In 2004, after writing a series of narrative feature obituaries for The Spokesman-Review, I began to notice how often women in their 70s and 80s—usually the surviving spouse—mentioned their service or work in a “Rosie the Riveter” type of job during World War II.

    Intrigued, I decided to do a larger feature on local women who’d been “Rosies.” My editor put a notice in the paper for a few weeks and I was inundated by calls. Hundreds of women contacted me asking to tell their story and I interviewed many of them.

    Time and time again the women talked about traveling to take a job at a shipyard or wartime factory. But I was left with the impression that their war work had been more than employment. It had been, for some, the biggest adventure of their lives.

     After the war most returned home or moved to another state with new husbands. Most left the workforce and stayed home with children. The dizzying whirl of sudden independence, graveyard shifts, USO dances was replaced with marriage, caring for young children and keeping house.

    Most didn’t seem to regret the choice, but I was struck by the fact that so many had never talked about the years before they settled down. Our interview was the first time they’d spoken of that time in front of family. Their children had no idea that the women they knew only as a mother, PTA president or Sunday School teacher had had any other kind of life.

    One woman said something that has stayed with me. I think of her words often.

    We’d finished the interview. I was packing up the portable scanner, the digital recorder, my laptop and my camera—the tools I carried to each meeting— and preparing to leave.  Almost as an afterthought, I turned to the woman who was still sitting at her daughter’s kitchen table.

    She’d traveled west to work at a California shipyard where she met and married a serviceman and at the war’s end moved to North Idaho with him to live on his family’s dairy farm. It was a life that was sometimes harsh with frigid winters, long hot summer days and the endless work of farm life. Like so many of the women I interviewed, she’d raised four or five children and then outlived her husband.

    “I’m curious,” I asked her. “How did the time you spent in California, not just the work but the things you saw and experienced, impact your life later?”

    The woman didn’t answer immediately. She looked down at her hands clasped as they rested on the table, smiled a small Mona LIsa smile, and said only, “There were times it sustained me.”

       Her daughter, a woman a few years older than me, reacted immediately.

      “Mother!” she said. “You know you were happy being home with us! You always said you loved living on the farm.” The woman continued to smile down at her hands.
   

    “It sustained me,” she said again.
   

    I said my goodbyes and left. But in the eight years since that morning, I’ve thought of her words at least once a week.
    

    So often I’ve imagined her, standing at the stove stirring oatmeal for the baby in his high chair, hanging laundry on the line, mending her husband’s work shirts, feeding the animals or working in the garden. I’ve imagined her taking care of everyone around her, but occasionally stopping for a moment to remember. To remember being a girl with a flower in her hair, dancing with a handsome sailor. To remember the camaraderie of lunches eaten out of a metal lunchbox in the company of other young women working to win the war. Remembering how it felt to be young and free and on her own.
   

   It doesn’t have to mean we’re unhappy with the choices we’ve made when deep inside there is a place or an event or even a scrap of memory we cling to.
    

   Those are the moments, after all, that bear the weight of the lives we’ve built.


    
Cheryl-Anne Millsap is a freelance writer based in Spokane, Washington. In addition to her Home Planet , Treasure Hunting and  CAMera: Travel and Photo blogs, her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com
  

This morning, at Chaps, one of my family's favorite places for Sunday brunch, I noticed a young family sitting at the table beside us. Three young boys and their parents.

The mother and father had their hands full with the two younger children, one just a lap baby. But the oldest boy, no more than five years old, was no bother at all. As we ate and sipped our coffee and talked over our own food, I kept stealing glances over to the other table. As good as my plate of eggs and bacon was, watching him was more delicious.

The boy had a big plate of the house specialty, Blueberry muffin French toast, in front of him. Each time he put a bite, smothered in syrup, in his mouth, he would wiggle a little, reacting to the sheer pleasure of it. I found myself smiling at his involuntary reaction, waiting for his next bite. When he turned his attention to the thick slices of bacon, I settled back with my mug of coffee and watched the show. 

Lost in a daydream, the boy placed the the end of one slice of bacon in his mouth and proceeded to chew on it the way a farmer might chew on a stalk of wheat. Bit by bit the bacon disappeared as he stared dreamily out the window, his hands slack at his sides and his legs wrapped around the legs of his chair. When one piece was finished, he repeated the process with another.

Finally, the little brothers were done with their breakfasts and the parents had taken one last sip of coffee and were bundling up everyone to go home.

The little boy who had needed no help polishing off a platter of food, stood up and slipped his arms into the sleeves of his coat. And then, as he turned to leave, he noticed a piece of his French toast in his chair where it had fallen from his lap. He stared at it for a few minutes and then looked over at his mother and his father. They had turned away and were already moving toward the door. He stood perfectly still another minute, as I watched, and then reached out, picked up the bit of fallen bread and popped it in his mouth. Just as he did so he looked over and caught my eye. I winked over the rim of my coffee cup. He smiled at me and then skipped off to join the rest of his family.

That, I thought to myself, is how each of us should appreciate a meal that was prepared and put before us. With gratitude and pleasure. Savored from start to finish. Especially that last delicious bite.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap is a freelance writer based in Spokane, Washington. In addition to her Home Planet , Treasure Hunting and  CAMera: Travel and Photo blogs, her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com

    We sat around the table at a downtown restaurant, a group of women all well into middle age and beyond, savoring a few easy minutes in the final crazed days of the holiday season.

    Looking around, it occurred to me the eight of us would make an excellent focus group. One is divorced, one widowed. Four are married, one is in a committed relationship and one is comfortably single and says she plans to keep it that way.

    There is one attorney, one CEO,  one retiree, one stay-at-home mother (who, in fact, had been in banking before marrying at the age of 40 and quickly producing two newborns in as many years) two self-employed, one unemployed and one clinging to a job she hates.

    One of us is a vegetarian, one is sensitive to a long list of foods. The rest of us agree we eat too much of everything.

    We are all very different women from different backgrounds. Between us, we have 12 children and three grandchildren with one more on the way, we speak three languages and at least two of us play a musical instrument. Our incomes range from “barely making it” to high six-figures. Our levels of education go from “some college” to advanced degrees.

    But, by the end of December we all have one basic thing in common: we’re exhausted. And this year it seems worse than usual. Talking about it, we finally realized we’re suffering from a deep collective uneasiness; a lack of confidence we just can’t shake.

    Usually, as one year ends and another begins, it’s human nature to salve any wounds with the belief that there are better things to come. The political climate will thaw. The economy will bloom. They’ll finally discover a chocolate-based cure for cellulite. But this year, one of us finally said it out loud. As we lifted our glasses to toast the end of one year and the beginning of another, one of the women around the table asked,  “But what if next year is even worse?”  We laughed but then all fell silent.
What, indeed.

    No matter what social strata you call home, the state of the world is fragile these days. So many people are out of work and many have been for quite a while. And some who’ve managed to hang onto jobs are bringing home significantly less than before. Retirement dreams have been put on hold and skyrocketing college tuition is taking a toll on family budgets or, more and more, becoming a luxury many can’t afford. And, then there’s Europe’s leaky financial boat, tethered to our own.

    Finally, after a few seconds of uncomfortable silence, I raised my glass again.
    “Next year will be what it will be,” I said. “And I’m willing to believe it will be a good one.”

    “Always the optimist,” a friend said as she smiled at me, and I shrugged. It’s true.

    There are some who believe that optimism is baked into our DNA. It is a part of who we are from the moment we’re conceived. I don’t know about that but I do know it just isn’t in me to be anything else. It keeps me moving forward and helps me find my way. The way I see it, optimism, another word for hope, is like a candle on a dark path. And we’re only truly lost if we lose that light.

   So, here's to another year, and all it might bring. Here's to a bright and optimistic future.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap is a freelance writer based in Spokane, Washington. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com
  

This is a repost of one of my favorite columns. I recorded it for Spokane Public Radio several years ago and it is available on Public Radio Exchange. This year, the audio essay was broadcast by Delta College Public Radio in Michigan.

November 22, 2004

Giving her thanks for a gift of insight
Cheryl–Anne Millsap
Correspondent




   When I was a girl, an old blind woman lived in the faded white house with peeling clapboards and a shaded, vine–covered porch, next door to me. Mrs. Miller was small and wiry, and very old. Her thin white hair was always pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck.
   

   She lived with a little Chihuahua named Rocky – a strange and exotic pet at the time. The dog was ancient, barely able to walk on his thin matchstick legs and he, too, was almost blind.

   Sometimes, Mrs. Miller’s son, John, lived with them. John was a loud and angry man who worked nights – when he worked – and either slept or watched game shows on the television all day. John drank. And when he was drunk, he wasn’t very nice to his mother.

   I was afraid of that house and everyone in it. To me, the old woman was a person of shadows, living a dark and shuttered life. John, whose angry voice I could hear through the closed windows, frightened me and I was wary of the odd little dog.

   Occasionally, when John wasn’t home, my grandmother would send me over with a baked sweet potato, a couple of ripe tomatoes or a slice of homemade pie. I would knock on the back door and listen to her shuffling through rooms, calling out to me in a thin, rough, voice. Rocky would totter across the linoleum floor, coughing out a dry, raspy, bark.

   As quickly as I could, I would leave the food on the kitchen table – the sticky oilcloth–covered surface crowded with salt and peppershakers, paper napkins and bottles of hot sauce and pickled peppers – and run back out into the sunlight.

   One Thanksgiving Day, my grandmother asked me to take a meal next door. I drooped, but I knew better than to argue.

   I carried the plate, piled with turkey and dressing, mashed potatoes, green beans and ruby–red spiced apple rings across my back yard. I walked up the bank and past the little grove of plum trees to her back door, and knocked.

   “Mrs. Miller,” I called. “I brought you some Thanksgiving dinner.”

   I listened to her slow, painful, progress through the cluttered rooms. I imagined her reaching out for familiar doorways, feeling the edges of the furniture with bent and arthritic fingers. When she finally opened the back door, I thrust the plate at her, anxious to deliver it and leave.

   But she didn’t take it. Instead, she put her face down to the steaming plate of food and inhaled deeply, breathing in the warm fragrance.

   “Oh, Lord,” the old woman said. “That’s good.”

  And she didn’t move. She just stood there, lost in thought. Finally, as soon as she stepped aside, I set the plate down on the table and ran home.

   Just today, when I thought about what we will have for our Thanksgiving dinner, and my mind remembered, and replayed for me the taste of roast turkey and cornbread dressing, I recalled that day so long ago.

   Thinking about it now, I understand that at that moment the old woman and I traded places.

   I was blind to everything but my desire to run away, but for an instant Mrs. Miller could see. Through clouded eyes, she looked back at other Thanksgivings, long gone. Happy days before she was old and blind, and trapped in a dark house with an angry son.

   In the years since that November day, when the trace of a scent or the sound of a voice leaves me gazing at ghosts, I’ve learned that time gives back as much as it takes away.

   And for that, like the old woman, I’m grateful.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com
  

    Not that there’s ever been any shortage of evidence, but my three older children now have solid proof that we love the youngest more. By their standards, of course.
    

   When I was raising my three older children, three little stairsteps born in just under six years, I was one firm about one thing. We would not, I insisted, be a Disney family. I didn’t see the appeal of packing up and driving or flying to an oversized amusement park. I had all sorts of arguments: long lines, sunburn, expense, crowds, and nothing but whirling rides to entertain us.
   

    When they got old enough to take themselves to the happiest place on earth, I told them, they could go.
   

    I got my way. They grew up as Disney theme-park virgins.  My son was the only one who ever got there and he, just as I’d insisted, drove himself and his girlfriend the summer they graduated from high school.
   

    But something changed last year. I had an assignment in Orlando and we decided to make a family vacation out of it. The others were already out of the house, away at school or living on their own, so it was just the three of us: me, my husband and the 15-year-old “baby.”
    

   I got my work done and we spent a few days playing at Walt Disney World. As luck would have it, we were there in October and each night the park was transformed into Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.
    

   So much for sticking to a position. I took one step inside the gate and went completely over to the mouse’s side.
    

   I elbowed my way to the front of the line to watch the parade both times it threaded through the park that night. As we “trick-or-treated” (naturally there was trick-or-treating)  I was scolded by my daughter for (accidentally, I swear!) going through one line twice. I stood in queue for the rides without complaining. I traded pins with the toddler waiting behind me and then worried he might have gotten the better deal.
    

   While my daughter watched bemused, I acted like, well, a kid.
    

   Of course. Exactly as Walt Disney and his army of imagineers planned. I didn’t throw myself down on the ground and pitch a tantrum when it was time to leave. But I dragged my feet all the way to the airport.
    

   When we were all together at Thanksgiving there was a lot of teasing and good-natured grumbling about how the baby was the favorite and the trip to Orlando was just one more example of getting the best of everything. And there were more than a few comments about my fall from my high horse.
    

   Now, here it is October again. And I keep thinking about that skeleton band in the parade. And the way the lights illuminating the castle changed colors every few minutes. And just how much fun it was to spend a few days in a magic kingdom away from deadlines and the aggravation of the real world.
   

    You win, Disney. I want to go back. Just do me a favor, please. Don't tell my kids.

   Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review and is the editor of Spokane Metro Magazine. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com

    When I was in my mid-20s, I spent a summer in New York City working and studying. I immediately fell in love with the city and found my pulse danced to the constant rhythm of traffic and people; to a compact space filled with people that was alive and moving at any hour of the day.

    It was a world away from the relatively quiet way I’d lived up until then and I couldn’t get enough.
    I was staying in an apartment on the campus of Columbia University and working at New York University, at the opposite end of the island and I spent most of my days traveling up and down Manhattan by subway or taxi, sometimes by bus.

    One day I was lost in thought as I walked several blocks from the subway stop to  my apartment, already accustomed to the noise and crowded sidewalks and the heat, when, suddenly, something arrested me. I stopped, confused. I didn’t know why, but I was instantly and deeply, homesick. I missed my husband. I wanted my grandmother, my cats. I could think of nothing but the important people and places in my life, a life that was a thousand miles away.

    I noticed the man pushing a lawnmower across Columbia’s wide quadrangle, a place always populated by students and others moving quickly from one place to another, or lounging, relaxing, socializing and realized it was the scent of freshly mowed grass that had hit me. It was the familiar fragrance so closely associated with summer where I was from that had overpowered the smell of asphalt baking in the sun and garbage in the dumpsters and food from the tiny bars and delis lining the street.

    It had found me and wound around me, capturing me the way such things do in cartoons.
    I’ve never forgotten the way I felt that day and I was reminded of it again last night when I stepped out my back door to enjoy the last light of the day. My husband had just mowed our tiny back yard and the air was heavy and sweet with the smell of green summer grass.

    And, in the peculiar way life has of taking the years and turning them over and inside out, and then at the most unexpected  moments handing them back to us to examine, I was assailed by the memory of being young and brave and foolish. Of being so hungry for adventure and experience I would jump at almost any opportunity to go and do and see.

    I am now, I realized, a product of the joys and heartaches; the babies, the jobs, the moves and the experiences that have shaped me since that hot August day in New York. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve seen a few things along the way. But long ago I surrendered to the knowledge that wherever I go I am always, inextricably, drawn back to the green grass of home.





Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review and is the editor of Spokane Metro Magazine. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons.”
She can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com

   I brought the sheets and pillowcases in from the clothesline, stiffened by the wind and still warm from the late afternoon sun. Before I folded each piece, I buried my face in the fabric and breathed deeply.

   Who doesn’t love that smell? Like sunlight spun into thread.

    I made up the bed and the fragrance was still there when I turned out the light and drifted off to sleep. As I dozed, I don’t know what exactly triggered the memory, my mind drifted back to charm-pillows.

    One day when I was a girl, no more than six or seven, in the morning of what would be a long, hot, southern summer day, my grandmother mentioned charm pillows as we folded laundry from the big willow basket. The were sachets to be tucked under your pillow, she told me, filled with grasses or herbs that were said to sweeten your dreams.

     Naturally, I had to have one. So she led me out to the backyard and we gathered fat white blossoms from a broad patch of clover. She’d already shown me how to make a chain of the flowers – woven together by their stems -  to wear in my hair or around my neck, and my sister and I spent hours sitting in the field stringing them together. But that day my grandmother and I picked the blooms and spread them out on the child-sized picnic table – the place I usually sat to have my lunch of peanut butter sandwiches cut into quarters - to dry in the hot sun.

    By the end of the day they were ready. As I stood looking over her shoulder, she stitched a tiny pillow out of fabric pulled from the bag of quilting scraps, leaving it open at one end. Together, we filled the bag with the dried clover and using small, neat stitches, she sealed it.

  That night she tucked me into bed, the bed my mother had slept in when she was a child. I was cocooned by sheets that had dried in the sun, just like the clover. Beside my head, was the pillow we’d made.

  The truth is, I don’t remember what I dreamed that night; if the sachet worked its magic then. But the magic is with me now. Last night, thinking of that day, I returned to a place that is gone. To a woman who is gone. To a childhood long gone.

  Perhaps that is the true magic of the charm pilloe. The thing itself is lost to time. But the perfume lingers to catch you by surprise, so that years later, when you least expect it, you fall under its spell and into sweet, sweet dreams.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com

Walking to an early meeting, the sharp tapping of my heels on the sidewalk ricocheting off the stone walls of the old cathedral on the corner, I looked down at my feet and I was shocked by what I saw. I’d almost stepped on two tiny wings.  A sparrow’s wings.  The sad, singular remainder of a deadly battle between predator and prey.

 At that moment, I looked up to see a woman coming toward me. She’s a familiar sight downtown. Small, with a quirky rolling gait, like a little sailor listing from side to side as she moves, she walks her city like a tourist. She peers up at window washers hanging from scaffolding. She peeks into buildings that are under renovation. She studies parked cars as she walks slowly past them. She looks up to follow planes as they pass low over the city. She turns to watch bicyclists and skateboarders rocket by.

I see her often and she always reminds me of a bird in an urban cage. She lives in the senior apartments near the Cathedral where I was standing. Her world is an orderly grid of streets and avenues: Six blocks to the drugstore.  Four blocks to the market.  Five blocks to the mall.

Every day, she walks, listening and watching the rest of the world; men in starched shirts and silk ties and women in heels and power suits, all hustling from one meeting to another, on their way to coffee breaks and corporate lunches.

I can’t help but think she must have been something when she was young. Even now, in old age, there is a hint of the petite, curvy, young woman she must have been. Now, even in elastic-waist pants and sensible shoes, I see a girl who wore a flower behind one ear. A girl who danced at the USO.
I wish I knew her story. Is she a widow? Or, perhaps a divorcee, from a time when divorce set a woman apart, leaving her to live on pennies and prayer.Did she raise a family, taking car vacations to National Parks or the train to big cities? Did she work? Does she miss all that?

How did she lose her wings, I wondered to myself. When did she turn into a solitary figure who walks the city as an observer?

The woman walked up to where I stood and stopped beside me, looking down at the feathers at my feet. Then she peered up at me, cocking her head to one side in that birdlike way she has.

 It was all I could do not to ask, “They aren’t yours, are they?”

I couldn’t see her eyes behind the dark, oversized glasses she always wears, as she smiled and shook her head in pity.

“Poor thing,” she said, and walked away.

Watching her, it struck me that a bird can’t survive without its wings.  But people? Well, people do it all the time.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com
  

    They stood on the corner downtown, a loose, silent group of young men. Most not more than boys, really. Each had a bag or duffle at their feet.
    

   I realized they were new recruits on their way to boot camp. To basic training. On their way to an adventure, on their way to the fast-track to maturity. On their way to a place and a future they couldn’t imagine. Gone, as the old folk song goes, for a soldier.
    

    The group paid no attention to me as I walked past. Most were lost in their own thoughts, staring down at their shoes, or at their fingernails. I wondered if they were still under the spell of tearful goodbyes; hugs from crying wives, mothers or girlfriends, awkward handshakes from fathers whose voices were gruff with unshed tears.
    

    It was all I could do to walk on by. I have a son just about their age. I worry about him all the time. When he’s traveling, I call, leaving nagging texts on his phone.
    

    “Where are you?” I write, or “You need to call me now.”
     

    When he’s in town, I cluck and flutter around him like a hen, asking questions and giving advice that is politely taken, but quickly tossed away.
    

    Those boys weren’t mine, but I could barely contain the urge to do the same for them.
    

    “Take care of yourself,” I wanted to say. “Be careful. Pay attention to what’s going on around you. Call your mother.”
    

    I wanted to send them off with a blessing.
    

    What would they think, I wondered, if a woman – a woman old enough to be their mother - ran up to each one and, taking their head in her hands, kissed each cheek and told them she loved them? Because at that moment I did love them all. They would remember me I’m sure. From time to time they would talk about the crazy woman who kissed them the day they left. They would laugh about it, but they would never forget.
    

    I didn’t stop. My feet kept walking. They kept their eyes trained at the far edge of the horizon.
And we each kept our thoughts to ourselves.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com
  

   I didn’t pay much attention to the first shoe. It’s not unusual to see a lone shoe on the road, although I almost always wonder who dropped it and left it behind.

   The second shoe, the mate to the one I’d just passed, did get my attention. They were expensive-looking men’s leather shoes, lace-ups, and the one that had landed upside down showed a good sole, no holes or worn spots.
   Who loses both shoes in the road?” I wondered.

   But it was the pants that slowed me down. Not more than 100 feet down the road, a well-traveled arterial through an upscale residential neighborhood, a street lined by stately homes and old trees, a pair of men’s trousers, a nice wool gabardine by the look of them, were thrown across the center line.
Pants, shoes and then, yep, you guessed it, a little farther down the block, a shirt. A man’s light blue cotton dress shirt. By this time I was almost afraid to look ahead, afraid I would see some guy, stripped down to his boxers, splayed on the pavement like a scene from CSI.

   Fortunately, I didn’t find him. But there was a belt. A nice black leather belt with a shiny brass buckle.
I drove the rest of the way bemused. There had to be a story there somewhere.

   Was this what was left of a stockbroker who’d decided enough was enough and had switched off his computer, pushed away from his desk and peeled out of the parking lot, stripping off his work uniform like a snake moves out of his skin? Did he walk into the house wearing only his underwear and carrying a brief case and say, “Guess what, Honey? I quit,” to his startled wife?

   Or, perhaps it was something a little sexier. Had he been driving with a beautiful babe by his side urging him on as he peeled off his clothes, waving them once out the top of the convertible and then letting them fly as he sped away? If so, the pants and the belt impressed me. I mean, that would be hard to, well, pull off.

   I suppose the clothing could have been put there by an angry girlfriend, a trail of spiteful crumbs left by a woman who felt a little better with each garment she threw away. Relationship roadkill.

   I finally settled on another scenario. Not as romantic, but probably a little more realistic.
I pictured a car, maybe a minivan, driven by a man who left the office and stopped by the gym for a quick workout before picking up his toddler from day care. While he drove home, distracted, still connected to the office by a Bluetooth umbilicus, the curious child fished around in his gym bag, pulling out one thing after another and then deliberately pushing each out the window, delighting in the way the objects simply disappeared as the car moved on. I imagined his reaction when he opened the door and leaned over to unbuckle the grinning child.

   The next morning everything was gone. The street was clothing-free. But somebody, somewhere, must have had some explaining to do.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com

  

   The evening’s performance is Mozart and the beautiful old Fox Theater is filled with the sweet sounds of the violin and viola.

    My son is in town for the weekend and has accompanied us to a night at the Symphony. Watching him from a row behind, seated beside his sister, I notice the way he closes his eyes when the music starts, a small smile playing around the corners of his mouth.

    Something behind my ribs, deep in the center of me, aches. I know that look. I’ve seen it before.

    Every mother looks at a grown child and sees the baby he or she was. My son is tall now, his hair is short and dark, his face is angular and shadowed by the stubble of his beard. But in my gaze, superimposed on his adult features, is the image of the sturdy little boy whose head was once covered with soft cottony curls.
    For a moment, the little boy is mine to hold again.

    From the moment each of my children were born, we ended each day in the dark. Rocking in the old chair that had been their great-great grandmother’s, I held them close and sang a series of songs. The order of the lullabies, one sung after another, never varied and I sang them so many years the tunes melded into one melody always accompanied by the soft creaking sound of the old rocking chair.

    Each of my children had their own way of falling asleep. My firstborn fought it every step of the way. I could feel her surrender, finally softening in my arms and dropping into sleep. When I rocked my middle daughter she popped her thumb in her mouth and proceeded to fall asleep almost as soon as I started singing. My youngest, the baby, would lay in my arms silent and still but half-awake, through two loops of the singing before dropping off.
    My son, the only boy in a house of sisters, had his own way. He would curl against me, his head - covered with with those soft curls - would rest against my arm. He would close his eyes and smile, luxuriating in the pleasure of the rhythm and the caress and the music. I would gaze down on his face, as I did with each of them, illuminated by light coming through the bedroom window.

    Rocking those babies, everything - the burdens; the frustrations, the fatigue and the worry I’d carried with me all day - would fade, swept away on songs that mothers had been singing for ages.

    Try as I might, I have not found anything that soothes me as much as soothing my children did. My life, without all the care and worry of parenting small children, should be easier now, But there are days when I would welcome the chance to sit down and hold a warm little body in my arms; a chance to sing and rock and relax.

    I think about that as I steal glances at the man, my boy, who sits in a room filled with the sound of music. And I watch him smile.
    


Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com

    The car swooped down on the empty parking spot like a bird of prey, flying the length of one car, then reversing and capturing the open space with one maneuver. The driver’s door opened and a woman stepped out, taking care not to dip her high heels in the oily puddle left from melting snow and the morning’s rain.

    She stepped up onto the curb, snapping open a pocket umbrella against the blustery wind, and peered down at the face of the parking meter.

    March, the lion’s month, played with the woman, pushing back the edge of her umbrella like the brim of a hat, threatening to take it away and toss it down the rain-slick sidewalk, teasing open her raincoat, stinging her stockinged legs with tiny pellets of frozen rain.

    With one hand she dug deeply into her purse, searching for coins, the fee for holding her place, a tax for standing still for exactly one and one half hours. The soft brown leather bulged where she felt for change, pushed out here, then there, in side pockets and deep into the corners where a quarter might hide under pens and pencils, receipts and breath mints.

    One by one, she found what she needed and out came the woman’s hand to feed the meter little bites of time. The last coin slipped out of her fingers and fell to the ground. Dancing a jig of frustration, she shifted her purse, tucking it under the arm that held the umbrella that threatened to escape, and picked up the coin with cold fingers.

    Paid in full, she reached into her pocket and found her keys and aimed the remote at the car. “Stay,” she seemed to be telling the vehicle as she pushed the lock button. The car chirped its reply.
As she turned to walk away, the fickle wind turned as well. Now, instead of teasing, flipping her umbrella and snapping at the hem of her coat, tossing her scarf into her face, it snuck up from behind her, pushing her down the sidewalk blowing her hair into her eyes and tucking her raincoat between her legs as she rounded the corner.

    The car – perched like a bird on a wire, off duty and at rest - waited, engine cooling, wipers idled and lights off. The meter, the master of everything between two white lines painted on asphalt, waited too. Ticking away the seconds until the woman returned.


Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com

(photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap)  

    The first thing you notice about the Alamo is that it stands right in the center of San Antonio. The small, sand-colored building, surrounded by trees and a lawn of green grass, ringed by tall buildings, sits like an antique, rough-cut stone, in a modern setting.

    Of course, the Alamo was there first. Everything else came along later.

    I visited the Alamo for the first time late in the afternoon two days before the 175th anniversary of the battle that shaped both the legend and the aura of the Alamo, as well as the state of Texas.

    I watched as people walked the grounds, stopping to read the names on the tall memorial. Some were in costume. Members of the Texas Living History Association were there to reenact the event. Horses, tied to lines strung between trees, dozed, lifting one foot and then another. Men strolled around in buckskin and homespun, some in the uniform of Mexican soldiers. The women were in bonnets and calico.

      Finally, I opened the heavy wood doors and stepped inside.  I am always struck by the power of a place with a past. The way inanimate buildings can breathe with life and echo silently with the sound of all they have witnessed.

    In the wide central hall, visitors moved from one display to another, their voices hushed as though they were in a sacred place. The people of Texas would say they were.The air was perfumed with the  cool, dry, mineral smell of stone and time.

    As I stood there, listening to our guide speak of the battle, the deaths and indignities, I noticed a man walk through the door. Tall, lanky, wearing jeans and a wide cowboy hat - the quintessential Texan - he stopped and looked around him.

Then, slowly, he reached up and removed his Stetson and, with his big, rough hand cupped over the crown, held it over his heart.

    I came back for the ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the battle. Standing in the crowd, shivering in the dark, I listened to the speakers and felt the concussion from the musket volleys fired at dawn. I wondered if the man who’d stood so respectfully a few days before was there, lost in the crowd.

    History is such a personal thing.  But it is a collective experience, as well. 

I hadn’t expected to be moved by the Alamo. That is their history, after all.  Not mine.  But I was moved. I was deeply moved by words and faces of the people who stood there with me as the sky lightened into a deep violet over the rough stone walls of the old mission.    

I came away with the lesson we so often forget in a world that moves too fast to do much more than hold on to where we are at the moment.
    

Ultimately, history asks only one thing of us: Remember.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com
  

(photo by R.B. Millsap)

In the dream, I rode the river like a magic carpet, floating on nothing more that a scrap of material beneath me.  I lay still, relaxed, stretched out on my stomach with my hands folded under my cheek, lulled by the gentle motion as the the wide, rolling river undulated beneath me.

I studied the scenery as I drifted past the city skyline, past buildings and houses, past schools and playgrounds, past people strolling on paths along the river. With sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, I looked up through the branches of the willow trees lining the riverbank, gazing into a soft blue sky.

 I was content. I wasn’t afraid of falling in or being snagged by sharp, dangerous things just under the surface. I was, at that moment,  as peaceful and comfortable as I can ever imagine being. I was free.

Of course the irony is that just an hour or so before, waiting for sleep, I had been anything but content. I’d tossed and turned, kicking at the blankets,  restless with worry.  My mind kept pulling at loose threads, deconstructing, mulling over decisions, pondering the charged state of the world, always going back to, circling again and again, each of my children.
 
In the dark and quiet room my ears echoed with the dull pounding of my own heartbeat. My eyes, no matter how many times I closed them, flew open with every new troublesome thought.

I don’t know why it is that the things that weigh the heaviest on us, the things we carry, come alive at night.  When the rest of the world is sleeping, worry lives in me the way  my babies did before they were born, kicking and rolling as soon as I lay down, prodding me, keeping me awake. Forcing me to stare at the ceiling looking back and ahead.

Finally, exhausted, I remembered a piece my daughter used to play on the piano, Debussy’s “Jimbo’s Lullaby.”

It is an odd, shifting, restless piece, constantly changing from soothing melody to a jangle of notes. And then back again. She practiced it for weeks, and still, today, when she’s home from school she will occasionally sit down and play it again. The girl, and the song, were on my mind as I finally drifted off to sleep.

 When the radio clicked on the next morning, and I slowly swam to the surface of a new day, I manage to catch the hem of the river dream as it slipped away in the soft light of morning and I held onto it and as I went through the day letting it play at the edge of my mind.

I found myself, at odd moments, humming the song. The night had not been kind but in sunlight, remembering the sensation of drifting so peacefully, I could release the things that had so disturbed me the night before.
I practiced the lesson of the dream. I gave in. I let go. I let the swift current of a busy day carry me away.


Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com
  

   I flew into my day on autopilot. I turned off the clock radio and stole an extra fifteen minutes in bed. I made a lunch for my daughter and called up the stairs to stop dawdling so we wouldn’t be late. I shoved the dogs out the back door and tapped my foot, waiting for them to finish and come back inside.  I dropped her off at school and drove away.
   

   This is how I start too many days. Cruising without really paying any attention to the horizon.
   

   Yesterday, I took a different route, down a side street I don’t normally travel. I joined the queue of cars waiting to merge onto the busy street that would take us downtown. The wintery morning was overcast and dark, so I could see into lighted rooms in the houses on either side of the street. A movement caught my eye and I noticed a man sitting at the table in his kitchen. He was having his breakfast, munching through a bowl of cereal, looking around the room as he chewed. The way you do when you see without seeing rooms that are as familiar as your own hand. He looked up at the ceiling, took another bite, back down at his bowl for another spoonful, gazed to his right toward the clock on the wall and then to his left at the window and, startling us both, straight into my eyes.
   

   At that moment the traffic opened and I drove away.
   

   I thought about  the man as I went through the rest of my day. He had looked so content. I wondered if the rest of his day had been as peaceful as the few minutes I’d witnessed.
I wondered if he appreciated the splendid ordinariness of his morning. Probably not. I know I hadn’t.


   For all I know, as soon as I looked away he choked on his Wheaties. Or the furnace, with a great shuddering, gasping groan, gave up the ghost. Or the toilet overflowed. Or, his wife walked in and said, “Charles, I’m leaving you. I can’t spend another minute watching you chew and swallow.”
  

   The man had caught me watching him. Did he wonder about the nosy woman in the car? For all he knew I could have driven straight into oncoming traffic, or had a flat tire or run out of gas. Did he wonder if I appreciated my reliable car or the short commute or a life easy enough to let me fritter away time staring at people in houses?

   Ask any of us and we can provide the details of the times when things were bad, when we were caught off guard and left stunned by bad news or bad situations. We can narrate, again and again, the highlights. The awards, the surprises and the days that we got the recognition we deserved.

   But most of us, like me when I’m late for a meeting or the man who sat down to his breakfast, forget that every day we munch and drive and daydream our way through irretrievable moments that disappear as quickly as they arrived.
 


Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com

    It looked like a child’s Valentine, a square of red construction paper glued onto a round, lacy, white paper doily. I noticed it on the floor, one edge trapped under the leg of a chair in the coffee shop.
I picked it up and opened it expecting to see something like “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue…signed with X’s and O’s and written in a looping childish scrawl.

    But that’s not what I saw.

    Instead, I read the words, “You can bite me” printed in ink – by an adult hand - and finished with lots of exclamation points.

    At first I assumed it was a kind of naughty little note. A homemade come-on left on the breakfast table, propped against a glass of orange juice or coffee cup. Or, perhaps it had been meant for a co-worker, a secret message left on a desk or handed off under the table in a meeting. A tease to after-hours fun, or a little corporate groping in the elevator.

    But the more I looked at it, the less sweetness I saw. The words, “You can bite me” had been practically carved into the paper. I got the feeling they were written by someone who was angry. Someone whose teeth had been clenched when she wrote it. Someone who might have preferred to carve the same message on the forehead of the recipient. And I was sure it had been written by a woman.

    Whoever she was, she was mad. And she had a point she wanted to make. So, as befitted the day, a lover’s day, she dressed it up in lace and red paper.

    I sat there, holding the little bomb, and tried to imagine who sent it and for whom it had been intended. What on earth had he done to deserve it? And how did he feel when he opened the card?

    Did he sit there, nursing a Venti double-shot and read the words over and over again, mulling over how much trouble she was and how tired he was of her theatrics? Or, did he mentally kick himself, making a promise right then and there to shape up and show the love.

    And what about her? I would give anything to have been a fly on the wall when that card was made. I could imagine her furiously rummaging through drawers looking for a pen that wasn’t out of ink and a glue stick that wasn’t dried and useless. Opening and closing kitchen cabinet doors, searching for those ridiculous doilies she bought last year when she had that baby shower for a friend. Then, after scratching the words across the paper, folding the card and slipping it into an envelope. An angry Cupid, locked, loaded, target in sight.

    Everywhere I look I see Valentines. Most are syrupy and trite. I can’t help but wonder  how many are given  under false pretenses. Pretty poetry and sentimental schmaltz when what the sender would like to say can be summed up in two little words: “Bite me.”

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com


  

Real love is the kind we are surrounded by every day

Chances are you’ve got love, or something like it, on your mind. After all, it’s Valentine’s Day.

Did you buy roses? You need to buy roses. And a card covered with sentimental poetry written by a stranger.

Don’t forget the chocolate, the expensive perfume, something from Victoria’s Secret, a gourmet meal at a five-star restaurant and jewelry. Isn’t that what it takes to show love? Well, one day a year, maybe. But it’s the other 364 days that tell the tale.

The truth is, love doesn’t always come with balloons and words that rhyme. True love usually comes to us just like the groceries – mixed with the necessities and wrapped in plain brown paper.

Love is spread between the peanut butter and jelly in a school lunch sandwich and folded into baskets of clean laundry.

It is carried in a soft look at the end of a hard day and the gentle sound of your name on another’s lips.

Love is scrambled into eggs for a quick supper on a hectic night and sweetens a cup of coffee brought to you before you get out of bed on a cold morning.

Real love isn’t just tender whispers in the dark. It’s pillow talk about unreliable cars, failing hot water heaters, thinning hair, expanding waistlines, ominous medical tests and parent-teacher conferences.

Love is the glue that holds us together and the fuel that drives us to work, piano practice, dentist appointments and soccer games.

Love is the smell of a newborn baby. Love is the sound of a sullen “goodnight” muttered by a teenager who, only moments before, expressed a keen desire to become an orphan.

Love is when you tell the one you chose, “I’m scared,” and they hold your hand. For as long as you need it.

Real love is letting someone hold your hand.

Sometimes love is only visible, like the growth rings in a tree, when we’ve been cut and left with an open wound. And love is the bandage that binds our wounds and helps us heal.

Real love has very little to do with the candy and cards we buy and give once a year. It isn’t in romantic music and movies.

For most of us, love is hidden in the shadows of an ordinary life, when you open your eyes in the cold, gray light of morning and make the choice to stick it out one more day.

Most of us learn to take love where we find it. And when we look, really look, past all the frills and fuss of a made-for-retail holiday, it’s all around us.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com


  (photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap)

    The wind slipped cold, cruel fingers down my collar and teased at the heavy scarf around my neck and it fluttered and danced around my face as I walked carefully down the slushy sidewalk. The afternoon sun was high and bright but the temperature was still bitingly cold.
    I’d been wandering in and out of the shops that line the main street of Traverse City, Michigan,  looking for some kind of token to bring home with me. Valentine’s Day was coming.

    I picked up a few things as I shopped: jam made from Michigan cherries, a postcard, a pair of gloves. But nothing carried the true weight of what I wanted to say.

    Finally, running out of time, I turned off the main street and walked toward the shore of the Lake.


    As I navigated the path, I was careful to avoid the iciest patches. The deep snow formed a high white wall around the edge of the lake and I noticed there were no other footprints. A few cars were parked at the edge and the occupants were protected as they ate their lunches and gazed out at the water, but no one else was foolish enough to get out and face the relentless cold.

    I stood there, open to the wind that poured across the lake freezing everything in it’s path. My face was numb, my eyes watered. My toes and fingers ached.

    The deep azure color of the lake, rimmed by snowy beaches and green hills, flowed up toward the sky in bands of blue broken only by small clouds.  There was a skim of ice on the water closest to the shore and for a few minutes I watched a pair of swans, side-by-side, floating languidly in the frigid water. I remembered reading that swans mate for life and wondered, again, if it is true.

     
     Finally, surrendering, I pushed my hands deeply into my pockets and started to turn away but stopped when the pair of swans moved. As I watched, in a slow, subtle, water-ballet, the pair turned slightly toward one another, long necks gracefully arched, heads pointed down to the water, swimming breast to breast. And for a moment, at least from where I was standing, the space between them formed the shape of a perfect heart.

    Swans live their lives the same way so many humans do, it’s just that our seasons are longer. We court in the spring, have our young in the summer and in the winter, after the young have left the nest, we are content to swim alone, close to our mate for comfort and company.

    My fingers were cold and too slow to bring out my camera and by the time I pressed the shutter the swans had turned away. But I had found my Valentine.

    I was looking for a card or a gift but it took a pair of wild winter swans to show me the way.
 This Valentine's Day, all I really want to say is that when we are winter birds, I will still be here. I will always be the other half of the heart.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com
  

This is a re-post of one of my favorite columns. I am always asked to read it when I have a speaking engagement. I wrote this in 2006 but I've never forgotten the feeling of standing at the window and watching the couple walk down the sidewalk.

Interestingly, I got dozens of phone calls, emails and notes from people who thought the pair I described might have been, or at least reminded them of, their parents. When the column aired on KPBX, the music I chose to undescore the essay was “Real Love” by John Lennon.

February 13, 2006

True love is truly ageless

Standing at the window, high above the busy street, I watched them.

The elderly couple walked slowly down the sidewalk. He was tall. His head was bent low over the woman at his side, and strands of his thin white hair lifted in the wind. Faded, shapeless, corduroy pants, a size too big, hung loosely on his spare frame.

The woman was small. Her head was no higher than the man’s shoulder and her open coat flapped around her thin legs and billowed behind her.

His arm was wrapped protectively around her slight shoulders as she clutched his sweater, and they clung together against the onslaught of the gusts of wintry wind.

There was something about the way they walked, fitted into and against one another, that hinted of a long history as a couple.

I imagined them as they had awakened that morning. Bodies that had lost the softness of youth, grown lean and sharp with age, spooned together in the bed they had shared for many years. They rose to greet the day in a room full of photographs, the smiling faces of mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, newborn babies and fresh-scrubbed children, looking down from the walls.

Their own wedding portrait – perhaps he was wearing a uniform – on the table beside the bed.

I imagined a room and two lives that had seen passion, heartache, tears and laughter. And love.

It’s Feb. 13.

For weeks we’ve seen ads for chocolate and diamonds and all the trappings of romance.

For some reason, in the midst of the sentimental spiel about expensive jewelry and sexy lingerie, the image of the old man and woman popped into my mind.

The idea of love as it is fed to us by greeting cards, movies and best-selling novels is luscious, soft and sweet. Like ripe fruit.

But what I saw in the language of the bodies that moved so slowly down the sidewalk was something else. It was older and mellowed, more mature.

It was real love. Love that has been tempered and forged. Love that, like wine, has opened and breathed. Love that has bloomed.

Forget the candy and the roses. I want what they have.

I’m not naïve. I know there must have been days, weeks, months and even years when the feeling between them waned. When the bonds felt more like chains, and desire cooled. When life was too hard and unforgiving to foster romance.

But love endured. I could see it in every move they made.

As I watched, the man and woman rounded the corner and disappeared from view. Impulsively, I hurried down the stairs and out the door to the corner. But they were gone.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.

Somewhere in this town, in a room filled with memories, the morning light will fall on the man and the woman.

I can’t help but believe that when they stir, each feeling the comforting presence of the other before their eyes even open; without a word, without flowers or diamonds, they will quietly share what the rest of us will wrap in poetry and pretty paper: Love.

Real love.

(Photo by Cheryl-Anne Millsap)   

    When we arrive at the starting point for our hike, Trevor, our Overlander Trekking guide, gives us all thick, insulated, boots and a set of cleats to strap on the soles.

    Checking that we have hats and gloves, he leads us across a narrow swinging bridge and up and along a trail that traces the rim of the frozen Maligne Canyon in Canada’s Jasper National Park.

    He shows us the trail we will follow at the bottom, walking on the frozen river that flows through the canyon.
    “Just watch me,” he says as we descend. “You’ll be safe if you watch where I step.”

    Stepping gingerly onto the path he makes as we move down into the canyon,  between high walls of stone, we follow a trail of thick, scarred, ice on what just a few weeks before was moving water. On thinner patches, you can, if you stop and listen for it, hear the deep roar of water moving freely below. It is an erie sound.

    Above, where the ground shears away, where in warmer seasons water flows over the rim, massive columns of ice descend the depth of the canyon walls forming layer upon frozen layer. At the tallest formation, the densest frozen waterfall, we stop to watch a pair of climbers. A man stands at the base, feet apart, a rope threaded through the harness around his waist and anchored at the top. He is belaying a woman who is slowly, one toehold, one pick into the ice at a time, climbing.
    
    We walk a bit farther to where the stone forms a dome over us. We are standing in a tall cathedral of limestone carved by rushing, swirling, water and polished by eons of ice and wind and snow. The rocks are coated with fine ice crystals and I notice that just above my head they are decorated by the handprints of hikers who have gone before us. People who, as they passed, put a hand on the stone. The warmth of their bodies melted away the ice and in the  shadowed, frigid, air the prints remained.

    It is a beautiful thing, this ice-walking.  Time and again we stop to take photographs, trying to capture the scale and majesty of what we are seeing. Time and again we look at the images on our digital cameras and are disappointed.

    As we make our way back out of the canyon, I take one more look over my shoulder. I notice again the pristine, crystalized surface of the limestone on either side of me. Like the others who’d come before me, I lifted my hand and placed it flat against frosted surface of the stone. Still and silent, I felt the sharp winter cold drawn into my skin as I exchanged it for the warmth of my body.    When I pulled away the distinct print of my hand, mine alone, decorated the rock.

    I was, in that instant, connected to the past in a tangible way. I imagined a woman who might have passed between the stone walls thousands of years ago and done the same thing - stopped for a moment to give in to the urge to paint the cave with her handprint.

    Seasons will change. The canyon will erase any trace that I was there. But, at least in my memory, the winter walk left a more permanent mark on me.

Cheryl-Anne Millsap writes for The Spokesman-Review. Her essays can be heard on Spokane Public Radio and on public radio stations across the country. She is the author of “Home Planet: A Life in Four Seasons” and can be reached at catmillsap@gmail.com