When I was in elementary school, my family hosted an exchange student from Japan. Her name was Yoshimi. We were already a family of eleven, so I suppose my parents figured what’s one more?
About a month before her arrival, I saw a scene in some movie while at a friend’s house that slithered into my young, impressionable brain like a snake. It involved a Japanese college girl viciously attacking a Caucasian girl from behind while she was jogging on campus.
There’s something about the middle of the night that can really rile up my thoughts.
It’s 3 a.m. My mind is working overtime. I can’t fall back to sleep.
When this happens, I’ll often grab my pillow, then go and sprawl out on the living room couch to see if a new location will help. When that doesn’t work, I come here to my little wooden desk, turn on the white lamp, and write.
Typically, I love this time of year. In a few weeks, I’ll be taking cranberry colored walks and family drives on tree-lined roads. Sampling apples and local honey. Wearing slippers and flannels. Smelling tailgate chili in the crock-pot.
But on this shadowy night, I’m feeling more gravity than release.
For centuries, scientists have tried to map the female brain. While its exterior shape may be slightly smaller than its male counterpart, its inner circuitry is vast, complex, and spectacular.
It’s also wired for worry.
Take my midlife mom brain for example:
If you don’t know me well, you might think I’m quiet and reserved.
But if someone were to remove the lid to my egghead, with let’s say a can opener, you’d probably have to run for cover from the slew of to-dos, logistics, longings, concerns, and unresolved dilemmas that would surely burst out of my cortex and jello-y wrinkled lobes like a deafening pyrotechnic display.
Empty water bottles and overdue library books roll backward, then forward on the floor of the passenger seat as I pull up to my parents’ eclectic, dated abode and shift into park.
After grabbing my stuff from the back seat, I climb out of my SUV that has duct tape holding together the side view mirror. There on the other side of the car, as always, perched next to the big tree that shades their driveway, is the little ceramic deer with an old bandage wrapped around one of its shoddy ears.
(Posted on Sept. 2016)
(This post was written in 2016, soon after hearing the confession of the man who abducted and killed Jacob Wetterling.)
In the thick of recent summer crazies, while schlepping kids around in my clunky, dilapidated Suburban Chevrolet with no working air-conditioner like a New York City Uber in broiling flannels, I fantasized a rap parody. It featured me busting a move in yoga pants out in the cul-de-sac, buzzed on espresso and cocoa nibs, after the kids left for school.
But, when school did finally start the day after Labor day, I didn’t feel much like busting a move.
I have a scar on my left foot. It’s about an inch wide, two inches long, and looks like a fat minnow without fins.
The scar is a rippling reminder of a late summer day, nearly four decades ago, when I asked my big brother to give me a buck on the back of his bike to a friend’s house about a mile down our rural road.
He was happy to taxi me and my long pigtails flying in the wind to the desired destination. Somehow, though, as we were riding along, sun splashing in our faces, my foot got caught in the spokes of the back wheel causing the bike to jolt us off and twist my foot like a pretzel.
My dad as a young boy would have climbed the tallest mountain for his mother if he could have. But all he had available to him that afternoon while standing outside her hospital room window was a telephone pole.
Since kids weren’t allowed in the Intensive Care Unit, Bobby, as they called him, then 7 or 8, decided to take matters into his own hands to wave hello and goodbye to his mother before the cancer swooped her away.
Dressed in his late 1930s after-school garb, which I picture in my mind to be an old pair of knickers, a t-shirt and knee socks, he climbed the telephone pole located about fifty yards from her hospital room window, no doubt scraping his scrawny ankles on the way up.
I'm Julie Jo, former college newsroom junkie and PR girl, now a freelance writer and editor with two desks. This is the one I doodle on about past, present, and future clinking glasses and making peace.
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