Excerpt
from Finding Grace: A True Story About Losing Your Way In Life...And Finding It Again
by Donna VanLiere
Chapter 1
We moved to our home in Medina, Ohio in the spring of 1970, when I was three. My brother Brian was seven and got his own room, the green one with the short, shaggy dark green carpet. I shared a room with my sister, Mary Jo (we call her Josie . . . like Jocie, not Jozey) who is nearly ten years older than me. We got the baby aspirin orange room with the orange shag carpet and my parents got the all purple room. The family room was pink, the living room blue and the kitchen had bluish-green patterned indoor-outdoor carpeting and avocado appliances. The house screamed 1960's!
There were a few homes on our road but it was mostly farmland. Our split-level house had a long, black top driveway, huge front lawn, brick front, a white barn in the back that would hold my dad's tractors and gardening equipment and over an acre of land behind the barn for a garden that could feed most of Medina County (my parents never believed in small gardens). Our neighbor Mr. Lake also had a garden behind his barn. Bud Lake had a round chest that was slick as a watermelon. It actually glistened on hot summer days when he worked outside. When we met Mr. Lake for the first time I whispered to my mother, "That man doesn't have any hair on his chest." She tried to shush me but I was three and lacked whispering skills. Mr. Lake believed in using manure for fertilizer. He'd haul in a huge load from somewhere and let it percolate inside his barn before he used it. His garden always smelled crappy but it was lovely.
A dairy was just up the street and Mr. Lake walked to work there every morning with his lunch pail in hand. Sometimes (but not nearly enough) he'd bring home a package of ice cream bars and hand them to me. Life couldn't get any better than on those free ice cream bar days. One morning as I played in the driveway I was talking to myself, weaving together an outlandish tale full of colorful characters, intrigue and drama. I froze when I saw Mr. Lake peering from behind one of his trees, listening to me. "Go on," he said. "I can't wait to hear what happens." Stage fright hit me and I couldn't utter another word. I ran toward our garage door and heard Mr. Lake laughing from his yard.
Across the road was a pasture full of cows for the dairy and right next to us was an old farmhouse where our other neighbors lived. For the sake of this story I'll just call them the "Taylor's." Theirs was not a charming farmhouse in any way. The exterior hadn't been painted in years and what was left of the old paint fell like curly, white pencil shavings around the house. A distinct odor of aged, rotting wood, cigarettes, and filth met you before stepping onto the porch. My mother was and is a no nonsense woman. She and my father both grew up in east Tennessee working on farms that fed fifteen children in my father's family and five in my mother's. My dad's oldest sibling, my Aunt Stella was born the same year as my maternal grandmother, Mary Hurley. As Grandma Hurley grew, got married and began having children of her own, my Grandma Payne was still giving birth to her fifteen children. When she died in 1972 her death certificate claimed she was just worn out.
My mother was always very practical (as I write this sitting at a plastic folding table I know the apple hasn't fallen too far from the tree) and called things as she saw them. On more than one occasion I remember her looking at our neighbor's home and saying, "Move next to a dump and you live next to trash." I didn't know what she meant.
When we moved to Medina my mom worked at the latex factory, the flower container factory and then later, the box factory. (My sister eventually worked at the pickle factory.) My mother settled on cleaning homes as a business because she could set her own hours and be home when we got off the school bus in the afternoon. My dad worked second shift in one of the steel mills in Cleveland; the same one he'd worked in since he moved to Ohio in 1955 and ultimately retired from forty years later. At night I'd fall asleep in my mother's bed and when my dad got home in the early morning hours he carried me to my orange room. I never remembered a thing.
After I learned to read I would crawl into bed with my mom and read her stories. Mother would come home from the factory and make dinner for my siblings and me, maybe do a load of laundry or scrub a spot on the indoor/outdoor kitchen carpet before turning in each night. I'd rifle through my books or the ones we'd picked up at the library and read one after the other out loud to my mother as she fell asleep. I'd look over at her and think, "Why are you so tired?" I'd read till I got sleepy and then turn out the light, thinking about new books to bring home.
George and Tess Taylor lived next door to us with their five children who were all much older than me except Tom, who was my age. Sometime after our move I walked across the field that divided our homes with my mother and met the Taylors. Tom was in the yard playing with the family's shaggy, bounding yellow dog. "I'm Tom," he said, pounding the dog's side. "And this is Ziggy, the butt sniffing dog." He smacked the dog's muzzle back and forth and took off running. Ziggy chased after him and pushed his snoot into Tom's rear end, hoisting him into the air. "That's why we call him a butt sniffer," Tom yelled, laughing.
"Stop doing that to that dog," Tess said, taking a drag off her cigarette. "You'll turn him mean." Tess had a mess of reddish orange hair and the longest toenails I'd ever seen in my life. She was wearing sandals (no way those nails could fit inside a shoe) and an orange jump suit with a belt that tied in the front. Although it was the seventies I can proudly say that my mother never owned a polyester jumpsuit. Tess was down to earth and warm and called me Sugar Pop most of the time.
Tom had dark hair and eyes like his dad, his brother Kevin and his sister, Cindy who had enormous breasts. Of course the hugeness was accentuated by the lack of bra she often excluded. As Tom and I played in the back yard one day he stopped, doubled over and vomited right on his feet. I ran to the house to find Cindy. She was on the front porch, ironing. Her breasts swayed from side to side as she moved the iron back and forth over a shirt. "Tom just puked," I said.
I couldn't remember the other word for puke. My mind raced: It was a grown-up word, what did it start with? Hurry. Hurry. Oh, I got nothing. "He just opened his mouth and all sorts of chunks flew out," I said. She jumped off the porch and I couldn't believe that whatever was under her t-shirt was actually attached to her body. She helped Tom to the porch and went back to her ironing. I watched in silence then finally asked, "Do you have water balloons under there?" She reared her head back and laughed. I didn't know if that was a yes or no.
I don't know where George worked and I don't think Tess did anything more than smoke cigarettes and paint her toenails. I'd often catch her slathering on a new coat of candy apple red when I'd be playing at their house. I'd look down at those ugly, glistening nails when she was finished and wonder if she took the skin off George's shins in bed each evening. These were the things that kept me up at night. That, and why Tarzan didn't have a beard.
I never really got to know the oldest siblings, Marty and Tabitha. They weren't interested in me and I don't remember having a conversation with them. Kevin was in the middle: younger than Cindy and older than Tom who had long, greasy hair and a dour personality. "There's just something about that kid that I don't like," my mother said time and again. I didn't like him, either but I didn't know why. He'd never done anything to me and like his older siblings; he never paid attention to me but I hated it when he called Tom a little shit or piss head and I wondered why George or Tess didn't make him stop. Cindy was definitely my favorite of Tom's siblings. She gave me a piece of candy any time I asked for it and that made her tops in my book. After a while I learned to ignore her great, heaving breasts and love her for the buxom candy dispenser that she was.
Tom was either at my house in our giant sandbox making what he called "butt butt trails" or I was crossing through the field to play with him and Ziggy. My mother was at the grocery store one afternoon when Tom came over to play. We wandered into the barn, a place my mother had told me countless time I "had no business being in" and climbed on top of a huge oil barrel with a lid. I was pretending to be a bus driver when my weight collapsed the outer rim of the lid and my leg fell down into the barrel. I screamed as sharp metal broke the skin on my thigh, just above my knee and my leg was immersed in oil. To this day I don't know why my dad had a huge barrel of oil inside the barn but he did and I took a bath in it. I tried to pull myself out but couldn't get a good grip; my hands were too slippery. Tom yanked on my arms till I was able to hoist myself up and over the rim.
A dark mixture of oil and blood streamed down my leg and I grabbed one of my dad's barn rags to wipe it off. Tom found a rag and began wiping as well. I was a bloody, oily mess and my mother wasn't home. I sat on the barn floor and pressed the oily rag onto the cut, waiting for it to stop bleeding but it wouldn't. Tom pushed the rag harder into my leg as we waited. With my vast medical knowledge of boo boos, I quickly surmised that I needed a Band Aid. I stood and bent over, holding the rag in place as I made my way to the house and down the mudroom stairs. I took short, quick steps through the family room, careful not to drip oil or bleed onto the pink, shag carpeting and climbed to the middle of the stairs that led to the kitchen. My teenage sister was sitting at the table, eating. "Donna needs a band aid," Tom said, standing beside me.
"What for?"
"She scratched herself in the barn." I felt the blood soaking through the rag and pressed harder before I bled on the blue stairs.
"Let me see it," Josie said.
"I don't want to come upstairs," I said. "Just throw a Band Aid down to me."
Josie got up and saw the rag I was holding to my oil streaked leg. She took me into the mudroom and cleaned me up, using a clean rag to stop the blood. "By the time you grow up that scar will be two inches long," she said. It's not, by the way. When my mother got home from the market she was told by the doctor that it was too late to put stitches in my leg because it had stopped bleeding. Later that night she said, "I told you you've got no business playing out in that barn. Guess you learned the hard way." Parents always fall back on that.
After I fell out of the apple tree (the same one my mother told me not to climb) and broke my arm my mom said, "Guess you learned the hard way." After I fell down the stairs (the ones my mother told me not to run on) and broke my other arm my mom said, "Guess you learned the hard way." And after I broke my first arm again trying to jump over a lamp on the end table in the family room while watching The Carol Burnett Show (the lamp my mother told me to stop trying to jump over) my mom said, "Guess you learned the hard way." I never got to finish that episode of The Carol Burnett Show.
My days were filled with as much play time as I could pack into them. There were plenty of trips to the emergency room but I had fun getting there. That was still the time when mothers told their children to go outside and play and called them inside at dark to take a bath. If there were problems in the world, I was unaware of them but that would change.
The above is an excerpt from the book Finding
Grace: A True Story About Losing Your Way in Life . . . And Finding It
Again
by Donna VanLiere. The above excerpt is
a digitally scanned
reproduction of
text from print. Although this
excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the
scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.
©2009 Donna VanLiere, author of Finding Grace: A True Story About Losing Your Way in Life . . . And Finding It Again