Anticipation and memories

Douglas is counting down his final ten working days in Munich. We were packed out yesterday, we are down to a fraction of our clothing and toiletries, our computers, four books, a few food stuffs and several (mostly spent) candles. No piano. No CDs. No yoga mats (not that they've been getting that much use as of late). No TV. We like it like this.

I was asked by a friend last week what I'd miss most about Munich. "I'm looking at it." I answered as she looked at me. Mrs. Julie (not to be confused with my friend Miss Julie in St. Paul) is my steady writing and walking companion in Munich. I met her as part of a creative group. We stayed in that group, but also split off and formed a writing group which for a time dwindled down to just the two of us. The following is my latest contribution to the writing group. Our assignment was to write as though blind - exploring our other senses. We could still describe what we saw, but we were to emphasize the lesser senses.

Summers in our little red brick oven of a house in St. Paul nearly exorcised the saint in me. I grew up in Phoenix where temperatures in the 110’s were common so I’m not put off by hot weather. (I can hear your thoughts, “But it’s a dry heat.” Yeah. You walk around all day with an iron set at cotton a half inch from your skin then tell me it’s a dry heat. You spend a summer being able to etch your name in your skin with your fingernail regardless of how much lotion you rub in and then tell me it’s a dry heat.) In Phoenix we had the sense to put in air conditioning units in our houses. St. Paulites don’t like destroying the integrity of these ‘nice old houses’ by installing air. What about our integrity?

My last summer in St. Paul, I took classes towards a degree in piano pedagogy which meant I needed to spend a lot of time at the piano. Opening the windows did little good. It was like sitting in the oven turned up to 300 with the oven door open. Big deal. I sat at the piano trying to concentrate on theory so difficult I cried (in class and at home), fingers slipping off the keys from sweat, rivulets of sweat trickling and tickling down the backs of my calves, my own stench beginning to overwhelm me. So I took to the basement and my keyboard.

The basement is also where my husband and I often slept during the summer. Summers in St. Paul were not good for the marriage bed. Calls of “you want to?” were replaced with warnings “you’re touching me!” Trying to have sex in that weather was like going at it covered in cooking grease (appealing to some, I’m sure) with baggies pulled over our heads. The slap-slap of our wet bellies was only sexy for a minute or so. The slap-slap of my wet breasts was never sexy. The effort it took to keep it up and breathe could not have made for a ‘come hither’ expression on my face. It’s one thing to share in grief with one you love by touching and tasting a tear; it’s another thing entirely to get a mouthful of your lover’s forehead sweat in your mouth wide open gasping for air. St. Paul water torture.

So we often took to the basement. One night I woke up from what must have been a very pleasant dream. I felt light. I felt floaty. I even thought I could hear a gentle, soothing waterfall. Hypnogogic images. As I relished this feeling I rolled over on the air mattress and realized my nose was dripping – or was it sweat? Either way I needed a tissue. I reached my hand over to where my tissues were and my hand fell into inches of water. We were adrift in the basement. The weird thing about this (there were so many) was my first thought of all the centipedes that were probably taking refuge on the air mattress with us. Immediately I began to ‘feel’ them.

“Douglas!”

“Wha . . .?”

“We’re floating.”

“Mm zzammazzam . . .”

“Douglas!”

“Shit!”** (Don’t tell him I told you he said that. He has a reputation.)

“Where’s the flashlight?” I asked.

“You put it in the tissue box.”

“Where’s the tissue box?”

It was storming outside and, we later found out, the downspout had become disattached from the house so all the water from the roof, the high, pointed roof, was now pouring into the basement. He, being the man, was the one required to leave the relative safety of the air mattress to find his way upstairs to the light switch. I felt for him, I really did. It’s bad enough in the light prodding one’s way through the spider webs, but it’s worse for tall people like Douglas. He’s almost 6 feet tall the pipes hang about 5’6’’ off the ground. After this night I wrapped all the pipes in bubble wrap. Over his feet sloshing through the water I heard toes thumping into pallets, hands feeling past plastic bags of stuff from the attics of our childhood homes, his poor head finding every low hanging pipe and a vocabulary I never knew he possessed. At least the water wasn’t cold.

He made it to the stairs and up to the kitchen where he turned on the light. Of course the power was out. Lightning storm, it would be. I heard muffled footsteps through the ceiling as he searched for a flashlight, candle, firefly – whatever.

Water has a way of embellishing scents like the heat has a way of magnifying – I mean embellishing – tempers. While awaiting Douglas in this dark, splashy basement where the air mattress bounced off my Barbie dream house I could smell the years from the blocked drain. I could smell the rotting wood of the pallets we brought down to keep boxes of Douglas’s old army uniforms and my old singing telegram costumes dry. (While he kept you safe I kept you laughing.) And ever so faintly above all these normal basement smells wafted the memory jerking scent of my old Avon perfume bottle collection.

Somewhere in a distant corner I could hear the occasional piece of peeling plaster break off and splash into the water. That stirred up the bats, the wings of which could be heard . . . no that was Douglas’s slippers flip-flapping on the kitchen floor directly above where I had drifted.

Candle in hand, he descended the stairs. He stood at the bottom of the steps and told me to come to the light like I was a moth.

“Did you bring my slippers?”

“Why do you need your slippers?”

“I don’t want to walk on the basement floor in my bare feet.”

“It’s covered with water!”

“I know.”

He stomped back upstairs. All this happened just a couple of months before we left St. Paul for the Foreign Service. I had been reading a book, “Our Man in Belize,” about a Foreign Service officer in Belize during a hurricane. The day after the hurricane he slogged through waist deep water stepping on the submerged bodies of dogs and people. There was no way I was walking across this basement in the dark with bare feet. Douglas returned with my Wellies. This was the night I found out my Target brand Wellies (not really Wellies, I know, I know) leaked. Walking up the stairs I sounded like an eight year old playing his armpit.

“I’m not farting,” I told Douglas. “It’s the Wellies.” 

*Note to Douglas's mother: He didn't really say shit, that's just artistic license.

* Note to my mommy: Indeed Douglas did say that. I would never think of using a word like that under the guise of artistic license.