Sand in My Eyes (36 page)

As my alarm went off at five o’clock in the morning and I touched my feet to the cold floor (no matter how far south of the Mason-Dixon Line one lives, floors are cold at five in the morning), I thought of Cora in the early mornings, walking out to that patch of dirt, and I prayed. “Lord, help me,” I said. “I pray for strength, I pray that whatever I do in these morning hours will delight you and I ask that you hold me up.” I nudged a pillow beside Marjorie’s body so, if she woke, she’d think it was her mama still beside her in bed, and then I tiptoed across the room to my desk. There, I went about the writing of my silly little story about flowers, an overwhelmed mother, and the lonely gardener who lived next door.

And one morning, glancing at my children tossing and turning in my bed, I was overtaken with emotion at how big they were getting and could hardly focus on the story I was writing. It was then that I walked out onto my porch. In a spot with a view of the children I sat on the floor scribbling a letter to Marjorie on the page of a coloring book.

Dear Marjorie
,

I’ve never been into bird-watching until I had you
,

And now I spend my life doing nothing but watching you
.

To me you’re like a little bird
,

The kind through our windows you’ve heard
,

A newly hatched osprey wanting to fly
,

A screeching owl demanding “why”

A growing pelican I struggle to keep fed
,

And a noisy woodpecker that wakes me from bed
.

I’ve never been into collecting shells until I had you
,

And now I spend my life collecting things for you
.

To me you’re one of those rare and unique shells
,

The kind one finds along the shore, then likes to show and tell
,

A rare junonia I will cherish forever
,

A jingle shell attached to my hip wherever
,

A conch shell I hold to my ear as you importantly blab
,

And sorry, darling, but sometimes you’re simply a crab!

I’ve never had time for smelling flowers until I had you
,

And now I spend my life smelling them with you. To me you’re every bit as beautiful as the flowers, The kind I could look at and hold for hours
.

A morning glory that wakes me each day
,

A rose that reminds me to rest, then play
,

A periwinkle that keeps my priorities real
,

And an orchid that cares about how I feel
.

I’ve never had, but always wanted, a parrot of my own
,

And now I spend my life teaching you how to talk
.

To me you were already a beauty before you had feathers
,

The kind I want to fly with through good and bad weather
.

A bird I can nurture in my nest for awhile
,

A bird I can train using my own innate style
.

A bird that will one day leave my nest and say good-bye
,

And then return to tell me of her soaring through the sky
.

Time goes by quickly when everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing. The children, for weeks, had been sleeping until seven. The birds were chirping and the woodpecker pecking away at the trees and not my roof. Timothy was gone, too, for days at a time! And I was waking at five, finding joy in the process of writing, discovering for myself the sense of lavish indulgence that comes from doing anything solitary and early in the morning, before the sun rises. I knew what Cora meant when she said that a woman pursuing her passions might feel and look as if she is only playing
frivolously. Blind faith made me believe it was a story worth telling, and that no mother in her right mind would consistently sacrifice two hours of sleep to do something that wasn’t worthwhile.

And then, one morning, even the orchid Fedelina gave me finally did what it was supposed to do—opened—and its brilliant, plum-colored lip said “good morning” to me! “Good morning to you,” I said back to the enormous lavender flower as I sat down to write. In the days following, I wanted to tell my neighbor—despite her assertive opinions that overstepped boundaries—of its opening, and to give her another “thank you” for sharing with me the letters from her mother, and to tell her how the last one I read had inspired me to reintroduce into my life the spirituality I let go of long ago when the winds of life picked up, scattering me in different directions. Yet an opened orchid was nothing she hadn’t seen before, and the concept in that letter from Cora—about spirituality being the stem that holds everything up—wasn’t new to me. It was only reworded and packaged differently, as are most of life’s philosophy and inspirational sayings, but, like seeds, it fell upon my ears at a time when my insides were ripe.

Every so often, as I typed away, I would look out my window and see her, there before the sun, dropping seeds into the dirt, and it reminded me of all the menial tasks a mother does for her children.

All those menial tasks a mother does for her children will one day be significant, just as a pianist practices hours upon hours, years upon years, and no one hears all those times her fingers hit the keys. They only hear the concert. And the writer puts in untold hours of solitude at her computer—and no one sees all the work that goes into it as she types away before the rest of the world wakes, year after year. They only read the novel
.

No one but me saw Fedelina dropping those seeds into the dirt, but every car that goes down our bumpy road will see her flowers. And no one in the world—but God—would know of my behind-the-scenes toiling over my children all the years of their lives thus far. They would only see the finished
products, the masterpieces I was creating—the adults that I would raise.

I almost jumped up from my desk, wanting to forgive my neighbor for the blatant things she had said, to run down there and let her know that, with spirituality as my stem, I was finding that the petals—the priorities surrounding me—were easier to keep up, and that they complemented one another as if they belonged in a circle on a stem.

And if one of the petals isn’t meshing with the whole, it can be plucked and replaced with another
.

I was thrilled that, for now, my petals were flourishing, and that ideas for the story were coming while playing with my children, biking or wading in the water near Lighthouse Beach. I got my full cardiovascular workout easily and pleasurably once I decided to participate in the childrens’ activities, pulling the wagon, a chariot behind my bike, or chasing them in the sand. And I tried as we went, using nature, to teach my kids a few things. “Red coquina, blue coquina, orange coquina, too,” I would say as we sat where the water meets the sand—my children learning their colors from the shells in my hand.

“Never, kids,” I told them as we hopped over the clear jellylike blobs washed ashore. “Never in your life should you be spineless like those jellyfish, you hear?”

Motherhood in and of itself inspired me, as did going to the beach. In our hands we carried home pails filled with seashells, and in my mind I brought ideas and things I wanted to write but couldn’t—not until the children were asleep, and then from nine to eleven, and again the next morning from five to seven, I’d let it all out. When they awoke my writing would end and we’d sit in our favorite spot, halfway down the wooden steps of the house, with that great big book of nursery rhymes. And there I’d read until the sun was too hot or we reached that one with the farmer’s wife who cut off their tails with a carving knife, and we’d put the book down and go inside, for my kids had never seen such a thing in their lives, and adamantly didn’t care for “Three Blind Mice.”

We’d go back out in the early evening—me pulling all three down Middle Gulf Drive in the wagon, always the same course. I figured, why turn here or change to there when it’s already good with regard to the children liking the walk and me getting inspiration. It was always at the same point in the walk that ideas started coming, dropping from the trees like coconuts, or falling softly at my feet like sea-grape leaves. I never had paper, but I’d gratefully accept the ideas, jotting them down on any writable object found in my purse, be it a grocery receipt or a dollar bill. Sometimes I would leave my purse at home and decline ideas, turning them away since, like a dream, I could only retain so much. But when they were really good, worth holding onto, I could feel my mind swelling and would walk faster. The children loved it when Mommy walked faster, but mostly I would tell the ideas to stop, for there is a limit to what a mother’s mind can hold in a single walk with three children. Many ideas were lost when Marjorie started to cry of thirst or the boys began to fight. But motherhood, I learned in those mornings spent outdoors with my children, complements, not deters, both the creative and physical petals. And spirituality holds them all up!

“This is the day that will have Mama crying,” I announced to my children as I parked the wagon under the house and lifted each tired, sandy, dirty child of mine from the wagon. “The day she will want to relive when she is old.”

It had been a perfect day. The birds were singing louder than usual, the children were getting along, and my mind was bursting at the seams with ideas. I couldn’t wait to get us all upstairs and the children into one big bath, so I could write it all down before I forgot it like a dream.

“Anna,” I heard a familiar voice call out as the children and I were halfway up the stairs. “I haven’t seen you in awhile.”

I looked all around, knowing it was Fedelina, but I couldn’t see her.

“Over here, in my window.”

“Oh, there you are,” I said.

“I haven’t seen you people in weeks. How are those wonderful kids?”

“Good,” I said, not meaning to be brief, but how does a woman explain—without sounding crazy—that her time spent with the kids on the beach was so inspiring that she was holding all these ideas in her head, the
way one holds a firefly in her hand, and if it wasn’t all put into a jar quickly it would soon slip through a crack in the fingers, or lose its light and die?

“It bloomed,” Thomas shouted out of the blue. “The orchid you gave to Mama, it bloomed!”

“Did it really?” asked the woman who had grown it from seedlings, and who gave it away as a gift. “And what color is it?”

“Um, um,” he said with his face squashing into my thigh. “Lavender,” I whispered into his ear.

“Lavender,” he shouted.

“That’s wonderful news. I thought maybe it died and you all were hiding from me.”

“Of course not,” I told her.

“Well, I’ve missed seeing you all,” she said.

“We’ve been out every morning. Where have you been?” I asked, only seeing bits of her through the branches of a tree and the darkness of her screen. “You’re doing okay?”

“In with a foot infection,” she said. “Would you believe I injured the bottom of my foot without knowing it, because I stepped on a thorn while barefoot in the garden?”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I won’t be doing that again—walking out there without shoes. Good thing I gave myself a pedicure. That’s how I noticed it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Will it be okay?”

“Oh yes, I’m fine now,” she said. “And I already have my calendar marked for future pedicures. Not how I like spending my money, but I now see the value. Medicare is there to cover the cost once I have issues, but keeping myself healthy—taking better preventive care of me—is all mine. But I don’t want to bore you. That’s all that’s new with me—nothing too exciting.”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better.” I was still shy from when she last rained her strong views on me.

“Anna,” she said then. “By chance, are you going to the grocery store this week?”

“I usually go once a week,” I said.

“What about the bank?”

“Maybe.”

“The post office?”

“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“No specific reason. My daughter said to me on the phone the other day, ‘Mom, why don’t you move closer to me, then whenever I go shopping, you go shopping, and when I go to the bank, you go to the bank.’ In other words, she was telling me I could go along with her wherever it was she had to go, and wasn’t that nice? I could help with the kids.”

I made a face, but don’t think she saw it from where she was.

“So I was wondering,” she continued, “how often you shop and when you were thinking of going next.”

“I don’t follow any routine. I have no idea when I’m going next. I just go.”