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Sherpa
Did You Ever Look So Nice | The Samples
Last Monday morning I ordered the twins’ graduation announcements. They arrived Thursday evening, Kit and I addressed them Sunday afternoon, and yesterday Walt and I sat at the kitchen table, affixing self-adhesive U. S. Flag postage stamps to each envelop.
I’d sent Walt on an errand to buy the stamps, hollering after him as he walked out the front door on his way to the UPS store up the street. “Pick a pretty stamp!” I instructed, but Walt came back fifteen minutes later with a book or two of Forever stamps and an apology from the franchise owner.
“Rami says so sorry, but he doesn’t have any pretty stamps today.”
We’ve known the photographer, Katherine, who took the pictures for Kit and Walt’s graduation announcement since they were in preschool with her son. She took the twins’ school photos then and has photographed our family for Christmas cards a couple times since. I’d planned to have her take Archie, Kit, and Walter’s First Communion photos, too, but I couldn’t get my act together to pull off that shoot. I’d scheduled the session with Katherine a week or so after the celebratory mass because that’s when the azalea bushes in her old house’s backyard would’ve be in bloom, but backed out before it was time for the shoot. I didn’t have it in me to wash the cake icing from the boys’ suits and iron the wrinkles out of Kit’s gown, so I let the moment pass.
Maybe that’s why I spent so much time with Kit scrolling through page after page of card designs, comparing each of them to the photos she and I liked best from her and Walter’s photo shoot. When she finally picked a design and I gave the A-OK, Kit chose two photos to complete the announcement, one for the front and one for the back. I’ve been doing this for a while now with Kit and Walter, intentionally doing nothing in situations where I used to do almost everything. It’s time to trade my ascendancy for their autonomy, I’ve decided.
Most nights before bed I fill the diffuser on John’s nightstand with fresh water and essential oils. To do so, I first have to take off the diffuser’s base cover and each time I do a few drops of condensation roll of its rim. That’s why I always put down the base cover on whatever books or papers are stacked on the nightstand to protect the wood from the water.
A few months ago, I saw the top of the nightstand was empty after I’d popped off the diffuser’s base cover, so I opened the nightstand’s top drawer and riffled around inside for something to catch the water dripping from it. Underneath a pile of tangled charging cords and a handful of euro coins, I found a copy of our family’s 2012 Christmas card. I’m not sure how it ended up there, but John saves everything and stuffs it everywhere so I wasn’t particularly surprised to find it where I did.
That year I’d ordered our cards from Katherine. She’d met us at Paris Mountain on a Saturday afternoon in fall to take our family’s photos. The day before we met Katherine at the park, I’d went to Sears in Haywood Mall to shop their Land’s End collection. There I found coordinating outfits for Archie, Kit, and Walt, as well as a matching scarf for myself. John’s never liked it when I bought clothing for him, so I made sure to choose sweaters and shirts and pants in basic colors for the kids and me that would match whatever John already had, hanging inside our closet.
On one side of the Christmas card I found at the bottom of the nightstand’s drawer, there are twelve photos of Archie, Kit, and Walter’s faces, each one featuring a slightly different smile or tilt of the head, all of them cropped into circles. There are four photos of Archie across the top of the card, four of Walt in the middle, and four of Kit along the bottom. In their expressions you can see the little people they were then, as well as the ones they’d become today.
I’d chosen a family photo for the flip side. That was the year my kids were passing through that awkward smile phase, so the most natural shot Katherine was able to capture was one in which we’re all making funny faces. But the photo worked so I picked it and even now, all these years later, it still made me smile when I found it in the bottom of the nightstand’s drawer, underneath that pile of tangled charging cords and a handful of euro coins.
That night a few months ago, after I’d used it to protect the nightstand’s wood, I propped up the card against John’s bedside lamp and it’s been there ever since. I pass by it a handful of times a day and, each time I do, I’m struck by time’s disregard for temperance. There we were then, and here we are now. Archie could fit on John’s lap, Kit could stand on his shoulders, and Walt could kneel on my thigh. College decisions and graduation announcements were one-hundred years away.
Until they weren’t and I e-mailed Katherine to book another session, this time downtown, to close the circle. The day of this session, Kit, Walt, Archie, and I met Katherine in Falls Park. I followed behind them, the photographer, and my kids, pulling beside me a suitcase filled with changes of clothing and shoes as we five walked from spot to spot, stopping here and there as Katherine snap-snap-snapped her camera’s shutter. When she asked, Archie held Katherine’s big circle reflector with the black fabric border and foiled side just the way she told him to best diffuse the sunlight across his siblings’ faces. Kit and Walt took Katherine’s direction, turning their hips here and popping their chins there and throughout all of it, the promenading and preening and posing, I stood off to the side and took in everything. I filed away inside of me Katherine’s instructions, the twins’ nervous laughter, and Archie’s requests for clarification when he wasn’t quite sure what was expected of him.
Remember this, I ordered myself. All of it. Snapshot these moments in your mind as Katherine is capturing them on film. Build a frame around all of it and construct its edges like the brick walls of the Wyche Pavilion, the ones in the background of the shots Katherine’s taking right now. Stuff it all away like the Christmas card inside the nightstand’s drawer and know this – to catch the rolling water or mark the time, these memories will be right here waiting to surprise you when you need them the most.
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Glow Up
I saw it while I was standing outside a door on the second floor of Mary Woolley, waiting for a class to begin. Next to me, behind an old half-wooden, half-windowed door, there was a hallway decorated with a series of four transoms, one right after the other. Each transom’s window glass, held together by a web of lead cames, framed a medallion. The juxtaposition of the medallions’ brilliant colors inside each achromatic arch created a bold, bright design full of magic.
I mean it, too, that the tetrad of medallions is magical. Each one depicts a color and its corresponding creature – red pegasus, green griffin, yellow sphinx, and blue lion. When Kit was researching schools, she learned Mount Holyoke women have voted for their class mascot since its beginning. These creatures inside the medallions, sculpted by art glass and soldered lead, were chosen by students in 1909 and they’ve stood the test of time. Even-year classes are red pegasuses and blue lions, and odd-year classes are green griffins and yellow sphinxes. When one class graduates, it passes on its color and creature to the incoming one. Like an heirloom, they are living reminders, connecting generations of alumnae down through the years.
The day after Kit received her letter of acceptance from Mount Holyoke, she found the College’s bookstore online and purchased her class pennant. She tacked it to her bedroom wall as soon as it arrived in the mail. Now it’s the first thing you see when you open the door to Kit’s room, that yellow sphinx pennant hung right below a calendar celebrating strong women. How fitting.
But the medallion I saw while I stood outside the door on the second floor of Mary Woolley didn’t feature the sphinx, rather it framed a rearing pegasus, her forelegs off the ground and mane blowing as she danced within a rainbow of color, swirling up around her. I took a photo of the pegasus and texted it to John because I knew he’d see what I did.
Ever since she was small, Kit has been all rainbows and glitter and unicorns. She is affable and affectionate, tenderhearted and true. And she’s innocent, but in a unique way that doesn’t equate to naivete. It’s that authenticity, I think, that enables Kit to always find the good and forego the bad. On her best days Kit is positively ebullient, and when she is John and I will look at each other as our daughter dances across the room and one of us will say to the other, “Rainbows and glitter and unicorns.”
I am none of these things, I know. I’m more grit than glitter so when I watched Kit dance across the room when she was small, I worried about the way the world may smother her spirit. But I should’ve never worried because now I know. Kit’s grit just looks different – it glows.
We arrived in Massachusetts a day before admitted-students weekend began because Kit wanted to visit the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst. The Homestead, the house where the poet lived that was converted into a museum, is a fifteen-minute drive from Mount Holyoke. It was closed for renovations when we toured colleges last spring so Kit was adamant this time around – we wouldn’t again miss the opportunity to visit.
During the tour, our guide took us into the “poetry room.” It’d been Lavinia’s bedroom way back when, but now it’s an interactive exhibit highlighting Dickinson’s writing process. Inside the room our tour group sat on benches as the guide taught us about Dickinson’s unresolved word choices, indicated on her manuscripts by a “+,” and how using one over the other would radically change a poem’s meaning. On the wall behind the guide was printed a line from one of Dickinson’s poems. He used inch-wide knobs attached to a sliding window to reveal the words asterisked on Dickinson’s manuscripts, as well as the potential replacements she’d suggested. In doing so, the guide revealed how word choice completely shifts the poet’s meaning.
The next day Kit and I sat in Chapin auditorium, listening as various members of the administration welcomed us to campus. One of the speakers suggested students approach Mount Holyoke like they did Choose Your Own Adventure books in elementary school. You are your own protagonist, she explained, and your choices will determine what happens next.
When the welcome speeches were finished, a moderator invited student panelists onto the stage. There they took turns answering a moderator’s questions, and each time they did I was impressed by the thoughtful eloquence of their answers. How fortunate Kit is to have the opportunity to study here, I thought, to learn alongside these accomplished women.
Before the panelists were excused from the stage the moderator asked each of them to share any advice that may benefit the admitted students. Pursue passion, chase curiosity, surmount stumbling blocks, and foster friendship, they counseled as they passed the mic from hand to hand, all the way down the table. The final panelist who spoke shared with us a question an alumna had posed to her. The panelist had interned in the alumna’s lab and when she’d finished, before she traveled back to campus, the alumna asked her, “Who are you to not change the world?”
Back at out hotel later that night when Kit and I were talking about the day my daughter asked me, “Do you remember when the panelist said the thing about not changing the world?”
“When she said it, I almost started to cry,” Kit confided. “I mean, who AM I if I don’t change things?”
I haven’t decided yet if life is a sequence of random or predetermined events. Are we our own protagonists, or are our unresolved choices annotated with asterisks, arbitrary to another’s authority? I don’t know. What I do know, though, is this fall Kit will begin to learn how to reflect light at different angles. At Mount Holyoke, she’s gonna make the whole place shimmer.
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Servant Leader
The World’s Greatest / R. Kelly
I was driving Archie to speech therapy this morning when he announced, “Randy is retired.” We were stopped at the roundabout on Rocky Slope, the one right next to the park, so I turned to look at his face. Archie likes to look at me over his glasses when we talk about important things. He was doing that then, his head tilted a little to the left, awaiting my response.
“He is,” I replied, easing the car forward.
“He will be missed,” Archie added.
“Yes,” I affirmed. This is how Archie processes things. He repeats a statement or question again and again expecting the person with whom he’s talking to acknowledge him, no matter what. If you ignore Archie in the hopes doing so will discourage him from continuing the back-and-forth, he only becomes more insistent.
We’d just passed the front of the coffee shop further down the road when Archie asked, “Who will do Randy’s job now?”
He was talking about Randy Muir, who has served as the Greenville County Parks and Rec’s Therapeutic Recreation Manager for 30 years. Before that, Randy would accompany his mother to work. She was the fine arts director at Camp Spearhead way back when it operated in Paris Mountain State Park. Going to work with his mom gave Randy the unique opportunity to spend his summers with the disabled community.
I marvel at Archie’s adept ability to size up a person’s character. This talent isn’t unique to him, though, as many family members of disabled people will tell you. I suspect this intuition is a skill they begin to hone early on because Archie and his peers, no matter their innate abilities, are dependent on the kindness of strangers. When Archie’s dad and I, his siblings, and his grandmother aren’t present to look after him, someone must.
Although he isn’t always able to articulate his opinions, I suspect Archie knows Randy is intrinsically good. Because of this, he’s earned Archie’s trust. And when I watch other campers interact with Randy, I can tell they believe in his magnanimity, too. In a world that weighs and measures their ability against non-disabled peers, the campers know Randy values them for who they are, not who they could’ve been.
Yesterday we drove up to camp to attend a drop-in celebrating Randy’s retirement. Lutrell Lodge was filled with campers and families, most of whom I either know or recognize. That’s the thing about the disability community – there are no strangers. We’ve all met before or will meet soon. In carlines and doctor’s offices, support groups or advocacy organizations, mother’s morning outs or therapeutic activities, we’ve waved hello or stopped to introduce ourselves. We can’t travel anonymously after all. Our kids tend to stand out in a crowd.
Archie, John, my mom, and I positioned ourselves at the back of the long line of people inside the lodge. We were all waiting our turn to talk to Randy, who spent the time to engage each camper and their family. Everyone visited as the line wound its way around the room, and there were lots of heartfelt hugs and high-fives, greetings you learn to love as a member of this community. That’s the thing about Camp Spearhead, a place where anything goes and nothing is considered odd or off-putting. Up here you learn to lean into acceptance.
On Thursdays when camp is in-session family members and friends are invited to Talent Show night. Every single camper performs during the show, most of them choosing to sing along to a popular song. I’ve never heard a single camper who could carry a tune, but each of their performances are magically moving. At the end of the night after all the performances are concluded and each camper has been celebrated, the counselors encircle the audience, most of whom are campers, and sign the lyrics, moving hands replacing spoken words, to a song the campers recognize. “I’m that star up in the sky, I’m the mountain peak up high,” the counselors speak without saying a word. “Hey, I made it!”
I can’t describe what it feels like to sit beside your camper as the song plays and the counselors sign along, but I can tell you every time it conjures up emotions I don’t even know I have. “I’m that little bit of hope, when my back’s against the ropes,” the counselors continue to sign. “I can feel it!”
If you look around Fireside Hall, you’ll see many campers signing the lyrics back to the counselors. When you watch their actions mirror each other, the campers and their counselors, you know way down deep inside the inspiration goes both ways.
Thank you for building the foundation upon which my hope for the next generation of decision makers and their charges has been built, Randy. Together they’ll change the world, I’m sure of it. Your counselors and campers wouldn’t be the people they are today, nor the ones they’ll become tomorrow, if it wasn’t for you. You’re the world’s greatest.
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Care and Comfort
Kit and Walter are home from school this week. It’s spring break. Archie, who is also enjoying time off from his activities, is happy to have them here. Or at least he was for a few days because all they’re doing now, toward the end of the week, is bicker. I blame myself for that, their bickering. I intervened too often when they three were small.
Before I sat down at my laptop to write, I grabbed a piece of tablet paper from a drawer on Archie’s side of our shared desk and scribbled on it with a black marker, “Writing – Do not disturb.” I underlined the “Do not disturb” part before I ripped off a piece of blue painter’s tape to affix the sign on the outside of my office door.
I’m at home during the kids’ break because I left my job in January, the one at the same University I worked before Archie was born. I bowed out when intuition told me it was time. A week later the Board of Trustees called for the President’s resignation, their motion confirming another thing I’ve learned through experience – hunches are harbingers. Learning to listen is liberating.
The morning after I left the University, I picked up here at home exactly where I’d left off. After walking the dogs and emptying the dishwasher and collecting the laundry, I helped Archie part his hair and tie his shoes and remember his lunch before he and I drove across town. He’s enrolled in a Y.M.C.A. program for adults with diverse abilities, an activity in which he loves participating. It operates out of the branch near Kit and Walter’s old school, the one they attended through fourth grade. I drove the same route that morning with Archie as I’d done one-thousand mornings before, and it struck me as I crested the hill on Hudson right before the hard left turn into a subdivision that it’s true after all. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
During one of the mornings Archie was at the Y.M.C.A., I convinced myself it was time to put together my home office. It had become a place to hide away everything our family wanted to ignore. Bags of clothing I’d intended to donate were crowded into a corner of the room. Archie’s worn textbooks, some with torn covers, were haphazardly stacked on his side of the desk. Kit and Walter’s collection of college prospectuses, propped up against a wall, had toppled and spilled across the floor. I couldn’t shut a couple of the desk drawers because they were stuffed full of broken crayons and wrinkled notebook paper, forgotten stationary and capless markers, things we should’ve thrown away but saved, just in case.
Two days later, I unpacked the bag filled with stuff I’d brought home from the University. I’d saved that task for last. I put up on my shelves the framed photos I had displayed on my desk: Kit en pointe in front of Dickinson College Law School’s copper wall; Walter and Archie at Gilbert’s in Portland, Maine; and all three kids on the side of a hill at the Boyd Mountain Christmas tree farm. I filled three mugs with pens and pencils and scissors and placed them beside an orchid I’ve neglected for too long. I pulled my composition notebook from the bottom of the bag and flipped through its pages, all of them filled with scribbled notes and ideas, before I tossed it in the trash.
It’s time to start writing again, I told myself. Maybe write a manuscript and apply to an MFA program, I thought before wondering if I had the discipline to do it. I’d been thinking about blogging again, I reminded myself. I’ve missed reading posts that surpass the superficial introspection of social media and maybe other people do, too. In one of the desk drawers I’d emptied earlier that week, I’d found a three-ring binder filled with printouts from my old blog, the one John built when Archie was born and I’d kept up until he and the twins went to elementary school. When I read through the printed entries, I realized I’d forgotten so many things.
I don’t want to forget what’s going on now. Kit and Walter will graduate from high school later this spring. They’ve both committed to colleges, one in the Northeast and the other in the Upper Midwest, and right now they’re looking forward to the end of the school year. For them this ending is mostly sweet, I can tell, but for me it’s a little bitter, too. Not in a negative way, just in the way a parent feels when she knows her people are ready to leave home.
I may be preparing to let the twins go, but John and I recently petitioned the County for guardianship of Archie. This is something many parents of disabled people choose to do for a variety of reasons when their son or daughter becomes a legal adult. For John and me, it felt like an important step to take. After home visits and evaluations, a court date and a bank check to attorney and ad litem, a manilla envelope that had been scotch-taped closed arrived in the mail. In it was a Certificate of Appointment from the Greenville County Office of the Probate Court declaring John and I Archie’s legal guardians. As such, we are now responsible for his “care, comfort, and control.”
They may say differently, but I never wanted to control my kids. When they were small, John and I determined schedules and set expectations, corrected the wrongs and praised the rights, but eventually all three kids assumed those responsibilities themselves. That transfer of power wasn’t planned, rather it just happened, each time the moments’ significance passing by unnoticed. One day I held each of their hands, pulling them along behind me, and the next they took their turns standing in front of me, each hand inside mine until they were ready to let go, exactly as I’d raised them to do . So, no. Controlling Archie nor his siblings, be they here in our house or far away at school, isn’t something I’ll do. But the care and comfort part? After nearly 20 years on the job, I’m already good at that.
Home
9 responses to “Home”
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This has me in tears. Gods timing on stirring you back to writing is sheer Providence for my weary soul. 🥹 The worry of being “forever parents” has felt too big to hold onto this week, and you capture the essence of the juxtaposition so beautifully. They are their own people, and God’s first, always and no matter what. Thank you for that reminder.
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Well done! Can I assume this is the first step toward that book?
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Wow! I feel privileged to get a look inside your heart, head and life raising three extraordinary children, now adults! Thank you so much.
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Correcting my last name!
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Glad you’re back to blogging! I will happily follow.
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Thank you, just thank you!
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Your writing pulls me in, and at times , I feel like I’m there. You definitely have a way with words!! I want more!!
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Keep writing, and I’ll keep reading!
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Anne, it’s been my pleasure to know your wonderful mother since she moved to BG, and through her, to know and adore Archie. I’m so glad you’re writing again and sharing your path, and paths of your 3 phenomenal children!
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About Me
Writer, leader, advocate. My name is Anne Moore and you can sit with me.
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