Locus by Nancy Townsley

Lucile Loesch Lashbrook Photo courtesy of author

My mother would have loved it here. She would have appreciated the moodiness of the river and the stately beauty of the sailboats and the way people walk around on the docks in broad daylight wearing loose-fitting tops and baseball caps and cargo shorts, being themselves.

Her innermost self would really have adored all of that, but she died a month after she turned 82, and this year she would have been 93. She never saw where I live now, on the Multnomah Channel, where the comings and goings of various forms of wildlife signal the changing of seasons more dependably than anything else.

The last house of mine she visited sat on three-quarters of an acre of land, a rural property with plenty of what she might have called “pluses”: a formal dining room (handy on holidays and other special occasions), three bedrooms (enough for out-of-town company), and two baths — “two and a half would have been nice,” I can almost hear her saying, with a quick nod of her head for emphasis. She didn’t say that, though, on that day or pretty much any other day after that, ever again.

When she and my father drove up to the farmhouse in their Volvo sedan, he got out, went to the passenger side and opened the door for her. Chivalrous, watchful. She was wide-eyed, like a child, and leaned on his arm for support. Our dog padded up to her, lifted his leg, and urinated on her white Keds. I ran to get a rag to mop it up, but mom didn’t notice the dog or the urine or the rag. Before the cherry trees blossomed again she would be living in a care center for people with dementia and dad’s heart would be broken and he would feel so many hard feelings, aggrieved being one of them. The only thing that pieced him back together again was the twice-a-day visitation schedule he kept for the rest of her life, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, when he would sit by her bed and stroke her white hair and sneak her red licorice and call her his sweetheart.

That house had a wonderful large wraparound porch, and on that nice summer day we settled mom into a rocking chair at the northeast corner so she could see the flowers and hear the wind chimes hanging from the painted beam above. We’d planted pansies, her favorite. Yellow and purple-blue. I pointed them out. She smiled a small smile, but I don’t think she knew why.

Over the years my parents lived in rented apartments and military housing and two-story homes they bought themselves and filled with Ranch Oak furniture. Mom often said she loved the adventure. In those days she talked a lot. Later, not so much, and finally, not at all, because of Pick’s disease. After dad got out of the Navy they only lived in four places over the next thirty years, if you don’t count the care center, and he didn’t, because they didn’t live there together. When she lived there and he lived alone in their last place, a townhome that shared a common wall with their neighbor Ethel, he fervently wished it hadn’t gone that way, and he knew he couldn’t fix it, but still he thought about bringing mom home again, all the way up until those last few weeks, when she didn’t want the chocolate nutrition shakes anymore. Sometimes it took dad a long time to coax her into keeping the straw between her teeth and continue to sip, her brown eyes tired and vacant. He let her stop if she drank half of it. “That’s enough, honey. That’s fine,” he’d say, and pat her hand.

In 1965 my family of origin moved to Puerto Rico, where dad was in charge of a flight squadron. First we lived in Fajardo, just outside Roosevelt Roads, because our house on the base wasn’t ready yet, and my sisters and me would listen to the coquís sing their songs at night through the louvered glass windows. Once we settled into the neighborhood where the officers lived, mom and dad let our dog, Maree, have a litter of puppies, two males and a female. We named them Sir Pudge, Archie, and Veronica. Mom would sit outside in her Jackie O sunglasses and culottes and watch the puppies climb all over us. I thought she was beautiful, like a movie star. Maree flew back to the states with us when dad got new orders. Not the puppies, but they all went to good homes.

Dad ran the Navy’s West Coast recruiting program on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, the last thing he would do before becoming a civilian again. I was a teenager when we came to Oregon and lived in a big new house on Wall Street, with a sunken living room, three bedrooms and two and a half baths. I did not have to share a room with either of my siblings because my older sister was off at college by then. A few times I snuck out of that house to meet my boyfriend and during my senior year I spent a week recovering from mononucleosis on a pull-out couch downstairs because I was too weak to walk upstairs.

Mom loved that house, the bigness and newness of it, but I think it always made her nervous because after she and dad bought it in 1973 the economy went south and there was the mortgage to pay and three daughters’ college educations, too. She worked nights as an intensive care unit nurse to bring in extra money, a sacrifice I should have appreciated more. While I was away at state university they moved to a smaller house on a golf course and when I was pregnant with my first child they moved to the townhome. Mom quit smoking there and fell and broke her arm and healed up from a mastectomy there. She hosted Easter brunches in that house and held babies in her arms and sewed dresses for her granddaughters, fussing over the smocking on the bodices, which she wanted to get just right.

Hummel figurines decorated a piece of custom clay artwork dad gave to mom on their silver wedding anniversary, black lettering listing twenty addresses in their first twenty-five years of marriage. It’s hard to imagine them packing up so many times, deciding what to keep and what to give away, what mattered most and least. Only with the passing of time do we really know.

All those houses: places of warmth and shelter, shared food and companionship, bitter tears, hard decisions, divergent memories. They were not unlike the bodies we walk around in as human beings on this Earth, fragile imperfect shells meant for us for a period of time but not for all time. In them we dance and stagger, err and recover, dream and wish and strive. Released from them, we rise, swirling mist above water.

Mom would be pleased with that. And she would be happy for me, here on the river, playing with my dog and watching the boats lurch and sway.

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About the Author:

Nancy Townsley lives in a floating home along the Multnomah Channel near Portland, Oregon. Her debut novel, Sunshine Girl, forthcoming from Heliotrope Books, was inspired by her long career as a newspaper journalist. She continues to have a keen interest in the cultural and political changes altering the media landscape, channeling that fascination into writing fiction and nonfiction. Her creative work has appeared in Hippocampus, The Big Smoke, Nailed magazine, the Timberline Review, Elephant Journal, Mountain Bluebird Magazine, and several anthologies. Leaving Tulum, an excerpt from her first novel, can be found at unleashcreatives.com.