Don't Sleep With a Bubba

by Susan Reinhardt

  They like the days when the air feels laundered, the sky a blazing blue that only fall displays, as polished as the jeweler’s stones.

  This is a season I used to dread but am learning to appreciate, especially after weekends when the edges of summer waltz with fall, one giving warmth, the other luscious color.

  Fall used to remind me of death, nature’s corpses in the form of lost leaves and withered vines signaling the end of daffodils and impatiens planted with eagerness after last frost. I’d watch the one-shot flowers collapse, the bees flying zigzagged in a final spree.

  Fall may spread a patchwork of color across the mountainside, but the beauty of each topaz leaf and ruby-red bush seemed as cruel as the glittering ball gowns on Cinderella’s stepsisters.

  I’m a Summer person, a Georgia girl who relishes May through August and the shucking of shoes, the first blinks of lightning bugs, the chorus of eager insects trying to live and love and do it all as if the next day was their last.

  The sauna breath of an afternoon is for me as comforting as a heating pad on sore muscles. The flowers and emerald leaves, tomatoes going from green to red, tulips and wildflowers offering snapshots of God within every bloom. Children in swimsuits and sunburn, roaming the streets until after 9 PM .

  Summer was a season of more; fall, a season of less; winter, a time of death; spring, the months of renewal. That’s how I’d always thought of this, though the older I get, the more I have come to appreciate autumn. No longer is it the months of taking, but I can see it as a period of giving.

  Certainly life leaks out of things, but in that slow evaporation the full-color veil lifts itself from death as a promise. Its beauty doesn’t disappear but changes. It’s no longer a virgin green leaf or the first pink petals of a dogwood. It’s no longer a Bradford pear like a bride in white.

  These are the months when people carve pumpkins and drink cider. Spend time with their families and friends, and when life is pulled by forces of temperature and tilt.

  It is also the season of state fairs, my favorite autumn pastime, which I enjoy every year at least twice, often more.

  This past year we attended the North Carolina Mountain State Fair. It was midweek, around 3:30 PM , and the grounds were nearly deserted—the way old people and mommies like it. The quiet hung over the midway ever so slightly, like something napping after many days of exertion.

  Clouds played bumper cars in the sky, hiding the sun and catching heat, letting autumn cut in line.

  We stood in the sawdust and earth as the place tried to shake off fatigue from the previous night, everyone involved bone-tired but dedicated, all waking up like a row of toddlers after naptime.

  The fair has always reminded me of life boiled down along a single, expansive field. It’s a place where the farm and the city hold hands—private-school boys in their Tommy cargos pet the sheep that are fed and raised by the 4-H’ers in their denim overalls.

  It’s where animals are as much a part of the show as people. Where a woman’s quilt and a man’s beefsteak tomatoes are all eligible for glory and ribbons.

  The fair lives up to its name. Everybody has a shot, a fair chance. Grandma with her killer cornbread and Mary Lynn’s new boyfriend who isn’t leaving until he wins her a stuffed bear bigger than his car.

  Around 4 o’clock the rides and attractions along the midway groaned to life, metal and machinery cracking like the lid on a slow-opening can. Ticket booth tenders raised their little glass windows. Hands clutching money slipping in; hands offering tickets fluttering out.

  A Ferris wheel began a slow spin, rising and dipping, its operator sun-baked and dirt-caked and trying to keep the ride moving and people smiling.

  Men and women selling chances sipped their drinks and lit their cigarettes, and at some point in between, called to those walking by.

  “Winner every time. Pay one price and everyone goes home happy.”

  Kids threw darts at balloons and five-dollar bills down the drain. They thrilled at the pop of rubber and the sight of a tattooed arm sweeping across the prize board. “Pick a prize. Any prize along this row is all yours.”

  Grills shot plumes of smoke that smelled of meat and onions; fryers crackled and the music beat louder as the hours matured into a rich darkness scented with all things sweet, fried, battered and dunked.

  Throughout the night, as her mood struck, a 40-something schoolteacher and neighbor of mine returned to the flying machine, paying her tickets and lying on her stomach across the seat. She squeezed her daughter who was next to her and waved to her husband on the ground below.

  In the air as the ride lifted her skyward, the woman with graying blonde hair spread her arms as if she were a bird.

  “I’m Superwoman!” she cried, voice fading as the ride took her farther away. “Look!” she called the next time she came around. “I’m flying!”

  My children and I drank Cokes and found a seat on an empty bench while we watched the lights blinking on and off, the night in slow motion when viewed from the edge of a bench.

  Charlie was right. You can slow down time if you find the right bench and hang on to the moment the way the flying lady gripped the handles of her ride.

  Winter

  Winter comes and the melancholy arrives with the shorter days. It’s the season of slow, when we think this frozen earth, this feeling of bleak and gray will never end.

  Wintertime Sundays always meant one of two things while we were growing up in West Central Georgia. After church, if it was pretty outside, we might jump in the station wagon for a family drive. If the day stuck with a Great Britain–like dreariness, after we ate my mother would scrape the leftover rice and gravy from the plates, wrap the fried chicken or roast beef with the quick tear of Reynolds foil and run a sink of soapy water. Then, around 2 o’clock if the steel sky hadn’t given way to a slice of sun, she’d go to her room and ask my sister and me to play quietly upstairs. She’d spend several hours napping away the doldrums of winter.

  She wasn’t depressed. She wasn’t unhappy. She was simply sick of winter.

  This was Georgia where summers never seemed to end and clung like a morning moon too stubborn to retreat. Winters, though short-lived, brought little more than unpredictability. We endured weeks of dark clouds and no beauty beyond the music and cadence of cold rain—the way it pattered against windowpanes and tapped on the roof, as close to a lullaby as the sky would offer.

  We rarely got snow in our part of Georgia. Every five or so years we might get an inch or two, and watching it fall in huge, wet flakes was as beautiful to those who hardly ever saw it as a stretch of bleached white sand surrounding an impossibly turquoise sea.

  When the snow lay against the clay earth, covering the dead grass and decomposed leaves, we’d stare as it piled up and dressed the world in white. It was what made the winters bearable.

  I hear people from up North moan and grumble when forecasters predict the storms that snag lives, slow the world and tangle schedules. For many the falling snow is winter’s pest, like summer’s mosquitoes. For people like me who grew up without it, snow was like confetti and fireworks.

  Winter, with its bone-thin trees and snaggle-toothed landscapes, is meant to wear white. Some of us who hate the cold and clouds, the rain that hovers at 34 degrees, can tolerate the season only so long.

  By January we are dreaming of the Keys or the Caribbean. By February a lucky few are there.

  I often spent the
winter days as my mother used to—in bed with a good book, staring at the naked trees and imagining them ruffled in green. I would wait for spring like an eager schoolgirl for the last bell.

  Spring

  Spring would come before winter ended—another pause before the season changes—a sampling of beauty with 65-degree days in mid-February. A chance for long walks and hikes, hours spent outdoors aching to plant but knowing it was too soon.

  I wanted to call Charlie and tell him that winter is the way to slow time. That it works better than a bench.

  But when I dialed his number and reached his wife, she said he was gone. He had passed away, but not before he got his bench where he spent many of his last days in the quiet stillness pondering the mysteries of the world and what lay ahead.

  He knew that the end of winter, like the end of life, meant spring was coming. He knew of renewal, of chances for rebirth the way new life finds its way into the barest of trees, nudging the branches with polka dots of green, ready to unfold as the days grow warmer.

  He realized as he took his last breaths that this wasn’t the end, but instead just another season. I believe it was his favorite.

  I’ll Love You Forever

  Written for my wonderful son, Niles, shortly before his baby sister entered the world, and later, as he changed from boy to teen, almost as if overnight.

  T hese are the last few months of just you and me. Of the nights we share after dinner, laughing about nothing and playing Knock-Knock until both of us are hoarse with silliness.

  Your baby sister or brother will be here soon, a period of great joy but also of divided time when a mother’s attention spreads even thinner and the necessary often replaces the fun and frivolous.

  For the next few weeks, I count our every minute as a gift, the uninterrupted attention as something that will never again come so readily, so freely. Many nights, after you’ve fallen into the dreamy sleep of children, I tiptoe toward your bed and watch your face in the glow of the moon, slipping through cracks in the shade.

  Many nights I can’t resist and place a hand against the curve of your cool cheek. And like the mother in the book Love You Forever , I long to scoop your relaxed little body into my arms and rock you. Just as I did not so long ago.

  Has five years really passed so quickly? Could you possibly be old enough to play T-ball? Lying in the outfield as the balls fly and skitter while you roll in the dirt tired and bored, sitting up only to check under the bases for worms and bugs? Could you possibly be old enough already to start kindergarten in the fall?

  I make promises in the dark: That I will always tuck you in with books and laughter, no matter the other demands of the day and child to come. That I will always find pieces of time for you, an hour here or there, maybe only thirty minutes, but I’ll catch it, trap and treasure it, no matter the crowded slates that leave a parent feeling drained and guilty.

  Seeing your peaceful face makes my throat knot with the oncoming tears, your beautiful profile, that of a sleeping child being one of the most serene on earth. It’s like watching an angel, something extraordinarily innocent, and all of the day’s frustrations sink with the sun and are silenced within the quiet corners of a child’s room.

  Sometimes, as I’m standing over your bed, I notice your hair slicked back with perspiration, matted from the sweat of a mother’s worries and extra blankets.

  Sometimes, it’s too much for me.

  I can’t resist and crawl underneath the covers until my body is spooned against yours. I try to match your gentle breathing, and I feel tugged from places deep within my chest, like an anchor slowly dropping, weighting a parent with a love she can never fully explain or begin to understand.

  It is a love that gives and takes. And in the hush of nightfall, knocks us cold with fear.

  We love and fear, mostly fearing what we love. This is the moment when I’m most vulnerable to the thoughts I easily push back in daylight, when I inch closer to your warmth as a chill surrounds my heart.

  This is when all the visions of lurking dangers crowd my mind. When the news on TV about children missing, the suffering and the madness of the world shoots images like a frightening montage of what can happen. We always think, “That’s other people. Not us.” It’s at night when I see your smooth-and-flawless face I begin to worry.

  I scoot in tighter and pray for another day, another year, even going as far on some nights as asking God to grant us both a long, happy life. Selfish, maybe, but necessary for peace of mind.

  I hook an arm around your tiny waist and feel your little-boy bones and baby-soft tummy, still round and free of the taut muscles to come later. I bury my face against the back of your hair, smelling the apricot shampoo and leftover sunshine.

  Sometimes, I hold your hand and listen as your breathing changes, as your eyelids flutter with dreams known only to little boys. You don’t move or stir. This is your gift to me.

  Before I know it the years have run as if in a marathon and you are 7, 8, 9, and now a boy entering middle school.

  Tomorrow is your first day at this place we used to call junior high school and you can’t fall asleep. I enter your room, just like the mother I used to be, the mother in Love You Forever . Your legs thrash, twisting the covers, hands flipping and pounding the pillow. You are nervous but won’t admit it, only that your tummy hurts. That former child’s belly is now hard and flat, the beginnings of adolescence hardening a child physically, and often emotionally.

  This is the evening of one of the biggest milestones in a child’s life. Middle school. I don’t tell you how difficult it was for me, the teasing, the girls who left me out of their inner, popular clique. I tell you about my best friend, Margaret, how if you find one or two really good friends, the rest won’t matter.

  I still think of Margaret and how our friendship saved me from what could have been three years of angst, of changing into a blue-and white-striped and ultrahideous polyester gym suit while the popular girls laughed because I had no breasts, just an empty training bra.

  I realize your worries have swelled with each story a neighborhood kid has told, as if sitting by a campfire and seeing who could outdo the others with gruesome tales of ghosts and monsters. Only, in this case, the monsters were bullies, certain teachers and the cruelties that can befall one at this stage of life.

  “Mama,” you said, your former apricot shampoo now the more grown-up scent of Pantene, hair slightly damp. I can smell Arrid XX as I try to scoop you near me, and you say, “Mom,” in that sing-song, go-away-I’m-fine voice.

  Then you throw me the bone I’ve been longing for.

  “Tell me,” you say, yawning, the thrashing silenced. “What is middle school really like?”

  I thought for a moment, breathing in the night and choosing my words carefully. “It’s freedom. It’s having choices in the lunchroom instead of mystery meat.” I see a smile, though faint, inching across his face. “It’s getting to change classes and not being stuck with the same mean old teacher. You’ll have to study harder and some of the kids will begin acting out and putting on the peer pressure, but you stay true to who you are and it’ll be fine. I promise.”

  As I said this, I knew in my heart that compared to other kids the change from elementary to middle would be twice as hard for my child. We’d moved from the city to the country and most of his friends were going to the middle school in town. We’d found a house we loved wit
h weeping willows, mountain views and enough cul-de-sacs to ride bikes and skateboards and send the children outdoors roaming like we did as kids in the 60s and 70s.

  It felt like the right decision, especially after having been told, as mothers long to hear, of the strength and dedication of the school system in that district. I assured my son he’d have every opportunity he wanted. But these weren’t his fears.

  His monsters were basic.

  “What if I can’t get the combination open on my locker?”

  “Oh, the teachers will be more than willing to help you,” I said, patting his back, which felt like the skin of a tight drum, his shoulder blades protruding with the sharp angles of adolescence.

  “What if I can’t find my classes?”

  “They’ll walk you through it all the first day. You know that, honey.”

  I stayed with him until his breathing slowed and the rhythm of rest overcame his anxieties. Even at this age, a sleeping child, a preteen, is a sight worthy of tears. I let them fall, lying with him long after he’d finally gone to sleep.

  The next morning he rose before the alarm shrilled, dressed in new shoes and ate his Honey Bunches of Oats. He spent a lot of time in the mirror, wetting and rewetting his hair, trying gel, then washing it out, changing shirts several times.

  We drove through a tangle of traffic to the doors of this new world. I knew, as I saw him disappear in a sea of backpacks, that when he came home, he’d have dozens of stories to tell, and that he’d say “Middle school is a whole lot more fun than I thought it would be.”

  At least I hoped that’s what he’d say, but the truth was, it was a day as heart-wrenching for me as when I dropped him off on his first day of kindergarten. I spent most of it at work, obsessing and trying not to. I watched the clock. At three, I raced to the school and waited in a long pick-up line, knowing that these very parents, once settled and confident, would send their charges home on buses or would carpool and this snarling jam of cars would thin.