In 1965 when I was a freshman in college my parents bought their first home ever in Rosenberg, Texas , after almost twenty years of marriage.   My dad was the assistant superintendent of the local school district and my mother taught second grade in one of the elementary schools in the district.   Since I wasn’t living with them, I’m not sure how the decision was made to hire someone to help with cleaning the bigger new house, but when I was home for spring break, my mom introduced me to Viola, who was hired for that purpose.   When I returned to stay the summer with my folks, Viola was gone.

I never knew what happened to Viola but was so self- absorbed I didn’t really care.   Early in the summer Mom informed me we would have a new woman who was coming to work for us and encouraged me to keep the stereo at a lower volume on the lady’s first visit.   I was in a Diana Ross and the Supremes phase and preferred the speakers to vibrate as I sang along but I obligingly lowered the level for our potential new household addition.

I needn’t have bothered.   Willie Meta Flora stepped into our house and lives and rocked all of us for more than forty-five years.   She became my mother’s truest friend and supported her through the deaths of her mother, brother and two husbands.   She nursed my grandmother and my dad and uncle during their respective battles with mental illness, colon cancer and cerebral palsy.   She watched over and protected and loved and cared for my family as she did her own, which included five daughters and two sons and an absentee husband.   In many ways, we became her second family and she chose to keep us.

Willie and my mom shared a compulsion for honesty and directness that somehow worked to keep them close through the good times and the hard times in both of their lives.  They were stubborn strong women and butted heads occasionally, but most of all, they laughed together.   Willie’s sense of humor and quick wit kept Mom on her toes and at the top of her game in their talks.   They also shared a deep love for the same man, my dad.   In her own way, Willie loved my dad as much as Mom did, and my father loved her and loved being with her right back.    His death broke both their hearts.

Although Willie kept her own apartment, she and Mom basically lived together in the years following the death of Mom’s second husband.   Mom planned her days around the time near dusk when Willie would be there to spend the night with her.  Willie became her lifeline to maintaining her independence, and the two of them grew older and crankier as time passed.   Willie and I talked on the phone frequently, and she began to tell me she was worried about Mom’s safety and getting lost when she drove around town in her old brown Buick LeSabre.    I dismissed her fears and ignored the signs of dementia until Mom’s 80th birthday when it became apparent she had major problems in everyday living.

Not long afterwards, I was forced to make a decision about my mother’s long term care needs and opted to move her to a Memory Care Unit in a facility in Houston which was a thousand miles from my home in South Carolina .   Why not move her closer to me?   A good question with a complicated answer that included my trying to keep her available to Willie and her family who could drive Willie to see Mom.  If my mother could choose between visiting with me or seeing Willie, there was no contest.   I would always come in second.

Mom will be 85 next month and struggles with the ongoing physical and mental battles associated with Alzheimer’s in her ultimate race towards death.   This past fall I moved her again to a different residence that is still in Texas but much closer to my second home which is also now in Texas.   Alas, she’s two hours farther from Willie, and Willie has only been able to visit her once since her move.

Willie will be 81 next month.   She and Mom have the same birthday month, and now they have the same disease.   We don’t talk on the phone now because she can’t form words I can understand.   When I visited her yesterday, she didn’t recognize me and was uncomfortable with getting up out of her bed, just as Mom is sometimes when I go to see her.   Willie’s five daughters and three of her granddaughters are coping with the same problems I’ve faced with Mom–trying to keep her comfortable in a safe environment.   They have the additional complications of differences of opinion about Willie’s care and what the environment should be.   I decided being an only child has a few advantages.

          When I consider the strength of these two women and their determination to rise above their inauspicious beginnings in an era when women weren’t valued for their strong wills, I feel a sense of admiration and respect and gratitude for the examples they’ve been for me and for Willie’s daughters, too.   We are the children of our mothers and we reflect their strengths and weaknesses in black and white.   Theirs was a mysterious bond that we may never fully understand, but the similarity of their physical and mental conditions in these last days is surreal and takes irony to a new dimension.   Leora, one of Willie’s daughters, told me recently she thought Mom and Willie just might end their race toward death in a tie.   I think it will be a photo finish.

A sad but apropos postscript: Wille M. Flora died April 14, 2012.  Selma L. Meadows died Wednesday April 25, 2012.

Sheila Morris was born and raised in rural Grimes County, Texas and describes herself as an essayist with humorist tendencies.   She is the author of two memoirs, Deep in the Heart – A Memoir of Love and Longing and Not Quite the Same. She and her partner Teresa live with their four dogs in South Carolina and Texas.

Yellow Raincoats                    by Michelle Valois

          We called them slickers.  Mine was hard, yellow plastic, with a tear under one arm that we tried to tape but the tape came off in the rain.  We had different names for things back then. 

My father called films moving pictures.  We called his mother, our grandmother, Mémay.  I once called my father a mold maker, but my mother explained that my father was a tool and die maker.  I asked the difference, and she told me that a tool and die maker was a man with a trade.   We called that sweet, carbonated beverage soda and then grew up to laugh at words like tonic and pop and soft drink.  I always wondered about soft drink and also hard liquor.  My father called those tiny bottles of whiskey and rum nips or sometimes toots.  He’d take them fishing.  They fit in his tackle box.

My other grandmother, not the French one, we called her Grandma, but my mother called her Mary.  She called the woman who gave her life her real mother and the woman who raised her Mary.  My mother’s real mother died when my mother was nine. 

Mary, some might call her step-mother, sewed and cleaned and cooked and made sure the children went to Sunday mass–though she herself was not Catholic–and kept the family together during the height of the Great Depression and stayed with the children’s father, my grandfather, who beat and belittled her.  Today she might be called an abused woman, the situation domestic violence.

My grandparents are gone now, my father, too.  It is a very different world that I inhabit, in some ways.  I have three children, but by some accounts, I am not their real mother.  I did not give them life or carry them inside my body or nurse them with my milk.  They call me Ma.  It was one of the first sounds the first child made so I claimed it for myself to feel chosen, to feel real, and because my father called his mother Ma.  The children call my partner, their other mother–real, by some accounts–Mommy, though just the other day the eldest declared that she might start calling her Mom.

          My mother, whom I also call Mom, is not legally blind but can only see out of one eye. She has had to give up knitting and driving and working, her independence, her once full life.  The other night she told me about spool knitting, which she did as a child. 

It was winter and my grandmother, Mary, herself barely twenty, had ordered the younger children outside.  It was a hard, biting cold, so my mother and her sisters took their play into the landlord’s barn.  There they found a box of yarn.  To keep them amused or to get them out of her hair, Mary had taught them how to use a knitting spool, which my grandfather made by hammering three nails, equal distance from each other, on the top of an empty spool.  Using a crochet hook, some yarn, and a lot of patience, the children could actually knit things–doilies, pot holders, baby blankets–each piece unraveled after completion since the box of yarn from the landlord’s barn was the only yarn they had.

          Before my next visit, I stop at a craft store to buy my mother a spool knitter.  The young man at the store has never heard of such a thing.  Later, I learn all the different names for my mother’s childhood toy: knitting nancy, bizzy lizzy, corker, peg knitter, bobbin doll, bobbin knitter, French knitter, doll knitter, punniken, patdocker, strick spiel, corking doll, knitting knobby, knitting mushroom, knitting bobbin.  Finally, I discover something called a wonder knitter.

My mother tears open the package.  The bright colors of the wonder knitter make it easy for her to distinguish the parts from the whole: the pegs from the spool from the green yarn, the only skein left from a lifetime of filling and emptying baskets of yarn in every color, texture, and fiber content.

She is awkward at first.  Her blue-veined hands and crooked fingers fumble with the green yarn.  Every part of her is trying to remember how the spool works.  She doesn’t read the directions; she relies on instinct and memory.  It’s been nearly seventy-five years since she has held such a tool in her hand. 

  I watch her fingers hold the bright yellow hook that came in the package.  All things are illuminated under the stark light of her magnifying reading lamp.  She is patient.  Within a half hour, she has knitted six inches of braided wool.  She wants to get one for my daughter.  Imagine, she tells me, how proud Grandma would be, her great-grand daughter learning to use a spool knitter.

          Yesterday, in an early morning drizzle, I walked the children to the bus stop.  Up ahead I saw a gathering of yellow raincoats.  My old one, I remember, had a hole in the pocket.  One morning, I put my favorite matchbox car in the pocket and walked to school.  Along the way, it fell through the hole and was lost forever.

          People called me a tomboy, a name I wore like a badge of honor.  Today, I suppose I am called middle aged.

          As we near the bus stop, I can make out three separate yellow-coated children huddled together.  I wonder if I can find a yellow slicker in my size and what I would call it if I did–and what would fall through the pocket and what would be lost forever.

Michelle Valois teaches writing and humanities at a community college in central Massachusetts.  She lives in Florence (Mass, not Italy, alas) with her partner and their three children.  Her writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, Moon Milk Review, Florida Review, Pank, Brevity, Fourth Genre, North American Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, among others. 

How I Met My Husband              by Jane Hertenstein

Every couple has their own story, but certain stories are stranger than fiction. That’s our story.

It was 1985, a time buried in the armpit of disco and the Euro New Wave. By the mid-80s I knew that the decade would go down as a footnote. Seemingly all the real history was behind us and we were stuck with Reagan and mediocrity. I think I was entering my cynical years, post-college, and just realizing that the world had nothing to offer me—especially a career. We were in a recession, nothing new—except that this one peaked right when I was graduating and needed a job. When nothing came fast enough I panicked and took a bus for Chicago where I ended up doing volunteer work. In exchange for room and board I worked at a city mission where I was promised a chance to use my educational background tutoring underprivileged kids.

Instead I ended up sorting through donations.

In retrospect I can see how my classes in psychology were helpful. I developed a character profile on who donates old clothes caked with feces to charity. After ripping open a bag that smelled like cat pee I insisted on wearing latex gloves. Who actually thinks: There’s still wear left in holey underwear? Who donates ONE shoe? It was enough to confirm my low opinion of mankind. Cynicism was a coping mechanism, not just an attitude.

For every fifty gross bags there was maybe one containing something fantastic—like a vintage gown or a black-dyed lamb’s skin fur coat with oversized buttons. Once I found $20 in an old purse. Each day I was greeted by a mountain of black garbage bags. I’d pull a few out, but the pile never went down because the mission was always getting calls from people wanting to donate. That’s the worst part—our brothers went out in a snub-nosed old mail truck and picked this stuff up for free when the owners should have been taking it to a dump.

Let me back up and explain. The mission operated a Freestore. On assigned days we opened to our clients to let them “shop” for the things they needed. We had regulars. One came so frequently that I struck up a conversation with her. What do you do with all the clothes you get? I asked. Miriam had about five kids. I say about because she also kept her friend’s children and had a revolving door policy of hospitality, so she was constantly on the lookout for sizes anywhere from 0 to 13 juniors. One of the older daughters also had a baby, I think. Miriam seemed embarrassed at my question. I assured her that this was why we were here, to help people like her.

She finally confessed, We get new stuff when the other’n get too dirty. But don’t worry, we give it all back.  

Well, that took care of my profile. I simply didn’t have that category in mind. The person who gives because they hate doing laundry.

I was set up in an annex, a building that was in a perpetual state of repair and, because the work was being done in-house, the renovation was going slow. Like whenever there was money, which wasn’t too often. During my entire Freestore tenure the abandoned annex was one brick away from collapsing. At one point the walls had been demo-ed down to the lath, the wooden slats beneath plaster, awaiting drywall. If I needed to use the bathroom I had to walk an obstacle course, through walls and around pipes and hanging electrical wires, to the opposite end where there was a stall without a door but those clinking beads that you see in the Mediterranean where it seems climate appropriate and not a side effect of poverty. It was like a Cohan movie or a Beckett play where life is cruel and somewhat absurd. Along the way I passed through an “office” where a guy sat taping on a typewriter.

What are you working on? I asked one time.

I’m working on a story.

He had clunky glasses, sturdy, and always dressed neatly in casual office Friday attire. Like the stuff I pulled out of the sacks stacked up to the ceiling three rooms over.

I explained I was looking for the bathroom and he continued typing, while sitting in architectural chaos. One day he asked me if there were any new book donations. I said, yes, in fact there had been. He followed me back to the Freestore where I’d set up a display rack in what used to be a shower. Watch out, I warned, pointing to the hole in the floor where the toilet used to be.

He helped me sort out the books. What do you do with the totally lame stuff? He wanted to know.

I knew what he meant. Mass paperbacks. Thrillers, romance, Christian prophet and Christian profit titles. How to live like a King’s Kid. I throw it down the hole, I said.

We tossed in some John Grisham and Tom Clancy.

We opened a banana box of books on childrearing. What to Expect When You’re Expecting, etc. Mike attempted to put a book down the toilet hole. Wait! I halted him. What are you doing?

He was embarrassed.

Breast feeding is important. A lot of women have questions about it. I put them over here.

There was a baby swing, the kind used to soothe a child into slumber, I had six or seven books stacked in the seat along with a handful of breast pumps, the cheap models that resembled torture devices.

We continued sorting and I was grateful for his help. It got a little creepy working in the Freestore alone. Once I found a guy sleeping in the bathtub I used for the one-of shoes (I kept them just in case, a totally hopeless situation.) He’d wandered in off the street drunk and had no idea where he was. He’d been looking for a bathroom. After a brother escorted him out I peered down the hole. There was The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey at the bottom pelted with piss.

On really slow days I tried on clothes and modeled in front of a bleary mirror. There were some really funky styles. I don’t know why I wasn’t freaked out about bedbugs or head lice. On really cold days, the days when frost collected on the inside of the windows (none of the radiators worked; they’d all been disconnected when the pipes burst), I wore layers of coats and rag-picked wearing fingerless gloves like a character out of Our Mutual Friend.

Yet I always had reading material. Whole libraries were donated. I could easily guess the former owners and their preferences, likes and dislikes. I acquired what was left of the estate of a university professor. His specialty was antiquities. The books were all hardback, the pages brittle and liver-spotted, and smelled of basement, as if they were in fact artifacts, stolen from a sarcophagus or pried from the hands of a mummy. It was sad. A couple divorces and liquidates their combined library. The kids are grown and their old books given away. I randomly collected Newbery Award winners, most inscribed by a literary auntie or uncle to their favorite niece or nephew: “Christmas 1962” or “To a Special Boy on His 12th Birthday”.

Mike got into the habit of stopping by to help me organize. Of course he took home whatever struck his fancy. We got to know each other and found we had a lot in common, not the least books and writing. One day he asked me out.

So when people ask how we met, my mind wanders back to those cold days leaning over crates of books, my breath a noir-ish fog, the wind rattling the loose frost-glazed glass in the window panes, bundled beneath layers of dead people’s coats. Mike, he just tells people, I found her at the Freestore.

Jane Hertenstein is a blogger, memoirist, tightrope walker, and blender of blended genres. She is not to be trusted. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Hunger Mountain , Rosebud, Word Riot, Flashquake, Steam Ticket, The Write Room, Frostwriting, Cantaraville, Fiction Fix, Six Minute Magazine, and Tonopah Review.  She is the author of the books Beyond Paradise , Orphan Girl, and Home Is Where We Live.  Visit her blog at: http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/.

Grace and the Process of Letting Go            by Vanessa Jo King

Grace was my 16th birthday present. It sounds ridiculous to realize that I was raised in a family where horses were birthday presents (on my 18th birthday, I actually received a Mini Cooper, but I don't think that enforces any misconceptions of normalcy). She was hand-selected by me after months of searching for the eventual replacement for my gelding, Ace. He was wonderful and beautiful, just not mine in that complete way that a horse can seem to be perfect for one person alone. Grace was different. I knew the first time I sat on her that she was mine. She was almost four. She was simple and honest.

For the last ten years, Grace went everywhere with me. Her dark, steel grey coat slowly lightened to a slightly freckled, almost white. We did amazing things in amazing places. We chased clouds on sweltering Boulder summer days. We won the blue ribbon in Greenfield, Massachusetts at her first show. We spent a summer in Longmont, Colorado , where I tried to convince her to swim and she not-so-politely declined to put even one hoof in water. We conquered hills at full speed and explored during thunderstorms in Erda, Utah . She gathered a harem of geldings in North Salt Lake , and eventually she moved high into the Wasatch Mountains to Heber, where we played games and briefly reconnected with each other.

As I approached my 26^th year, I hadn’t ridden consistently since my late teens. The horse-crazy passion that consumed me for most of my youth seemed to have faded. Why did I keep her, this extravagant beast, this endless drain of money? I suppose I can answer that with another question: how can a girl willingly part ways with an animal that more closely resembles a best friend than a horse? There were times when I was in a new place and I had no one but Grace. Sometimes I wrapped the familiarity of her around me like a blanket. The more terrifying reason for keeping her was the fiasco of letting Vixen, my first horse, go. After searching for the perfect home with the perfect people, I was devastated to learn that she had been starved. I refused to let that happen again. The tragic story of Vixen made me swear I would keep Grace until the day she died. There was a certain comfort in knowing that the only person I could trust with an animal I cared about so profoundly was me.

Mere semesters away from graduating from my seven year college adventure, something changed. Faced with the inevitable entrance back into the real world—a world where ideally I would receive a paycheck, and not depend solely on the assistance of my father—I became painfully aware of how difficult owning a horse would be. A horse would tie me to certain places, limit my ability to be courageous, and add a significant amount of worry to my everyday life. I wanted to find a job I loved. I wanted that job to pay me enough to be comfortable. But I had no guarantees that either of those things would happen. Adding my Grace worries to the mix made me feel like a single mother to a 1200 pound animal that had a proclivity for injuring herself on a bimonthly basis.

The more compelling issue was one that was much harder to voice. At what point did I let go of who I was? For over a decade some of the primary words associated with my identity were "rider" and "horses". Regardless of the reasons, that had changed. What used to bring me an incredible amount of peace and joy now brought me a sense of guilt when I tried to recall the last time I visited Grace, or analyzed how much I "should" have been riding, or thought about the increasing amount of money she cost as she aged. I never, ever thought it would happen, but I had outgrown horses. Thirteen year old Vanessa raged petulantly inside me every time I acknowledged that reality.

After years of my best friend harassing me to let her have my horse for her riding lesson program, I conceded in January of 2010. The day I put Grace on the trailer to go to Colorado was one of the toughest of my life. It seemed that the universe was testing the strength of my decision in every way possible. The horse movers were two weeks late and I waited for them at the barn for well over eight hours. Grace had a large wound on her leg and I worried that she would injure it more on her way to her new home. Grace refused to get on the trailer. When Grace finally loaded on the trailer, I crumpled in the dirt driveway of the barn, beyond caring about the mud or the people watching me cry like a child. I felt like firmly affixing a sign to her side, maybe attached with duct tape wrapped 12 times around her large, warm belly that read, "Please, take this creature gently: she has a part of my heart." But that sounded dramatic even to me.

The situation has worked out as well as I could ever have hoped. Grace arrived safely, and the wound on her leg healed within days. Aside from a recently developed aversion to being tied up, Grace has behaved herself very well at her new home. She is one of the favorite horses in the lesson program, consistently showered with attention, treats, and a regular fitness regime that has slowly whittled away that massive belly that used to trick strangers into thinking she was due to birth triplets within the hour. Everything has worked out. Perhaps the most profound lesson I learned from the experience was that I am not going to be the same person for the rest of my life. What drives me now, might not drive me in ten years, and the ability to let go of who I was in the past frees me up to be who I am right now. The relief I feel when I travel home to Colorado and I'm able to physically check on Grace, is tangible. She's safe. I'm not guilty of anything except growing up a little.

Vanessa Jo King grew up in Oakland, California and Boulder, Colorado, and currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah . She (finally) received her bachelor’s degree from Westminster College in 2010, and has yet to use it in any practical way (aside from planning some pretty awesome weddings). She has a herd of obnoxious animals including a lovable dog named Cricket and two very destructive cats. In her spare time, Vanessa likes to set her hula hoop on fire and read books. Sometimes concurrently.