Joy to the Whirled

Dog Bless Us, Every One!

Waiting for Snow

We are waiting forever, this season, for snow.
A barren November has been and gone,
and still the stark woodland stands empty,
and now December, the wait not done.

I dream I am falling light as air through
darkest night, where velvet boughs
reach out like arms to catch me there
in flight. Then dreaming slows, thin day

appears, and we wake to a cover of
silent white descending. The long
gray wait is over, the long hour ending,
and, soundless, the snow begun.


(12/20/90)

Speaking in Tongues

My daughter said, "The fire is singing." And it was.

This was Sunday evening. We were spread out in front of the fireplace, reading. I had just added a couple of logs, closed the screen, settled back in my Grandmother's rocker. These were spruce logs, notorious for excess sap (some people have accused me of that), and perhaps this, along with a strategic air pocket or two, had combined to produce a high whistling sound, not unlike a voice.

My Grandmother was forty when she gave birth for the first and only time, to a son, my father. When my Grandfather asked her what she most wanted, what would make her life as a new mother easier, she asked for two things: a rocking chair and a clock. He supplied her with both, a quarter-sawn oak rocker and a Sessions eight-day wind-up mantel clock. Then he headed down to the corner for a bump.

The clock sits on the mantel where I can see it as I rock. It worked like a yeoman (another of my father's words) until a few years ago. Now it's always 9:43...AM or PM, take your pick.
I miss the clock's steady tick, the ding at the half-hour, the whir followed by the chimes at the hour.

We called my Grandmother "Noni," derivative of "Nana," I suppose. She was the quintessential Old School Grandma: long hair wrapped in a bun, octagonal wire-rim glasses, black lace-up squash-heel shoes, shapeless jersey dress. She tucked hankies into the sleeves of her sweaters and spoke broken English. When I knew her, she lived in a single-room-bathroom-down-the-hall in a turn-of-the-century brownstone in the Old Port City that I now call home. The building was filled with other old widowed Finnish ladies, most of whom Noni had known since first arriving in America at the age of twenty. I loved to listen to them jabber unintelligibly in the warm dark hallways, in the tiny cramped rooms beyond the open doors. It wasn't long before I began talking elaborate jibberish, a habit some people would say still persists. In my child's mind I was speaking another language, all the better to understand Noni.

Every so often Noni would come stay with us, ostensibly to help my mother. But also because she was alone and, we assumed, lonely. My sisters and I loved her. She was a kid herself, preferring children to grownups, probably because she struggled with adult conversation. She'd play board games with us for hours, though she barely knew what was going on. She'd roll jacks with us, watch us jump rope, help with our rollerskate keys, wait patiently at the end of the driveway as we circled the block, again and again, on our two-wheelers. And she loved for us to read to her. I think it basically blew her mind to know she had grandchildren...girls!...who ran around speaking English like there was no tomorrow. She'd stare at us and grin and pat our arms and our heads with her large strong hands, saying things in a mysterious language we somehow understood.

And she had her ways.

Noni loved her cigarettes, Lucky Strike nonfilters was her brand. I remember the small white pack with the red bullseye tucked into the pocket of her ubiquitous cotton bib apron. My parents had forbidden her to smoke in the house, so she'd pace up and down the driveway, smoking and muttering, like a convict. She'd walk us kids to the market or the playground or to school in the morning, chainsmoking all the way, often ashing into the palm of her hand. In winter, when it was too cold to step foot outside, she'd sneak to a far corner of the basement and blow smoke out the open windowwell screen. This drove my father nuts. They'd start arguing back and forth in Finnish until my mother finally closed the basement door and looked around for something to straighten.

Once when Noni was visiting, my parents left her to babysit. It was an afternoon in winter. We played Little Dolls for awhile (my favorite storyline being Kidnap-Ransom-Murder), then Noni decided it was lunchtime. No matter we'd just eaten an hour ago. She bundled us up like Laplanders, and we trudged through the snow up to First Avenue, where she tossed her Lucky in a snowdrift, stuck out her thumb and hitched us a ride uptown. She was saving bus money, it made sense. We had egg salad sandwiches and strawberry sodas at Woolworth's counter, after which she hitched us a ride back home again. My father was waiting.

That was the pattern. My Grandmother would come for a visit. After a week, maybe two, the words between her and my father would grow louder and louder, always in Finnish, always in some other room. Until, inevitably, her suitcase would be packed, and she'd be sitting in her black cloth coat and felt hat on the front seat of the '47 Buick, my father at the wheel. It's a picture common to many of my generation: parents with their feet planted solidly in 20th Century America, grandparents with theirs back in the Old Country.

Once, with my father's help, Noni related a story about a friend of hers from the Old Country. When this friend first emigrated to the New World, she'd lived with her family on a farm in Canada and attended a country school there. The students were forbidden by the headmistress to speak Finnish inside the schoolgrounds, which were surrounded by a tall iron fence. So the children laid with their heads poking out between the iron pickets and blabbered away in their native tongue like there was no tomorrow.

And sometimes it feels like that. Sometimes a moment can feel so...present tense...that the possibility exists for it to go on and on, suspended in time. Like there's no tomorrow.

Like it's always 9:43.

Noni died on St. Valentine's Day, weeks before my eighth birthday. Now I rock in her chair in the Old Port City in the clock-silent air, suspended. While her great-great-granddaughter, having done a yeoman's job at yet another gymnastics invitational down in The City, sprawls at my feet and reads. And glances up, and hears it, there in the flames. A mysterious language she somehow understands.