Seasoned
I am
summer-ed, fall-ed,
winter-ed, spring-ed,
peppered and nutmegged,
salted, cloved,
cinnamoned and allspiced,
baked, blanched,
roasted, poached and steamed,
pan-fried and pressure cooked—
and still I create
summer-elegant fruit pizza
fall-spiced pumpkin soup
winter-soothing chicken chili
spring-sprouting asparagus quiche.
SummerTime
Mom is always pregnant or sad. Dad chugs a six-pack every day after supper, snorting sleep on the couch. Every morning, they take the streetcar to work: Dad—the steel mill, Mom—the hospital. Our house is falling down—no kitchen ceiling, piles of stuff everywhere, an asthmatic wheezing furnace, a hole in the wall under the bathroom sink. The oldest at 11, I’m in charge when Mom and Dad are gone, so I scrub mountains of dirty dishes, SOS grimy pots, yell at the kids to put their toys away, but they just call me Bossy Cow. I hide half the chocolate chip cookies I bake or they’d be gone in a minute. Something bad happens every day. Two-year-old Mark somersaults the stairs with a traffic jam of Matchbox cars—tears, bandaids and bruises. Diane trampolines her bed, falls and cracks her head. Maureen escapes the house and runs around the block without clothes or shoes—a neighbor brings her home, asks where’s your mom? I just want to sit in my room and read Nancy Drew. That Thursday in July was the worst, the scariest. Marianne asks for a drink. I give her a glass-glass of strawberry Kool Aid. It slips out of her hands, breaks, splatters the floor, bounces and slices her wrists. The floor swims with blood, more blood than I’ve ever seen.
burning winds
carve the city
into pieces
To the Core
Cooling sun, June evening in the city, supper over, dishes washed, we gather on the porch—Dad and Lynn in webbed lawn chairs, Marianne, Diane and I on the squeaking metal glider, waiting for dark and lightning bugs. Mom in her zip-up robe joins the family, flimsy screen door banging shut. Chairs all taken, no one getting up to offer her a seat, Mom leans against the porch railing, its spindles flaking dull green paint. Creak, crack and the rotted rail splinters, Mom crashes, breathless and whimpering, on her back on top of the railing in the dirt of the front lawn. Everyone except Mom is laughing. No one asks if she’s okay—does she have cuts, bruises, broken bones? No one offers a hand to help her up, not even Dad.
sky shattered gray and blue
above apple trees
trying to blossom
Anatomy of Fear
Voices wake me, clock glowing midnight. Out my bedroom window, flashing red and blue lights, a police car parked in front of our house. The policeman is talking, something about court. Mom is crying, wailing they’ll take you away from us, is that what you want? My brother Johnnie is in trouble. He missed supper, was gone all evening. The police car drives away. Dad forces Johnnie to pull down his pants. Whacks of fury: Dad’s wide leather belt, Johnnie crying, screaming, shrieking.
turtle retracts head, limbs
guarding
soft underbelly
Broken
15: My brother and I roll, wrestle and punch on the shabby wooden floor. Johnnie chases me out of the house, locks the door. I smash a front door window to get in, hide in my bedroom. Mom and Dad don’t even notice the broken window until winter winds clatter the bent blinds.
16: When I refuse to give Mom the paycheck from my after-school job, she slaps me and yanks it from my hand.
17: I get drunk, stoned and date-raped at all-night parties with boys I hardly know. My sister threatens to tell Mom when she catches me staggering home in the glare of 6 AM sunrise.
18: I graduate first in my high school class. In a pew at the St. Basil’s graduation mass, the song in my mind playing on repeat: we gotta get out of this place/if it’s the last thing we ever do/there’s a better life.
robins, warblers, sparrows
escape to warmth, abandon
tree crowns stripped bare
Falling
Far above Cayuga’s waters….
Leaving Pittsburgh, I promise myself, no drinking, no dope. Eight hours from home over two-lane mountain roads, Cornell University. Grassy quadrangle criss-crossed with trails, edged with classy historic buildings—brown bricks with limestone trim, arched windows, mansard roofs. Clocktower chimes sing the hours, serenade mid-day. Suspension bridge 200 feet above the Fall Creek Gorge and Foaming Falls. Within a 10 mile radius, 150 waterfalls and dozens of deep rocky gorges carved by glaciers 12,000 years ago.
A working class, scholarship girl from Pittsburgh, I can’t translate posh Long Island coeds—sorority sisters wearing neon mini dresses in geometric patterns, fraternity brothers in preppy ties and sport coats.
I blow off a date with George, a stable, common-sense engineering student from Pittsburgh, choose Paul, who ace-bandages my sprained ankle, bakes me a frozen apple pie. He’ll take care of me, I think. I abandon my roommate, move into a run-down first floor flat on a hill with him and two other couples.
My no alcohol, no drugs policy is blowing in the wind. Stoned weekends, cross-legged in a circle on the dirty wooden floor, we lose ourselves in Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, have you seen the stars tonight?
Paul convinces me to buy a rusting anemic green VW with my leftover scholarship money even though I don’t know how to drive. He convinces me to wash dishes with him at a sorority for fifteen dollars a week even though I washed mountains of dishes as a child. Paul gets drunk and passes out on the sorority house lawn, panics on mescaline, gets arrested for shoplifting. I don’t know how to leave him.
trapped in gorges
breathless
in waterfalls
Death Bingo
Pitchers of beer, Bookies Sports Bar in Ithaca’s Collegetown, students on stools, silent, shredding napkins. December 1, 1969, Mayberry R.F.D. is preempted for stiff suited men in white shirts and narrow black ties who spin a drum, reach in to pull out and open a capsule, extract a slip of paper, announce the date it contains, pin it on a board numbered 1-366, the birth date order for being drafted to serve in Vietnam. As the board fills up, Tom talks Canada, Tim— pacifism, Bob—medical, Bill—hardship, Paul—relief.
storm winds whirl
chaos
dancing trees
Drowning
I don’t leave him. After graduation, I marry him,
home-cooked home-sewn hippie wedding on a hill
—piña coladas, beer, pork chops and cherry cake.
First anniversary: flimsy paper. I teach high school English, he substitute teaches, does odd jobs.
Third: tattered cotton. Every weekend, he and Randy tour all the back country bars. I worry the nights, imagine death, fights, accidents, arrests. He stumbles in, stinking and incoherent at 3 AM, 4 AM, 5 AM.
Fifth: stained linen. We move to bars everywhere, alcoholic culture Wisconsin to live with adolescents in crisis. He escapes for all-night drunk poker, has a drunk driving accident when I’m pregnant. A few years later, he earns a DUI, loses his license. I drive everywhere.
Seventh: rusted iron. He fills our home with hoards of postage stamps, trading cards, Beanie Babies and comic books, yells at me if I dare move them. On weekends, he sells his treasures in hotel ballrooms, leaving me with our three children and their soccer games, piano lessons, dance, gymnastics, homework, baths and bedtime stories. He clings to the delusion that these weekend sales are funding our retirement.
Tenth: termited wood. When I plan a weekend visit with my girlfriend in Minneapolis, he threatens, if you leave, you’re slamming the door on our marriage. I go to Minneapolis.
Twelfth: moth-eaten wool. Arriving home at 10 PM after an eight hour work day, thirty-five mile drive, three hour grad school class and forty-mile drive home, Paul accuses me of having sex with one of my fellow students. Where in that schedule is there time for sex??
Thirteenth: corroded bronze. After a three-hour lunch with my colleague and happily married friend Peg, he accuses me of a lesbian affair. Time just melts for us when we talk about books, art, beading, quilting, work, children, life—it’s all food, tea and conversation—no sex.
Fifteenth: smashed crystal. When my parents visit for Thanksgiving, he buys a quarter barrel of beer—for him and my Dad.
Twentieth: tarnished silver. Cooking weekend supper, Paul pours two beers over ice into a super-sized McDonald’s cup, then two more and two more, passes out, head on the table after eating, comes back to consciousness, pours himself a tall glass of wine, then more beer and drunk-snoring on the living room floor until 5 AM, surrounded by crushed beer cans, music blasting from headphones fallen off his head, yells I’m listening when I try to turn it off. I stop picking up the cans.
Lake Michigan rip currents
knock my feet from under me
drag me towards open water
Storming
To give my children any chance at sanity,
I need to teach them:
This is not love.
This is not marriage.
This is not health.
This is a family drowning
in alcohol.
A word I’d never spoken, divorce, squirms its way into my vocabulary.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
—Anais Nin
After months of procrastinating, he agrees to a couple’s therapy appointment, arrives 20 minutes late, blaming me for not giving him directions, upset because he had to walk through the adjoining psychiatric hospital. He tells the therapist, I want her to be the way she used to be.
When he’s served divorce papers, he cries and denies, won’t move out, lives in our bedroom while I sleep on an air mattress on the floor of the crafts room. He rages at me when I take our children to therapy, doesn’t hire a lawyer, microscopes every word in proposed settlements, initiates fiery fights about insurance, holidays, tax deductions, property appraisal. We have flame-throwing battles about custody until I cave to his foolish demands. I ferry stipulation agreements back-and-forth between the lawyer and him. Shaking, I’m sure I’ll wreck my car on the way to the lawyer’s office when he finally agrees to and signs the final stipulation.
In court, when the judge asks if this marriage is irretrievably broken, he replies, I don’t know. My lawyer tells him this divorce is going to happen, today. He concedes, yes, we’re broken.
My short, bald and tight-lipped attorney calls me the next day: when he said “I don’t know,” I wanted to kick him in the balls.
From my couch, staring at the snow-bleached meadow and winter-stripped crab apple trees lining the driveway, I wait for my three children to climb down from the lights-flashing yellow bus and run down the long driveway, backpacks bouncing.
howls of wind snow
silenced
crystals glimmer in sun
What I Know
I slow, notice,
rest inside each breath,
learn to feel,
find order,
trust beauty
—sky, earth, water.
Winter’s silent blue sky is stenciled with feather clouds that stretch from horizon to heights. Winds sculpt the sky with cloud-art every day: massive climbing towers, gray-blue ledges spotlighted with sun, the swish of white brush strokes, sometimes, just a few commas.
I trust the moon’s rhythms: orange-cratered fullness shrinking to a silver slice, then swelling and blossoming. My every-day morning sun rises, falls in kaleidoscopes of color every evening.
I study the signs of life returning: weeping willows glowing orange in early March, trees waking up in ombréed greens of lily lime, pastel jade and pale mint, tight-fisted buds on bushes flexing muscles. Peeper symphonies lullaby me on star-speckled spring evenings.
I teach myself wildflower names and memorize where and when the trillium and mayapples, spring beauties and marsh marigolds, wild roses and evening primroses, cornflower chicory and purple asters will bloom along the trail.
Every summer, bird families faithfully return, cooing, chirping, twittering and beak wrestling, flashing their colors, entertaining me with their feeder antics.
Lake Michigan calmly brushes the sand with soft waves or crashes boulders with foam mountains that reach for sky far above the breakwater. Lake winds re-shape shoreline dunes. The beach is a treasure chest of stone and glass carved and smoothed by time, wind and water. The water’s shaded stripes of green, gray and blue merge with sky, challenge the boundaries of my imagination.
I am certain that summer is sliding into fall, that leaves will prove their brilliance: blushing, burning, skittering, dancing the streets. I know winter is moving in.
river geese honk-harmonize
wing-slap, rise as one
whisper-fly above me
Kathy VanDemark
Rememberings
Seasoned
I am
summer-ed, fall-ed,
winter-ed, spring-ed,
peppered and nutmegged,
salted, cloved,
cinnamoned and allspiced,
baked, blanched,
roasted, poached and steamed,
pan-fried and pressure cooked—
and still I create
summer-elegant fruit pizza
fall-spiced pumpkin soup
winter-soothing chicken chili
spring-sprouting asparagus quiche.
SummerTime
Mom is always pregnant or sad. Dad chugs a six-pack every day after supper, snorting sleep on the couch. Every morning, they take the streetcar to work: Dad—the steel mill, Mom—the hospital. Our house is falling down—no kitchen ceiling, piles of stuff everywhere, an asthmatic wheezing furnace, a hole in the wall under the bathroom sink. The oldest at 11, I’m in charge when Mom and Dad are gone, so I scrub mountains of dirty dishes, SOS grimy pots, yell at the kids to put their toys away, but they just call me Bossy Cow. I hide half the chocolate chip cookies I bake or they’d be gone in a minute. Something bad happens every day. Two-year-old Mark somersaults the stairs with a traffic jam of Matchbox cars—tears, bandaids and bruises. Diane trampolines her bed, falls and cracks her head. Maureen escapes the house and runs around the block without clothes or shoes—a neighbor brings her home, asks where’s your mom? I just want to sit in my room and read Nancy Drew. That Thursday in July was the worst, the scariest. Marianne asks for a drink. I give her a glass-glass of strawberry Kool Aid. It slips out of her hands, breaks, splatters the floor, bounces and slices her wrists. The floor swims with blood, more blood than I’ve ever seen.
burning winds
carve the city
into pieces
To the Core
Cooling sun, June evening in the city, supper over, dishes washed, we gather on the porch—Dad and Lynn in webbed lawn chairs, Marianne, Diane and I on the squeaking metal glider, waiting for dark and lightning bugs. Mom in her zip-up robe joins the family, flimsy screen door banging shut. Chairs all taken, no one getting up to offer her a seat, Mom leans against the porch railing, its spindles flaking dull green paint. Creak, crack and the rotted rail splinters, Mom crashes, breathless and whimpering, on her back on top of the railing in the dirt of the front lawn. Everyone except Mom is laughing. No one asks if she’s okay—does she have cuts, bruises, broken bones? No one offers a hand to help her up, not even Dad.
sky shattered gray and blue
above apple trees
trying to blossom
Anatomy of Fear
Voices wake me, clock glowing midnight. Out my bedroom window, flashing red and blue lights, a police car parked in front of our house. The policeman is talking, something about court. Mom is crying, wailing they’ll take you away from us, is that what you want? My brother Johnnie is in trouble. He missed supper, was gone all evening. The police car drives away. Dad forces Johnnie to pull down his pants. Whacks of fury: Dad’s wide leather belt, Johnnie crying, screaming, shrieking.
turtle retracts head, limbs
guarding
soft underbelly
Broken
15: My brother and I roll, wrestle and punch on the shabby wooden floor. Johnnie chases me out of the house, locks the door. I smash a front door window to get in, hide in my bedroom. Mom and Dad don’t even notice the broken window until winter winds clatter the bent blinds.
16: When I refuse to give Mom the paycheck from my after-school job, she slaps me and yanks it from my hand.
17: I get drunk, stoned and date-raped at all-night parties with boys I hardly know. My sister threatens to tell Mom when she catches me staggering home in the glare of 6 AM sunrise.
18: I graduate first in my high school class. In a pew at the St. Basil’s graduation mass, the song in my mind playing on repeat: we gotta get out of this place/if it’s the last thing we ever do/there’s a better life.
robins, warblers, sparrows
escape to warmth, abandon
tree crowns stripped bare
Falling
Far above Cayuga’s waters….
Leaving Pittsburgh, I promise myself, no drinking, no dope. Eight hours from home over two-lane mountain roads, Cornell University. Grassy quadrangle criss-crossed with trails, edged with classy historic buildings—brown bricks with limestone trim, arched windows, mansard roofs. Clocktower chimes sing the hours, serenade mid-day. Suspension bridge 200 feet above the Fall Creek Gorge and Foaming Falls. Within a 10 mile radius, 150 waterfalls and dozens of deep rocky gorges carved by glaciers 12,000 years ago.
A working class, scholarship girl from Pittsburgh, I can’t translate posh Long Island coeds—sorority sisters wearing neon mini dresses in geometric patterns, fraternity brothers in preppy ties and sport coats.
I blow off a date with George, a stable, common-sense engineering student from Pittsburgh, choose Paul, who ace-bandages my sprained ankle, bakes me a frozen apple pie. He’ll take care of me, I think. I abandon my roommate, move into a run-down first floor flat on a hill with him and two other couples.
My no alcohol, no drugs policy is blowing in the wind. Stoned weekends, cross-legged in a circle on the dirty wooden floor, we lose ourselves in Jimi Hendrix, Iron Butterfly, Eric Clapton, Fleetwood Mac, have you seen the stars tonight?
Paul convinces me to buy a rusting anemic green VW with my leftover scholarship money even though I don’t know how to drive. He convinces me to wash dishes with him at a sorority for fifteen dollars a week even though I washed mountains of dishes as a child. Paul gets drunk and passes out on the sorority house lawn, panics on mescaline, gets arrested for shoplifting. I don’t know how to leave him.
trapped in gorges
breathless
in waterfalls
Death Bingo
Pitchers of beer, Bookies Sports Bar in Ithaca’s Collegetown, students on stools, silent, shredding napkins. December 1, 1969, Mayberry R.F.D. is preempted for stiff suited men in white shirts and narrow black ties who spin a drum, reach in to pull out and open a capsule, extract a slip of paper, announce the date it contains, pin it on a board numbered 1-366, the birth date order for being drafted to serve in Vietnam. As the board fills up, Tom talks Canada, Tim— pacifism, Bob—medical, Bill—hardship, Paul—relief.
storm winds whirl
chaos
dancing trees
Drowning
I don’t leave him. After graduation, I marry him,
home-cooked home-sewn hippie wedding on a hill
—piña coladas, beer, pork chops and cherry cake.
First anniversary: flimsy paper. I teach high school English, he substitute teaches, does odd jobs.
Third: tattered cotton. Every weekend, he and Randy tour all the back country bars. I worry the nights, imagine death, fights, accidents, arrests. He stumbles in, stinking and incoherent at 3 AM, 4 AM, 5 AM.
Fifth: stained linen. We move to bars everywhere, alcoholic culture Wisconsin to live with adolescents in crisis. He escapes for all-night drunk poker, has a drunk driving accident when I’m pregnant. A few years later, he earns a DUI, loses his license. I drive everywhere.
Seventh: rusted iron. He fills our home with hoards of postage stamps, trading cards, Beanie Babies and comic books, yells at me if I dare move them. On weekends, he sells his treasures in hotel ballrooms, leaving me with our three children and their soccer games, piano lessons, dance, gymnastics, homework, baths and bedtime stories. He clings to the delusion that these weekend sales are funding our retirement.
Tenth: termited wood. When I plan a weekend visit with my girlfriend in Minneapolis, he threatens, if you leave, you’re slamming the door on our marriage. I go to Minneapolis.
Twelfth: moth-eaten wool. Arriving home at 10 PM after an eight hour work day, thirty-five mile drive, three hour grad school class and forty-mile drive home, Paul accuses me of having sex with one of my fellow students. Where in that schedule is there time for sex??
Thirteenth: corroded bronze. After a three-hour lunch with my colleague and happily married friend Peg, he accuses me of a lesbian affair. Time just melts for us when we talk about books, art, beading, quilting, work, children, life—it’s all food, tea and conversation—no sex.
Fifteenth: smashed crystal. When my parents visit for Thanksgiving, he buys a quarter barrel of beer—for him and my Dad.
Twentieth: tarnished silver. Cooking weekend supper, Paul pours two beers over ice into a super-sized McDonald’s cup, then two more and two more, passes out, head on the table after eating, comes back to consciousness, pours himself a tall glass of wine, then more beer and drunk-snoring on the living room floor until 5 AM, surrounded by crushed beer cans, music blasting from headphones fallen off his head, yells I’m listening when I try to turn it off. I stop picking up the cans.
Lake Michigan rip currents
knock my feet from under me
drag me towards open water
Storming
To give my children any chance at sanity,
I need to teach them:
This is not love.
This is not marriage.
This is not health.
This is a family drowning
in alcohol.
A word I’d never spoken, divorce, squirms its way into my vocabulary.
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —Anais Nin
After months of procrastinating, he agrees to a couple’s therapy appointment, arrives 20 minutes late, blaming me for not giving him directions, upset because he had to walk through the adjoining psychiatric hospital. He tells the therapist, I want her to be the way she used to be.
When he’s served divorce papers, he cries and denies, won’t move out, lives in our bedroom while I sleep on an air mattress on the floor of the crafts room. He rages at me when I take our children to therapy, doesn’t hire a lawyer, microscopes every word in proposed settlements, initiates fiery fights about insurance, holidays, tax deductions, property appraisal. We have flame-throwing battles about custody until I cave to his foolish demands. I ferry stipulation agreements back-and-forth between the lawyer and him. Shaking, I’m sure I’ll wreck my car on the way to the lawyer’s office when he finally agrees to and signs the final stipulation.
In court, when the judge asks if this marriage is irretrievably broken, he replies, I don’t know. My lawyer tells him this divorce is going to happen, today. He concedes, yes, we’re broken.
My short, bald and tight-lipped attorney calls me the next day: when he said “I don’t know,” I wanted to kick him in the balls.
From my couch, staring at the snow-bleached meadow and winter-stripped crab apple trees lining the driveway, I wait for my three children to climb down from the lights-flashing yellow bus and run down the long driveway, backpacks bouncing.
howls of wind snow
silenced
crystals glimmer in sun
What I Know
I slow, notice,
rest inside each breath,
learn to feel,
find order,
trust beauty
—sky, earth, water.
Winter’s silent blue sky is stenciled with feather clouds that stretch from horizon to heights. Winds sculpt the sky with cloud-art every day: massive climbing towers, gray-blue ledges spotlighted with sun, the swish of white brush strokes, sometimes, just a few commas.
I trust the moon’s rhythms: orange-cratered fullness shrinking to a silver slice, then swelling and blossoming. My every-day morning sun rises, falls in kaleidoscopes of color every evening.
I study the signs of life returning: weeping willows glowing orange in early March, trees waking up in ombréed greens of lily lime, pastel jade and pale mint, tight-fisted buds on bushes flexing muscles. Peeper symphonies lullaby me on star-speckled spring evenings.
I teach myself wildflower names and memorize where and when the trillium and mayapples, spring beauties and marsh marigolds, wild roses and evening primroses, cornflower chicory and purple asters will bloom along the trail.
Every summer, bird families faithfully return, cooing, chirping, twittering and beak wrestling, flashing their colors, entertaining me with their feeder antics.
Lake Michigan calmly brushes the sand with soft waves or crashes boulders with foam mountains that reach for sky far above the breakwater. Lake winds re-shape shoreline dunes. The beach is a treasure chest of stone and glass carved and smoothed by time, wind and water. The water’s shaded stripes of green, gray and blue merge with sky, challenge the boundaries of my imagination.
I am certain that summer is sliding into fall, that leaves will prove their brilliance: blushing, burning, skittering, dancing the streets. I know winter is moving in.
river geese honk-harmonize
wing-slap, rise as one
whisper-fly above me