The Bottle Tree

My roommate was driving. I was in the passenger seat, but I was turned toward the driver and the passenger in the backseat. We'd picked up my roommate's mother, who asked, "How's the house coming along?"

"I need to get a hold of old bottles," I said in response. "In various colors."

"What for?" she asked.

"For a bottle tree," I said. I'd wanted for all the years I lived in Alabama and I fantasized about one day having a tree that I could convert into a bottle tree. The lore intrigued me. And the colorful glass in the sunlight didn't hurt either.

"I want a bottle tree to protect us from evil spirits," I said. I'd learned in the South that bottle trees were thought to ward off bad juju and keep a place safe from harmful intent. I wanted that: good juju and safety. I wanted it immediately and I wanted it at the farmhouse.

"Goodness gracious, Amanda," my roommate's mother said. "We have the blood of Jesus Christ for that."

I turned to look at her and said, "You might."

Jesus wasn't my guy. I was interested in him. I believed he was a wise man and I respected his teachings, but I could never understand how some guy way back in the way back died for a some sin I wasn't yet born to do.

I don't mean to ruffle any feathers. I was interested in bible stories, in the path it gave people. I'd attended church many times. But I never believed.

When I was a kid and my mom or a friend took me to church, I always panicked when the preacher started talking about how having the love of Christ in your heart was the way into heaven. I didn't really believe in heaven either, but from what I was hearing, you were supposed to have the love of Christ in your heart. You were supposed to believe in him. You were supposed to believe.

I didn't believe.

I often ended up in the ladies' room, waiting out the rest of the service. Hiding. Because I didn't belong among all the believers.

To hear people talk about their struggle with faith, it seems like something I could overcome with a little effort. Although, honestly, I wouldn't pretend to believe in something. I wouldn't fake it. I wouldn't be that dishonest. With others or with myself.

I could respect the faith of others. I could enjoy bible passages that my roommate read to me.

And I could have a bottle tree. I may not necessarily believed in whether or not it would keep bad things at bay, but I could enjoy its presence in my life. I thought bottle trees were delightful and I didn't care whether or not they worked. I cared that the thought of one lifted my spirit.

The way faith works for others.

News Arrives

The news arrived via a small, single page card, much like a birth announcement or wedding date reminder. It was addressed to Gigi, Gwendolyn Garry's nickname, which she hadn't used since college. She opened the envelope and read that revered professor Deanna Quaid was being laid to rest. Gwendolyn felt a chill. She skimmed the card to gather the rest of the information, and her eyes stopped on a handwritten note.

"Please forward contact information for Miss Angela Ward and Miss Joely Pfeiffer."

Gwendolyn dug around in the wooden chest at the end of her bed. Where other girls kept blankets and such, she kept old notebooks, address books, and every birthday card or letter ever sent to her. She found Angela's mother's phone number and dialed.

"Hi, Mrs. Ward," Gwendolyn said when a woman answered. "I'm an old college friend of your daughter's and I was wondering if you could either give me her number or give her a message for me."

"She's right here," Mrs. Ward said and handed the phone to Angela.

"Who is this?" Angela asked.

Gwendolyn inhaled deeply before saying, "Ang, it's Gigi." It had been a good five years since they talked on the telephone.

"Wow," Angela said.

"I know," Gwendolyn said.

"I thought you didn't go by 'Gigi' anymore," Angela said.

"Deanna died," Gwendolyn said quickly. Then she waited. She knew Angela would take the news harder than she did.

Angela cried. "Were you there?" she asked.

"No," Gwendolyn said.

"Was Joely?" Angela asked.

"No," Gwendolyn answered. "Angela, do you know how to get ahold of her?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, because I'm supposed to forward your contact information to..." Gwendolyn flipped the envelope over to read the return address. "...the law offices of Piper, Pendleton and Ash."

"Why?" Angela asked.

Gwendolyn stood with the card and envelope in one hand. "Probably to claim something she left us," she said.

"Oh. What would she have left us?"

The memory of Deanna's apartment was sharp and distinct. It was almost as if Gwendolyn was standing in the living room, leaning against the dining table that separated the sofa from the kitchen. She thought of all the books, all the odd knick knacks and stacks of paper. She thought of the shotgun underneath the couch and the black enamel plates in the kitchen cupboards. She thought of the imperfect and not entirely safe for using ceramic mugs that the art students cast off and Deanna couldn't seem to let go in the trash.

"She had stuff," Gwendolyn said.

"Jesus, Gigi," Angela said. "She had us, too."

babysitting game

Ginger froze. The little girl agreed to talk, and now Ginger had no idea what to do with her. She wasn't even sure why she'd offered such a deal. She would have let the little girl smash popcorn regardless.

"What do you like to be called?" Ginger started.

The little girl frowned. She shrugged.

"Come on," Ginger said. "Do you like being called 'Girl' and 'Kid?'"

"No," she answered.

"Then give me a name or something," Ginger said.

"My dad calls me Sweets," she said.

"Do you like that?"

The little girl slammed her fist down on a piece of popcorn.

"You seem like a nickname kind of kid," Ginger said. She looked around the room for inspiration. All she saw was unfinished walls and floors and the overall ugliness and state of upheaval that she usually lived in without complaint.

"What do you think of my place?" Ginger asked her.

The little girl stared at her blankly.

"Am I boring you?" Ginger asked. The little girl nodded.

Ginger wanted to know about the girl's mother, her relationship with her father, the reasons she didn't like to speak much and what made her as irreverent as she was at age eleven. The questions were too big, though, for her to ask and for the little girl to answer. Ginger felt exhausted just from the weight of wanting to ask them. Then it occurred to her.

"Okay," she said. "I've got it. I'm going to ask you a few questions, and you answer them all and then I'll tell you what your answers mean."

Another piece of popcorn turned to dust under the little girl's fist. She nodded again.

"You're walking in the woods. Who are you walking with?"

The little girl was taken aback. She seemed surprised. She concentrated for a second and said, "You."

Now Ginger was taken a little bit aback. But, she continued the questions. The game revealed a lot about a person. Or, it revealed nothing at all. The point was to create conversation.

"In the woods, you come upon a house. What's the house look like?" Ginger asked.

"The one across the street," the little girl said. She was talking about the two-story brick house with the wide porch and white shutters. Ginger nodded in approval.

"Okay," Ginger said, and then paused for a moment when she considered the implication of asking the next question. She'd have to fudge the meaning a little, but she didn't mind. It was just a game, anyway.

"You go through the front door," Ginger said.

"Like breaking and entering?" the little girl interrupted.

"No," Ginger answered. "Like the door is open and you're allowed to enter. You go through the door and walk through the rooms and into the kitchen. Over the sink is a window. You can see a body of water. What's the body of water?"

"What's a body of water?" the little girl asked.

"Like a lake or an ocean," Ginger said.

"Like a puddle? I see a puddle," the little girl declared.

Ginger's brow furrowed.

"What does that mean?" the little girl said as she placed pieces of popcorn in a long line across the table.

"Well," Ginger started. She took a deep breath. "Whoever you say that you're walking beside in the woods is the most important person in your life."

She saw a brief snarl pass over the girl's face. She continued.

"The house represents the size of your ambition," Ginger said. She took another deep breath before revealing the meaning behind the body of water.

"The puddle...represents your...capacity to love," she said quickly. Then she smiled, pleased with herself for making up such a good answer on the fly. Yes, she thought. Why couldn't it mean that? Just because that's not how she learned the game, when she learned it, as a bar game one night.

"A puddle?" the little girl asked. She seemed disappointed. Ginger had seen her look a lot of ways, but sad wasn't one of them.

Ginger handed her the hammer. There was a time when Ginger would have said, "Puddle," too. But that was speaking to the original meaning: the body of water represented your sex drive.

More babysitting

Ginger stood with her hands on her hips and stared at the blank television screen. She was about to spend three to five hours with a little girl who didn't talk or smile or seem to remotely easy to entertain. Ginger was running through contingent activities in her head when she noticed the little girl standing beside her. The little girl had her hands on her hips and was staring at the blank televisions screen, too.

"Do you like TV?" Ginger asked her.

The little girl shrugged.

"Sorry!" Daniel shouted from the open door behind them. "I told her to knock first," he said.

"It's alright," she said and waved for him to come in. He stepped inside and dropped a pink duffle bag on the floor. "I packed her toothbrush and pajamas and few things that might keep her occupied," he said.

"Cool," Ginger said. Both she and the little girl had dropped their hands and their arms hung limp beside their bodies. They stood watching Daniel look back and forth at both of them before he pointed at his daughter and said, "Behave." He waved at them, but with his back turned toward them, as if it were an afterthought.

Once he was out the door, Ginger looked at her charge. "I'm hungry," Ginger said in her direction.

The little girl nodded.

Ginger looked toward her kitchen. She didn't think to stock it with kid food. She had the basics, which would have to be good enough. She clapped her hands together. "Let's eat," she said.

She made a giant bowl of mashed potatoes from a powdered mix. She popped two bags of microwave popcorn and filled another bowl. She realized her bowl inventory was exhausted as she was mixing the cheese sauce in the macaroni, so she wrapped the pot with a bath towel and used duct tape to keep it in place. She had a three spoons and a ladle. She handed the ladle to the little girl.

"Don't cross contents," she said. They sat on the floor with their feast on the coffee table and started to silently swipe bites.

"We could watch something," Ginger offered.

The little girl squinted at the TV.

"What do you like to do?" Ginger asked.

The little girl squinted at her.

"You're going to have to talk to me at some point," Ginger said.

The little girl shook her head slowly.

Ginger shook her head, too. She reached into the bowl of popcorn and grabbed a handful. She scattered it on the coffee table and then reached under the sofa to find the hammer she kept there. When the little girl saw it, her eyes almost popped out of her head.

"Check this out," Ginger said and smashed every piece of popcorn with the hammer. The little girl reached for it, but Ginger pulled it back, out of the little girl's reach.

"I'll make you a deal," Ginger said. "You talk to me, and I'll let you smash popcorn until you heart is content."

"Deal," the little girl said. Her voice was softer and lighter and higher than Ginger expected. She was almost surprised that the little girl didn't have a whiskey voice, damaged from years of smoking cigarettes.

Babysitting Prep

It surprised her just a little bit that a man would let his daughter spend time in an apartment where lawn equipment was kept where furniture might have otherwise stood. Ginger looked around her house at the tools and parts and scraps of wood and shrugged. She offered to watch the little girl at their place, but Daniel said, "No."

"She'll have a better time looking through your stuff," he said.

The floors weren't finished, but Ginger rolled out a scrap of scratchy green indoor/outdoor carpet as a rug. She stacked a pile of poetry books next to the television, just in case the kid wanted to hear a story. Ginger could read off an absurdist sonnet or something epic, if she needed to keep it educational. That was as much as she knew to do. She told Daniel she was available to babysit, not that she was any good at it.

On the Porch

When she pulled up to the house, she saw Daniel on the top step, leaning against railing. He was reading his mail or something else that seemed to have his full attention. He glanced up as she walked toward him.

"How are you settling in?" she asked.

He shrugged and went back to reading his document. Ginger made her way up the three steps and stood across from him. She heard a muffled noise at his door.

The little girl stared at her from behind the screen.

"How are you settling in?" she asked her. The little girl slowly pushed the door open and stepped out. She had a deck of cards in one hand.

"What are you playing?" Ginger asked her.

Daniel practically shrieked, "No!" But, he barely had time to get the word out before his daughter looked Ginger in the eye, and then threw the entire deck up into the air. Cards floated down around her. A few settled haphazardly at her feet. A few more made their way across the porch.

She heard Daniel sigh behind her.

"The babysitter taught her 52 Pickup," he said. He went back to reading his letter. The little girl stared at Ginger expectantly.

Ginger nodded. She looked at the mess on her porch. She set her bag down and walked over to her front door. She left it open while she went inside. She came back a few minutes later with a leaf blower. Daniel's eyebrows knitted together. His daugther's eyebrows jumped into her hairline. Ginger turned it on and blew every single card out to the curb. It took a good ten minutes, and Daniel shook his head at her, but the little girl watched with wide eyes.

She left the leaf blower next to her car and reached down to pick up two random playing cards from the pile along the curb. She walked back up to the porch where her tenants stood waiting. With a card in each hand, she lifted her arms out into a "T." She stared back at the little girl for just a minute, and then she released the cards. They floated down to the floor. Just as they touched the scratchy green indoor/outdoor carpet, Ginger said to the little girl, "Look. It's Fall."

The little girl turned three shades of red before she narrowed her eyes. Then, the corners of her mouth turned up for just a moment. It was long enough for Daniel to notice his daughter's reaction, though. It wasn't disgust that he saw. He looked at his daughter and then he looked at his landlord and said, "Do you ever babysit?"

Make the Thing

I'll keep this brief.

I'm inspired to do more in my life, make more, create something. I have little bouts of productivity that leave me drained. I've worked out enough times in my life to know that if you practice, if you keep showing up and doing your thing, then that thing inevitably gets easier. Or, at least it becomes a habit and not an event.

A year ago, a friend of mine spent a year writing a poem a day. In a recent conversation with an old friend, he mentioned a "30 Days of Comics" exercise he completed. He mentioned the merit of just, "Making the thing." Even if it sucks. It struck a chord.

But I'm overwhelmed at which thing to choose to do every day. I'm not a poet. I write longer form stuff. I have a novel, short fiction, and essay drafts littering my home and work space. How would I possibly do a daily exercise that would build any of those projects to completion? I happened to have a folder on my lap containing one short story. I was working on it scene by scene. And that's when it occurred to me: just one scene a day.

It seems low pressure enough to be possible. I'm not writing a whole story or a whole essay or article or anything. I'm just writing the scenes in my head and if I like them, then they'll go in their requisite project. If not, I wrote them in the service of my writing practice.

You won't know all the characters or plots or settings. All that's in my head. I'll tag them, though, per project, for organization's sake.

Here we go. Making things.