Independence

by Terri McFadden

She was two-tone. Deep forest green body, soft cream color top. A year older than me, she was a gift for my 16^th birthday. My dad bought her at auction, beat up and in great need of attention. My brother worked on her for a year, fixing the engine, stripping old paint and repainting.

A Jeep. A best friend. Independence. I wouldn’t have to ask to drive the Buick LeSabre or the yellow LTD – monsters both. I had my own wheels. First, however, I had to learn to drive a stick. And stick it was. A long metal pole, with a worn black knob was the stick-shift, with a smaller stick to engage the four-wheel drive. The day after my birthday, with Dad behind the wheel, we drove up the hill to the big parking lot at the junior high school. Dad stopped the Jeep and pulled the hand-brake with a screech. He jumped out and I took his place. We slammed the tinny doors in unison. He gave me the lesson. “Left pedal: Clutch, Middle Pedal: Brake, Right Pedal: Gas. Push in the clutch, give a little gas, release clutch. Go.” I…went….jerked forward. Engine died. “Hell’s Fire Terri! Let it out slow.” It took some time, but I learned and then did I go!

Her top speed on the highway, was 45 mph. I only took her that fast once and her scream of protest still rings in my ears. On the few times we ventured on the main roads, to go roller skating in Latrobe, or to the teen “night club” to dance, I kept her to a sedate 40. Even VW Beetle’s zoomed past us. She also wasn’t happy in a rain storm. She had just one windshield wiper, operated by hand by the driver – or a willing passenger leaning over – swish, swish. Her heater let out occasional little wisps of heat on a cold day – just for the driver’s feet.

However, the highway wasn’t her home and winter wasn’t her favorite time of year. Her place was the mountains surrounding our little town, muddy spring through bright fall. Dirt roads and off-road treks with my girlfriends. That’s where my Jeep was most at home. On a Friday night I’d pick up some of my friends. Ginny, Nettie, Debbie, and Sharon would cram into the bare metal interior, the minimum padding in the rear made the front passenger seat coveted. Off we’d go.

Summer nights we’d take sleeping bags and a little food and we’d head up to the Ridge or Laurel Mountain, or to our farm ten miles out of town. We go off-road or let a dirt road see where it would lead us. One memorable night we drove through a grove of saplings and couldn’t get out. Forward, back, forward, back, forward back, I tried my best to ram my way through the tiny forest. Finally the poor Jeep gave out entirely and we had a very long walk back to town. Next day Dad and I made our way up the mountain to where the Jeep waited patiently. He took one look at the engine and said I’d broken the fan belt. Easily fixed. I was so relieved; I feared I’d killed my friend. My father was so nice about it too. He understood. Love of vehicles and the independence they offered was something we shared.

My senior year is a series of snap-shots in my mind. Driving to school and picking up my best friend Janice on the way – no more walking to the bus, shared with screaming kids two or three years younger. Driving around town with my dog, Patrick, a 150-pound Irish wolfhound sitting on the back seat. What a showoff – and I don’t mean Patrick!

There were scary times as well. Once I negotiated a hair-pin turn and started up a steep hill. With only a little power, Jeep slipped backwards, down the hill. We drifted across the road, toward another steep hill. I thought we were doomed. At the last minute the brakes engaged and we rested, one wheel over the edge.

It was a short-lived love affair. I headed for college and freshmen weren’t allowed cars. My Jeep stayed safely at home. During Christmas break I again drove her around, visiting friends, reliving memories. In June I returned home again. The Jeep was not in sight. I asked my father where she was parked. He sold her, he said. Had he sold my horse, Molly or Patrick, I couldn’t have been more upset. (But my mother would have saved them!) Dad had had a good offer, he said. No one was around to drive her, he said. Gina didn’t have her license yet, he said. I said nothing.

The Jeep gave me a lot in a year and half. I let her go, but I kept her memory. She meant freedom. In the decades since, no machine has had that impact on me. The means to choose, to go where and when you want. Independence. Never under estimate its value.

Fun with Mother Goose

by Lauraine Lombara Alberetti

Taking a walk alone, I started reciting nursery rhymes and songs.  However, I found I could only remember a first line and maybe a second but beyond that, I made up a few more lines.  I had fun doing this and thought it might also be fun as a game for children(or adults) who knew these rhymes, to make up disparate endings. If they rhyme, that’s fine but anything should be acceptable...it would solely be a creative mind-expanding, fun exercise/game.

Here are a few I created:  (with acknowledgement and thanks  to Mother Goose).

Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water,

A storm came on, it was full of hail and

What a ruckus it made in the pail!

A tisket a tasket, I found a yellow basket,

I piled a bunch of flowers in

And took them for a little spin.

Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John,

Went to bed with his trousers on.

One foot in and one foot out,

What is this all about?

Little boy blue come blow your horn,

The sheep’s in the meadow,

The cow’s in the corn.

Where has the boy blue gone? It’s not the time to sleep,

If you don’t work, you don’t reap!

Jack Spratt could eat no fat,

His wife could eat no lean.

They each were fat and skinny,

And nothing in between.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.

Good thing the sun had baked him,

He didn’t ooze at all.

Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet,

Eating her curds and whey.

Along came a spider, who sat down beside her,

And said, “What a mighty fine day!”

Wee Willie Winkie,

Runs through the town,

Upstairs, downstairs, in his nightgown.

Naughty Willie Winkie,

He better not trip…

We wouldn’t want to see his nightgown rip.

Leaves

by Beth Alexander Walsh

Orange, red and yellow

toppling like floating fire

falling from limbs

Rustling, crunching;

an autumn percussion

performed beneath my feet

Swirling, twirling,

dancing to music

only the wind knows

A brief display

before dormancy

and winter’s slumber

The Early Bird Special

by Charlotte Savage

I met my boyfriend Milton in 1998.  He lived in Century village, Boca Raton. When I first went down to visit him I learned of the early bird dinners which usually began at four o'clock.  However, I liked to swim in the late afternoon and not be dressing for dinner at three p.m.    Instead I went grocery shopping and cooked our meals leaving the weekends open to dine out around seven p.m.  In the beginning the ladies in his building were very friendly to me, asking me to play cards with them or join them for tea in their condo.   However as the weeks went by these ladies became less and less friendly.  I couldn't imagine what I had done to alienate them.

Then one afternoon when I was relaxing on a lounge chair at the pool, with my hat covering most of my face, I was almost asleep when Milton came down to chat with his friends.  They were sitting a short distance from where I was resting.  I heard him bragging about what a great cook I was.   He described our dinner the night before which was homemade mushroom barley soup with a lamb base and that he had never tasted anything so delicious in his life before.  

 The men were for the most part silent until one of the wives joined them.  Then her husband asked Milton to describe my menu from the night before to his wife.  When Milton finished, the gentleman asked his wife why Milt's girlfriend found it convenient to cook for him, while his wife of forty years insisted he be dressed at three p.m. to go to the early bird special.  

The irate wife answered, "Well if forty years of cooking isn't good enough for you then I think it's high time you found yourself a new girlfriend because if you want to eat with me--I will be at the early bird special." She left the pool in a huff.

That evening I had a little talk with Milton and suggested that he not be bragging about my cooking to his buddies because otherwise I would be the one not cooking and he would be the one getting dressed for the early bird special. 

Milt came to the conclusion that silence was golden and it wasn't too long before these ladies were once again my friends.

2018 Charlotte Savage, all rights reserved.

Tree Hugger

by Mary Ellen Gambutti

Christmas in Tokyo, 1962, Dad packed his Air Force blue B-4 bag for temporary duty in the Philippines. Three days later, my Swedish classmate, Ingrid, whose diplomat family lived near our city school, visited me to lunch and play in our military dependent community. Bored with dolls, we donned jackets, and went out into the crisp air.

                                         

In the gnarled embrace of a crabapple out our kitchen door that summer, I had lounged and read. A tall girl, I could easily grasp a low branch, lift my long legs up and over a limb, and hoist into the friendly shaded comfort of the fruit tree.

Below a grassy slope, I rambled and dreamed among tall trees. In this sacred space among arboreal spirits, adjacent to a high-banked stone wall that undulated at the edge of Meiji Shrine, I was a woodland child; a hugger of trees on the firm earth that hugs and supports kindred species. I relished warm bark, familiar feel of leaf and twig, and the shelter of a cathedral canopy.

Our Washington Heights houses were built in 1949 on Imperial parade grounds. Japanese gardeners-guards maintained these manicured groves that spilled over the wall from the forest planted in Emperor Meiji’s honor.

Ingrid warned me not to—she, the wiser and worldlier of us eleven year olds--but a leaning black pine dared me dash up its slanted profile, like a playground slide. Once up, I must lower myself ten feet with no assistance from side branches, while my worried friend attended below. A quick reversal, a twist, drop; my left ankle wrenched.

He heard my piercing cries, and a khaki-garbed caretaker trotted toward us. Concerned and consoling, he radioed “help” to military police. Ingrid spoke perfect Japanese, and pointed up the

steep lawn toward my house. The gentle man hoisted me to his back, and slung me over his diminutive frame. I wailed in agony. My long legs dangled, my broken ankle hung. He lugged me; a gangly, pigtailed American girl, up the slope, and across our kitchen threshold. Mom pointed to a chair and chided me for putting the kind man out of his way. I moaned and thrashed while we waited for the ambulance. Ingrid--responsible and mature--summarized the accident to Mom, departed down the hill, along the stone wall to the main gate, where she hailed a taxi home.

Three weeks after Christmas, Dad was home, and I was back in school with crutches. Five weeks from my fall, I graduated to a rubber-heeled cast, ready to play kickball, and a full eight weeks after, I was released of my burden.

I recall the insult of a second ankle turn the following summer; the painful reminder my healing was not complete, when Ingrid and I played catch in her driveway. Her blue eyes widened, and her empathetic gasp revealed her dread of another emergency in my company.

Mary Ellen writes about her life as an Air Force daughter, search and reunion with her birth family, her gardening career, and her survival of a stroke at mid-life. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Gravel Magazine, Wildflower Muse, The Remembered Arts Journal, The Vignette Review, Modern Creative Life, Halcyon Days, The Book Ends Review, Nature Writing, Haibun Today, PostCard Shorts, Memoir Magazine, Borrowed Solace, Thousand and One Stories, StoryLand Literary Review, CarpeArte and SoftCartel. Her memoir chapbook is 'Stroke Story, My Journey There and Back." She and her husband live in Sarasota, Florida, with their rescued Chihuahua, Max.

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