. I was so alarmed and upset I jumped up, saying, “oh no!” And “I can’t do this!”

Then I sat back on the chair we’d been in for hours, letting Splashy settle back onto my lap. He looked straight in my eyes, and then rolled over on my lap, stretching his legs and breast out as far as he could. He stretched his neck out too, baring his throat to me, and waited. I held the sharpest knife against his throat, and in a rare and awful stroke of misluck, I failed to cut through his skin. Horrified, I gasped, and he just lay there, still waiting. With our partner’s help, I gathered my nerves and killed the most sensitive, beautiful, brave and clever chicken I ever knew. And we shed a million tears as we buried him there with a heap of autumn marigold flowers and yarrow leaves.

It was so dark by the time our Splashy was buried, that we stood in the damp evening, looking up together at the darkening sky, waiting for the stars to come out. Our partner put his arms around me and we just stood there, looking sometimes at the darkness at our feet; sometimes into the deep, deep blue. And in the safe arms of my partner, I sang,

Oh watch the stars, see how they run!
Oh watch the stars, see how they run!
Oh the stars run down, with the setting of the sun.
Oh watch the stars, see how they run!

The sun still came up the next day. Some small animal dug at the dirt over where Splashy was buried. We planted giant allium bulbs with him, and they’ll bloom next spring. At the time I’m writing to you, we’ve already introduced a new rooster to the flock, and he’s learning his boundaries from the hens. Godiva ignores him.

Little Emily, this life is full of so much pain and so much beauty. If a chicken can teach us about acceptance and love, then there is hope for our world, despite the sometimes bleak odds. The darkness falls and somebody still crows, the next morning.

Love, Emily

Dear Little Emily: Mickey O'Flaherty and the Dog Poop

A row of six children stands against a few shrubs and a wooden fence.

The audio version of this story is now also available on my MakerTube!
https://makertube.net/w/4ikHDR1cK3fhjeNB7cxSm8

~~*~~

Dear Little Emily,
When you grow up, you’re going to keep singing with Mum, at the folksong retreats. Mostly the old ballads and work-songs that you usually sing, with all the spirituals that tie your hearts up into warm packaged balls of hope. And also sometimes songs Mum’s written. Like this one:

Well I know your Darn Dog done been here,
Done been here, neighbour, done been here!
I know your Darn Dog done been here,
He done blessed my yard and gone.

Mum is really never going to stop writing parodies. This one is of “I Know My Good Lord Done Been Here”, and you’ll be mighty glad Daddy will be dead by the time she writes it, because he’d sure not appreciate the vain usage of his Lord’s name! Haha. Pretty sure you would have sung it to him if she was going to write it while he was alive. Sometimes you’ll be so embarrassed, though, and this is no exception, although by the time you sing this, you’ll be me—your adult self—and have learned that a little embarrassment is worth the reward of a great memory.

Good morning, Mr. Otis
I wonder where you’re bound
You look like you’re on a mission
And you’re walking on landscaped ground

Well I know your Darn Dog done been here,
Done been here, neighbour, done been here!
I know your Darn Dog done been here,
He done blessed my yard and gone.

One of Mum’s favourite memories to tell, is of Mickey O’Flaherty. Even his name seems to delight her, and the stories fall out of Mum all your life long. I know you know this already. You’re around ten. But it never stops—I promise.

Mum has a framed photo on her wall of herself and Uncle Jim, and a bunch of their friends standing in a line on their street in Mill Valley, where they grew up. Six kids. Uncle Jim is the weirdo on the right with his legs and eyes crossed. Mum is third in from the left, and just beside her sheepish grin, Mickey O’Flaherty’s ears stick out. He looks like he’s just about to say something. Maybe that’s my imagination. He apparently had a lot to say.

Mum likes to tell about the protest signs Mickey put up on his front lawn, declaring “My Mother won’t give me hot chocolate!” and other such things. Apparently Mickey used to have breakfasts at little Mum’s house in the mornings, before they went off to school with Katie and the other kids. He spent a lot of time at Mum’s house. Grandma looked after him, I guess, because his mother was single. I guess like Mum was single for a little while after she left Daddy, and you both lived in the apartment, and Pappa brought you groceries, before he became your Pappa. So I guess maybe you have Mickey’s sense of humour to thank for Mum’s silliness. And perhaps this song.

You know that poodle Mitzi
She’s easiest to find
She’s just like Hansel and Gretel
She keeps leavin’ her crumbs behind

Well I know your Darn Dog done been here,
Done been here, neighbour, done been here!
I know your Darn Dog done been here,
He done blessed my yard and gone.

So the best story goes like this: There was some rude neighbour—and that’s important—he wouldn’t have met the same fate if he hadn’t been rude to children. And on top of all that, his dog used to poop all over the neighbourhood. So (and Mum swears this was Mickey’s idea), she and Mickey did a community service and picked up all this neighbour’s dog’s poop, and gift-wrapped it beautifully. They tied it up with a string and put a neatly-written note on top, that said, “Your dog did this. Be proud!” Then they set it on the neighbour’s doorstep, rang the bell, and departed.

I used to walk out barefoot
When I was just a lass
I don’t walk barefoot anymore
Because there’s danger in the grass

And I know your Darn Dog done been here,
Done been here, neighbour, done been here!
I know your Darn Dog done been here,
He done blessed my yard and gone.

So when you’re all grown, little Emily, you’re going to make a big road-trip down the coast, with your own teenaged children, and you’ll stop in Mill Valley, on Meadow Road, to look at the house our mother grew up in. The house will look rather as she described it: A single-story home with a garage and a lawn. You can imagine little Mum on that lawn, spread out with Mickey and Katie and maybe Uncle Jim, all painting on scraps of cardboard, some kind of creative advocacy for their rights. Mum spent her whole life advocating for children’s rights, as a preschool teacher. Although by the time you’re grown she’ll be an infant development consultant, doing the same thing. Did their exploits inspire her?

Around about now, when you’re ten, Mum and Pappa want to get you a passport, but Daddy won’t allow it. He’s fighting for custody of you, and I know you’re scared. Scared that every time Mum and Pappa come back from that courtroom it will be to say goodbye; to send you off to Daddy’s house forever. I wish I could tell you right now, Mum would never let that happen. She may not have money for a lawyer, and she may just be a preschool teacher married to a bearded man with a woven tie who cringes at the sight of documents, but she knows how to speak up for herself and your rights, and she’ll find a lawyer at the last second; a friend who is a straight-standing, clean-shaven man in a crisp suit and who will walk into that courtroom and silence all those people trying to take you away from her. He’ll silence them just by walking in like he belongs there. He walks like a man who knows he’s worth something. Like maybe his mother was like your mother, and knew how to give children a voice. That friend will save your life that day, little Emily. But he’ll be there because Mum was brave enough to ask him. And maybe all of it because she and Mickey developed their voices as children, so they could speak up when others couldn’t.

Good morning to you, neighbour
And how do you do?
I’d ask you in for coffee
But you’d get dog shit on your shoe!

And I know your Darn Dog done been here,
Done been here, neighbour, done been here!
I know your Darn Dog done been here,
He done blessed my yard and gone.

Sing the songs, little Emily. No matter how embarrassing. You never know where they came from nor what importance they carry. Sing the songs with your friends, now, and with your children and their friends, later. You’re going to be a teacher, too, and an artist, and you, too, can give people a voice, even though right now when you’re ten you don’t feel you have one at all.

I think it’s the struggle we go through as children that gives us the courage and power to stand up for others, later on. I wonder what became of Mickey O’Flaherty. What will your fear of going to Daddy’s house do for you? Your fear of speaking up, and the danger of not speaking up? I mean – I’m almost fifty, now. I kind of know what you’re going to do with your life. But I think I’ll leave that to you to discover, as you go. Sometimes the joy is in the finding. Unless it’s poop you find, I guess.

Well I know your Darn Dog done been here,
Done been here, neighbour, done been here!
I know your Darn Dog done been here,
He done blessed my yard and gone.

Love, Emily

Dear Little Emily: Katie's Thermometer

A man with short blond hair and a red and black checkered jacket holds a baby goat up to a woman in the open door of a car. The woman looks lovingly into the face of the small goat, her long straight white hair falling around her face.

Dear Little Emily is a series of letters to my childhood self, exploring loss, love, and personal growth.

~*~

Dear little Emily,
Do you remember Mum’s friend Katie? I mean, of course not, because we weren’t born yet. But I know Mum told you, with a sparkle in her eyes. When Mum was a girl, and lived in Mill Valley, Katie’s mother used to take her temperature every morning before school, in the little cookie-cutter house that was just like Mum’s, and sometimes Katie would bite the thermometer in half, and pour out the silver-heavy drop of mercury into her hand, and carry it out to play with. Mum and Katie delighted at the way the mercury rolled over their hands; wondered at the pure and clandestine droplet of magic. Funny to think that it was poison, when everything about it was so curative—the thermometer, the naughtiness, and the friendship.

I was thinking of this while taking my temperature, today; looking for the fine line of silver on the old thermometer that has survived for decades while countless surely-better digital thermometers died and went to plastic heaven. Like Mum. Is there a heaven for children who grew up to have their own children, and worked their lives away, and then retired and died of brain tumours, cut just under their white and beautiful hair, just as we expected them to finally start living? Is there a heaven for children who treasured and understood the joy of play so well that they grew up to teach and care for children all their lives; to learn and practise and master the art of growing through play? Children who played with mercury? Like Mum?

Little Mum sat in her classroom after she’d moved north from Mill Valley, and stared out the window at the first snowflakes she’d ever seen. Her teacher rapped the back of her hand with a ruler, to punish her for not paying attention. Mum grew up to have her children in Canada, where she delighted in the snow falling, and rolling and jumping and sledding in it, and in skating on the frozen lakes. She took you and little Adrian out to play not only in the snow, but the waves and the forests and the fields of most beautiful grasses and flowers and insects. She married a man who brought you gifts of found animals—almost-pets that you could never keep but who opened your hearts to a sense of wonder. You and Adrian will both become teachers. You and Adrian will never stop playing, even though the constraints of our worker-hungry world will try to make you.

Right now, little me, you’re ten; maybe eleven. You think Mum’s harsh because she says you really do have to learn the long division, even though it’s obviously stupid. Like a game of numbers that has no purpose but to prove your insufficiency. Like the barely-visible stripe on the thermometer: Always insufficient. Always too low to mean staying home from school. There is no such thing as a proficient thermometer.

Mum says babies are born proficient. They can breathe, and pee and poop, and they take only a day or so to learn how to nurse; no time at all to learn to cry, to tell us they need us. They need our love. And in that warm circle of our love, they grow. By the time they’re a month old, they’re proficient at so many things, from telling us when they need a diaper change, to when they’ve had enough milk, to using their ears and eyes and fingers and tongues to explore their growing world. And as soon as we notice these proficiencies, we try to control them.

By the time they’re a few months old, babies have learned to navigate our systems and controls; to cry only enough to get what they need, even if love is not available; to make do in a world that is ever-more restrictive. They’ve learned to grow despite the challenges we present. And by the time they’re half-grown, like you are, now, my little old self, they’ve learned to hide their true selves away: to master the art of appearing-to-be-doing-something, while growing in secret; breaking the thermometer to go do science at the back fence on the way to school. By the time they’re twenty, they’ve come to recognize the restrictions were for their safety, and by the time they’re thirty-five, like Mum is now, in your world, little Emily, they’ve learned to tell their children to finish their long division homework. Even if they wish they didn’t have to.

I’m almost fifty, now, little Em. I took my temperature, today, because I have Long Covid, and I get a fever from over-exerting myself, like I did today, by visiting with my Aunties. I wanted to break the thermometer, but I guess I was never as brave as Katie from Mill Valley in Mum’s childhood. I’d be so angry if my own children behaved so recklessly. What have we done? What have we done to ourselves, and our children, and our future?

Not wanting to be the parent our mother was, but inspired by her knowledge about child development, and by my own teaching experience, I ended up unschooling our children; Mum’s grandchildren. Much to her initial concern, but I did it anyway. I explained that it was like taking the premise of her child-centred preschool and expanding it to the whole life of the child: To present and encourage opportunities for growth, and to always support the children in their endeavours, while being a bit of a safety-net, on the other side.

One day, before Mum’s dead, you will show your children the game of long division. You’ll sit them at the dining-room table, your eyes full of excitement, and show them how the numbers fall into place like satisfying blocks tumbling into their designated holes in the block-sorting-box. Your daughter will expand the game into a mind-bending board-game, and your son will revolt, but then go on to take a calculus course at a local college, in his teens. For fun. We can’t always know how a child will experience wonder, but we can make space for it.

The unschooling “worked”, you might say. Your one-day kids are grown, now, and living independently; supporting themselves with varying degrees of financial security. And they’re happy. They live their lives in the world I failed to change, but somehow they are the change. I never gave them a mercury thermometer in their lives, because I was afraid they’d break it for fun, and maybe poison themselves.

Little Emily, I’m sorry you have to do your long division. I’m sorry you also never were left with a fun little stick of mercury to break out and roll around in your palm. But you had salamanders and frog’s eggs. You had trees to climb at lunch hour. You had a mother who took snow days very seriously, as she did “town days”, which meant getting out of school and going for adventures in town. And she won’t flinch much, when you tell her her grandchildren are leaving her preschool not to go to school, at all. She’ll cringe and fight it just a little before she, like all humans do, grows from the experience. She’ll sometimes take them for town days, too. And give them silly putty to play with, even when they’re ten or eleven, and listening to music that horrifies her. She knows what matters to them, as it does to all people growing. Even to aging preschool teachers who are about to die of brain cancer, and just don’t know it yet.

What matters is nurturing growth. Play. Discovery. Mum never lost the ability to wonder; to make space in her own life for joy. Just before she died, last year, her movements and language oppressed by the tumour’s growth in her left parietal lobe, her heart broken by the grief of saying goodbye, Mum went to visit Adrian’s new baby goats. The last trip she made outside of her house in this life was to look lovingly into the eyes of these babies as she did thousands of times in her life, with baby humans. She couldn’t speak anymore, but her eyes tell me she saw those babies’ potential. She saw their little growing selves and all the dreams they didn’t yet know they were going to dream.

Wonder. Mum didn’t look at them to see their sense of wonder, but I know that seeing the wonder in those babies’ eyes connected her to her own. The wonder we allow children to experience is what can sustain them through a lifetime of having to make do in a world that is never ideal. Wonder gives them a space to discover, learn, and grow. And in the end, when their lives are coming to an end, it gives them joy.

After Mum died, I dreamed I was holding her on my hip, and turning around in our yard, as she pointed wordlessly to the sparkling needles on the trees, the flock of singing birds flying by, and then the bulbs coming out of the snow and blooming. We turned further and she pointed at the veggie seedlings on the black earth, and the worms and beetles and pupae in the ground, bustling about their lives. We looked up, and she pointed at the sky, which had become a prismatic dome of light, shining above us, in a perfect white that somehow let its rainbow self show at all the edges. A matrix of wonder.

Little Emily, our mother was a conduit of wonder. She knew what children and all people need for growth, and she did her best to give you that gift.

Love, Emily